Friday July 18, 2003
With 100 million cubic metres of sand and rock, 60km of artificial beaches, 50 luxury hotels and 4,500 apartments and villas (including one for a certain Mr Beckham), Dubai's Palm resort is one of the most ambitious engineering projects ever. Esther Addley took an early look round
The Guardian
In a high hot suite in a five-star Knightsbridge hotel, a woman with long, bleached blonde hair and an Essex accent is impatiently tapping a polished vermilion toe that is poking out of her Louis Vuitton sandal. The estate agent is busy with another visitor, but this is no time to be coy. After half a minute she steps forward and interrupts. "Yes, can I have a look at this one here please, and this gentleman, we may look together but we are not together, he is a friend of my husband, he would like one of those, on an upper floor, with an ocean view. Now what have you got left?"
A few moments later it is settled. Details are exchanged and reservations noted, as the woman grasps her tiny Louis Vuitton bag with an annoyed little shake of her head and rises to leave. She has reserved an apartment, but it's not the one she wanted: the two businessmen sitting at the table behind have beaten her to it by seconds. "Yes, but you must imagine your view," attempts the agent. "Your view is outrageous . Clear and uninterrupted and unspoilt out to the open ocean as far as the eye can see - and then, obviously, a little to the left, all the other houses and villas and apartments."
Twenty-four hours later, we're looking at her view, and outrageous can scarcely do it justice. A converted ship is spraying from its bow thousands of tonnes of sand, arcing in a high, dirty rainbow into the water. In the far distance out to sea, a clutch of cranes at the site's boundary are picked out against the horizon, while the ocean, an exquisitely pale turquoise, has lapped itself cloudy by washing up dust from the site. Dominating the vista a few kilometres along the coast is the famously seven-starred Burj al Arab Hotel, puffing out its sail-shaped chest as if waiting to be impressed by the upstart development next door.
Welcome to the Palm Jumeirah, shortly to become the largest man-made island in the world and, according to its gleeful developers, the first constructed object since the Great Wall of China to be visible from space with the naked eye. If it is arguably one of the most audacious engineering projects ever undertaken, it also has a strong claim to be the most preposterous. An enormous complex of islands and causeways covering 7.5m square metres and stretching more than 6km out into the Gulf at Jumeirah in Dubai, the development, as its name suggests, forms a palm tree, with a 2km trunk, 17 leafy "fronds" of the same length, and a huge crescent breakwater that measures an enormous 11km from tip to tip.
The developers claim that its fill materials, if laid in a 2m-high wall, would stretch around the globe three times. At a stroke, this development alone will almost double the length of sandy shoreline in the entire emirate of Dubai. Once complete in December 2005, it will house 2,000 luxury villas, 2,500 apartments and more than 50 hotels, creating an instant community of up to 50,000 people on a stretch of the Dubai coast that less than two years ago was an untouched rocky bed.
And this week, perhaps fittingly, the Palm Jumeirah also became one of the most high-profile celebrity haunts on the globe. In a cannily timed press release last weekend, the developers revealed that no fewer than 11 England footballers, including David Beckham, Michael Owen, Gary Neville, Paul Scholes and Ashley Cole, had each bought £1m luxury villas on the development while visiting Dubai en route to the World Cup last year. So tempted was the squad by the special presentation - and the undisclosed discounts - they were given, that even the team's physiotherapist and goalkeeping coach put their names down. (Estate agents in London were also mentioning Robert Redford and Madonna's names this week.) The 50-degree summer heat appears not to have concerned them nor to have affected the undignified gold rush in London this week for the remaining properties. Absolutely everything else, insists the agent, sold out within three weeks of release last year.
These are jaw-dropping vital statistics, but then no one could accuse Dubai of lacking ambition. Fifty years ago the tiny Arab emirate was little more than a village made of coral block houses to which drinking water was delivered on the backs of donkeys. The discovery of oil in the 1960s changed all that: shortly afterwards it was incorporated into the newly formed United Arab Emirates, but it was not only the overnight acquisition of vast wealth that made the tiny city-emirate the economic and tourism powerhouse it is today. Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed al Maktoum, the father of the current ruler, realised in the 1960s that the British - and the oil - would not be around for ever, and set about developing enormous dry docks and industrial complexes, and the largest man-made port in the world.
After he died in 1990 his eldest son, Sheikh Maktoum, took over as ruler, but it is Sheikh Rashid's third son, Sheikh Mohammed, who really inherited his vision. "Sheikh Mo" decided to turn Dubai into the Middle East's version of Hong Kong or Singapore. He established free-trade zones in the city, attracting vast investment from media, internet and manufacturing companies. It is he who is responsible for the massive redevelopment of the airport, and for the foundation, in 1985, of the airline Emirates, one of the aviation world's most spectacular success stories.
