DUBAI, which I recently visited, must be one of the most astonishing places on earth. I arrived in the tiny Arab emirate late at night and saw nothing on my way in from the airport. But the sight that greeted my eyes when I pulled back the curtains the next morning took my breath away.
Directly below me, laid out like a giant map, was the cloverleaf intersection of several 12-lane highways packed with cars whizzing on their way to work. Snaking around and over them was a metro line with shiny trains gliding over brand new tracks. Beyond stood a phalanx of immense office buildings in all sorts of daring architectural styles, steel and glass glowing in the desert sunshine.
But the most amazing sight of all was a towering pencil-shaped building rearing so high that I could barely see the top. This was Burj Dubai, at more than 800m the tallest building in the world. The beauty of the scene, the bravura, the sheer sense of anything being possible were absolutely thrilling. For a moment I forgot all the stories about the global recession knocking Dubai for six.
Over the next few days I was treated to further amazing sights: the spinnaker-like Burj Al Arab hotel on the seashore, the palm-shaped reclamations reaching out into the Gulf, the indoor ski slope, the vast shopping malls, even the old bazaar down by the creek where they sell gold and frankincense.
You have to remember that 30 years ago, Dubai was nothing but a sand-blown trading station on the edge of the Gulf. Unlike its neighbour, Abu Dhabi, it had little oil, only a tradition of entrepreneurship. But today, it has used those skills to leap past all the other little Arab emirates to become one of the most highly developed communities in the world.
The drive has come from its ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, who in some ways is a traditional Arab emir but in others something of a visionary. Knowing that Dubai needed to make up for its lack of oil, he determined to transform it into the leading commercial centre in the Middle East. Using his own wealth to prime the pump, he lured in developers, architects, engineers and financiers to get his emirate moving, with the astonishing results you see today.
Dubai is now the leading financial centre in the Gulf with banks and exchanges, and is adding other professional services such as medicine, media, tourism and education. One of the curious sights of Dubai is an English public school, an outpost of Repton, in a neo-gothic campus out in the desert .
It has not come without controversy. Rather like Singapore, which has also flourished under a tough leader, Dubai is not democratic: what the ruler says goes. Much of the growth has also been achieved through the sweat of cheap Asian labour: immigrants now outnumber the locals four to one. Dragging a tiny emirate into the 21st century has forced the locals to abandon time-honoured practices, such as abducting small boys to train as camel racers.
But yes, appearances are misleading. The recession has hit Dubai badly, and if you look more closely at all those amazing buildings, you will find that many are empty or incomplete, work halted by lack of cash. Property prices have crashed. Expats are leaving because their jobs have gone, new developments are scarce, and financial problems are mounting. Dubai’s debts are calculated to be about 80bn, much of it due quite soon, though this is less worrisome than it looks because wealthy Abu Dhabi will almost certainly come to the rescue.
But Dubai may be past the worst. The people I met seemed to think that the economy was levelling out even if it had yet to show strong signs of recovery, though it could be years before property prices return to their dizzying pre-crash levels.
In a way, that doesn’t seem to matter. The impressive thing about Dubai is what a small, poor place can achieve with energy and vision. The world needs more countries with the courage to go after a big idea, and unleash the great creative forces waiting for opportunity. Nothing is impossible.
Lascelles is senior fellow of the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation in London, and a former banking editor of the Financial Times.