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that off. And if it can happen here, they say, it
can happen anywhere.
SHEIKH MOHAMMED GREW UP in a house lit by
oil lamps, where water from the village well was
delivered by donkey cart. The house belonged to
his grandfather, the emir; the Al Maktoum family
has ruled Dubai since 1833. The house still stands
near the mouth of Dubai Creek, a natural harbor
that is the reason the city exists at all. Sheikh
Mohammed’s father, Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al
Maktoum, had grown up in the same house and as
a young man had endured years when people in
Dubai starved; the Great Depression and the invention
of cultured pearls had destroyed the market
for pearl diving, the town’s main enterprise.
It was Sheikh Rashid who began to modernize
Dubai after taking over as ruler in 1958 and especially
after oil started to flow in the late 1960s. He
quickly brought in electricity, running water, and
paved roads. He built schools, an airport, and, in
1979, the 39-story World Trade Centre (now Sheikh
Rashid Tower), at the time the tallest building in
the Middle East. “It was built in the middle of nowhere,
on the edge of the city,” says Neil Walmsley,
a Dubai-based British engineer and urban planner
with the consulting firm Arup. “The city responded
by growing towards it”—and then well past it.
The pearl business hadn’t lasted forever, and
Sheikh Rashid knew the oil wouldn’t either.
Dubai holds just a fraction of the U.A.E.’s oil—
Abu Dhabi has the lion’s share. So while Dubai
was not a center of world trade in 1979, when
Sheikh Rashid built the Trade Centre, he set
about making it one. That same year he opened a
second and larger port at Jebel Ali, 25 miles from
the Creek, as it’s known.
His son Mohammed filled the empty space between
the two, turning Dubai into a hub not only
of trade and finance but also, improbably, of tourism
and real estate development. Each Emirati
citizen has long been entitled to a plot for his own
villa. But in the early 2000s, when Dubai began
allowing property to be owned by foreigners—
already attracted by the lack of income taxes—
cash flooded in. Four large developers carved up
the land. Workers streamed in from South Asia
to build villas and skyscrapers clad in glass—not
the ideal material in a land of relentless sun, but
what the market demanded. The workers lived
in camps that were often squalid, in conditions
that some said resembled indentured servitude.
The city exploded down the coast. It spread
out into the Persian Gulf, onto artificial peninsulas
built from titanic amounts of dredged sand; it
spread into the Arabian desert. “When you look
at how Dubai has been growing, it’s just been this
obsession with building outward into the desert,”
says Yasser Elsheshtawy, an Egyptian-American
architect who taught at U.A.E. University in Al
Ain for 20 years. “There were no limitations.
Energy was cheap. You had cars. So why not?”
Sheikh Mohammed’s aspiration is like his
father’s, only grander: He wants Dubai to outcompete
the world, to show the world that Arabs
can be pioneers again, as they were in the Middle
Ages. His strategy has been to attract the world
to Dubai. Some 90 percent of the 2.8 million residents
are expats living in a place where not so
long ago a few thousand Arabs struggled to survive.
Dubai’s population, young and incr edibly
diverse—children attend schools with dozens of
nationalities, several expats told me proudly—
is its main resource. But all those people have to
be kept alive in the desert.
These days Dubai has plenty of electricity
and running water. Almost all of it comes from
a single two-mile-long industrial plant at Jebel
Ali. There, in a line of candy-striped smokestacks
and evaporator tanks, the Dubai Electricity and
Water Authority (DEWA) burns natural gas to
generate 10 gigawatts of electricity. The leftover
heat is used to desalinate seawater—more than
500 million gallons a day. Gas comes by pipeline
from Qatar, with which the U.A.E. severed diplomatic
relations in June, and in tankers from as
far away as the United States.
Dubai, a tiny emirate we think of as oil rich,
depends on imported fossil fuel for life support.
One DEWA official, trying to convey to me
how that feels, gripped his throat tightly with
one hand. But there’s an upside to that choking
feeling: It can motivate you to change your
circumstances.
62 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC • OCTOBER 2017