The result is that Dubai now resembles a vast desert building site, interspersed with high-rise buildings of breathtaking opulence and architectural imagination. Construction continues 24 hours a day, every day, meaning that skyscrapers are being thrown up at an alarming rate; if you want to imagine Dubai in five years, say locals, pick a random yard of flat horizon, and fill it with towers. Dubai now has five million visitors a year for its population of one million; by 2007 it hopes to have 10 million tourists, and by 2015, no less than 40 million.
And so it is little surprise to find that Sheikh Mo, as well as running the police, overseeing the security services and personally vetting all appointments in the public sector, is also the man behind the Palm. "Oh yes, he was certainly the driving force behind the initial concept, and any changes that it has gone through until it reached the form it takes today," says Wahid Attalla, the director of operations for Nakheel, the development company fronting the royal initiative. "The main reason he thought of it was because of the shortage of beaches in Dubai, and the need to create more because of the importance of tourism. He thought: how can we have more beaches? We need to reclaim an island. It started with the standard rectangular or round shape, but it was too small. So it evolved to become the shape of a palm."
So taken was the sheikh by his idea that he shortly afterwards decided to build a second palm 25km further along the coast towards Abu Dhabi. Though it is not due for completion until 2008, the Palm Jabel Ali will be 40% bigger than its cousin at Jumeirah, with a second ring inside the breakwater crescent, made up of "water homes on stilts". The homes will be built in the shape of a line from a poem, in Arabic, written by Sheikh Mohammed himself and reading, rather inscrutably, "Take wisdom from the wise people - not everyone who rides is a jockey." (Nor, one might argue, is everyone who writes a poet.) As an expression of gloriously monstrous vanity, it is quite unsurpassed, but you have to hand it to the man - they simply don't make imagination on this scale in the west.
But while Dubai's better-off expatriates may laud the Sheikh for the "leadership" that allows them to live well-paid, tax-free lives in 360-days-a-year sunshine, dynastic dictatorships, however benevolently managed, are clearly not without their drawbacks. In Dubai no one will express so much as a faint criticism of Sheikh Mo on the record or, by extension, his pharaonic brainchild.
"If you play the game in Dubai, you will be treated fairly well and pretty fairly," says Richard, a British expat who has worked in the emirate for seven years, "But if there is an illusion of freedom, you're only free so long as you keep your mouth shut. It's a tacit agreement you make with the authorities." (He insists he would lose his job if his full name was mentioned.) Some of Richard's engineer friends have expressed concern that the Palm development sea walls may not be high enough to defend against extremely high tides or freak waves. "Also, these people will tell you how wonderful it is, but basically the only reason they can throw it up so quickly here is that the labour costs are so low." In May 1,600 construction workers rioted at the site of a new Dubai mall, protesting over pay and conditions, but anyone who speaks openly about problems like this is "runwayed", Richard says, meaning that they are put on the next plane home.
"Look, years of research and studies went into this project," says Jacqui Josephson, the Palm's customer-relations consultant, who is gamely attempting to manage the lavishly marbled on-site sale centre while the rest of her clients are off selling plots on the Jebel Ali to Brits who fancy the Beckham lifestyle. "All the studies were made - ecological, environmental, hydrological, you name it. And the study they did on the waves, well, they said we get a 4m-high wave every 150 years. The last 4m wave we had was in 1969, so I think we are clear for a few years yet."
So why are they able to built the project so quickly in Dubai? She smiles, and chooses her words carefully. "I think there is a tremendous dedication to the project. We work round the clock in Dubai. These people are out on the ships at the moment, and they stay there for six weeks at a time, working eight hours on and eight hours off. It's 24 hours a day. That wouldn't happen in England, I don't think."
She ushers us into a small cinema to see a presentation about the underwater dive site that will be built at the Jumeirah - 11 themed underwater zones, designed as ersatz copies of different reef habitats across the world. The Lost City will feature underwater "ruined" temples, a coliseum and a pyramid, while in the spear-fishing zone they are scuttling several ships and even a Boeing jet. (Every day, a 1kg gold ingot will be hidden by divers somewhere on the seabed, "waiting for one lucky diver's midas touch". There is bling, and then there is bling.
But what of the environment? The developers maintain that the project was not given the go-ahead until every aspect of its potential environmental impact had been studied carefully. The most self-evident point about the Palm developments remains one of the least discussed - how it can be possible to create two enormous new cities out of the sea, requiring vast amounts of quarried rock, power, sewerage facilities and expensively desalinated water without vastly effecting the local environment.
The Palm, of course, insists all is in hand. "Look, 20 years ago, before they built on this area, it was just desert," says Josephson. "Then they built the Emirates golf course, and in so doing created greens and trees and pools. So now we have wonderful birds here, on their migratory round. And if you go out to the site, the engineers are saying that they have seen great colonies of birds that were never here before." She smiles in satisfaction. "So you see, I would say that the general thrust of our environmental policy is that we're not worried about the environment. We're creating our own environment here."