Dubai: the new Melbourne

I recently spent three nights with my wife in Dubai - two nights out and one night back on a trip to visit my daughter in Melbourne. We stayed on both occasions in the XVA Art Hotel - a wonderful small guesthouse built around an art gallery and a vegetarian café. This is in Al Bastakiya, the oldest part of Dubai, located between to the Creek, the Linen Souk, the al Fahidi Fort, and the Royal Palace. Al Bastakiya is a network of narrow alleys between courtyard houses, each of which has a wind tower - a sort of air conditioning system in reverse, designed to channel cooler winds from the sea down into the rooms of the house. The Creek is lined with dhows and crossed by small open ferries called ‘abras’, which take you across to Deira, which has the gold and spice souks.

This is of course very different from the other Dubai, of gleaming towers and shopping centres, all marble, gold, glass and flash. The most common reaction of visitors to this Dubai is that it is ‘artificial’. This is a strange comment because all cities are the result of human decisions, either by planners, property developers, or the inhabitants themselves. Dubai has been set out in the desert, but many of the world’s great cities were laid out in this way. Melbourne was laid out as a grid in the Australian bush by a surveyor one morning. This must have seemed an unpromising location for a great city, but, as in Dubai, its governors built imposing town halls, government buildings, museums and art galleries, and post offices that befitted the great city they intended Melbourne to become. Over the 150 years since it was planned, the central grid has been adapted. Narrow passages between buildings have become ‘laneways’ - pedestrian streets packed with restaurants and small shops. Trees line each of the broad main streets of the grid, which are wide enough to allow tramlines (and tram stations) down their centre.

Dubai too will change over the next century: people will become familiar with and fond of its iconic buildings; different areas of the City will develop distinct characters; its inhabitants will adapt and humanise its houses and streets; people will become proud of their city and pity those unfortunate enough to live elsewhere. Perhaps they will remember with gratitude the vision and drive of those who founded the city.