Germaine Greer wrote a fairly negative article about Dubai for The Guardian in the UK (dated 09 February 2009), after sitting on a bus for 4 hours touring the city. As The Guardian is a well-known (some people might even call it reputable) newspaper, her report was picked up by other media sources, blogs and forums and the story spread around the world quickly, joining a number of other recent articles in reputable newspapers that were running down Dubai. Let's try and distill the facts, opinions, and misreporting on the part of Ms Greer.
Headline is "From its artificial islands to its boring new skycraper, Dubai's architecture is beyond crass" - a dramatic opinion, and it says that Ms Greer thinks Dubai is boring and crass, not that Dubai is boring and crass. It might be, but boredom and crassness are in the eye of the beholder. There are many people who think Dubai is exciting and sparkly. So right off the bat, Ms Greer clarifies her negative bias towards Dubai. It's common human behaviour to make personal attacks when people cannot find facts to support their criticism. This report comes across to me as Ms Greer resorting to personal attacks and inaccurate statements because either she's jealous of Dubai's success, or cannot find enough negative facts to complete her article. Some of her statements (with my comments) are ...
- "Dubai is a city built between the desert and the pale blue sea" - well, that's true
- "uses more water per capita than anywhere else in the world" - could be true (might be a toss up between other emirates and GCC states)
- "derives 97% of it from desalination, which means that it is the most expensive water in the world" - probably correct but what's her point? Does she have a bright idea for making water more cheaply in the desert?
- "Much of that water is being used to create a garden in the desert" - sounds like an opinion, and an incorrect one in my opinion
. There is all the domestic and industrial consumption that is significant. - "labourers can be seen planting out millions, possibly billions, of bedding plants" - millions maybe. Population of Dubai is about 1.5 million. How many of those are laborers planting plants? I'd guess a fraction of 1% at most, and probably much less. But let's say 1%, or 15,000 laborers, and they're planting about 1.5 billion plants in one year (for easy calculations even thought Ms Greer said "billions") and go from there. That would mean each laborer is planting 100,000 plants per year, or about 275 per day (if they worked every day). I don't even think you need to spend 4 hours driving around Dubai to release that it's unlikely there are 15,000 laborers each planting hundreds of trees or plants per day.
- "I deliberately managed my travel itinerary so that I had a long layover, four hours of which I spent on the open top of a double-decker bus that wandered ... past The World," - past The World is a bit tricky unless it was an amphibious bus. The World is about 5 km off the coast of Dubai.
- "Only 6% of Dubai's revenue comes from oil" - Dubai budget for 2009 has about AED 140 billion total revenue (and 2008 was about AED 135 billion). Oil production in Dubai is about 100,000 barrels per day, so at an oil price of about $40 per barrel, that means oil income for Dubai is about 100,000 x 365 x 40 x 3.67 = AED 5.3 billion so she's a bit off - 4% sounds more like it (although with higher oil price in 2008, the 6% figure might have been correct).
- "the city makes most of its money out of inventing, creating, building and trading real estate" - not correct as far as I know. Dubai was making money before the property boom started in 2003 - from trading (has anyone heard of Jebel Ali?), tourism in Dubai, as a convention and exhibition center, business services (Dubai Media City, Dubai Internet City), various Dubai Free Trade Zones, transport services (Dubai Airport doesn't just shift passengers - about 40 million in 2008 - but cargo also)...
- "Thousands of workers trucked in from poor countries constructed the patches of exposed sand, and the infrastructure that furnishes each with water and power." - Ms Greer is referring to The World. No they didn't, dredging boats constructed the islands, and the infrastructure hasn't been built yet (which is actually one of the legitimate complaints she could have made).
- "The islets have since sold for anything between US$15m and $250m apiece." - Not as far as I know. $250m sounds steep and I think is for several islands. Individual islands are more like $15m-$50m (Great Britain Dubai was sold for $63m but I don't know how many islands that was).
- "It seems doubtful now that the countries and corporations that have bought into the scheme will have the resources to develop their patches of sand into themed resorts," - sounds like an opinion but one that reflects the worldwide economic crisis, not a Dubai problem (although she's twisting that into a Dubai criticism)
- "We can only hope that the Irish company Larionovo, owners of the Ireland islet, never get to build their planned replica of the Giants' Causeway." - Why? And what was the point of this? Maybe she thinks it's "crass". If so, is she criticising Dubai or Larionovo? Larionovo presumably didn't think it was crass, otherwise they wouldn't have planned Ireland in the Sun in the first place.
- "peering up at this needle stuck in the buttock of the Almighty," - Ms Greer is referring to the Burj Dubai tower, and obviously showing that she is not objective about Dubai, the Burj, religion, or all three. It sounds more like she's trying for a schoolboy level insult than professional journalism. Or have I misunderstood her entirely? She said Dubai's architecture was crass, and then makes a crass comment about the Burj Dubai, so perhaps she likes crass and is therefore a big fan of Dubai?
- "I noticed with a thrill of something like terror that there were cranes still working on the top of it, half a mile up in the air, supposing there was any air up there." - strange comment. You would expect cranes on top of a building that is under construction, and she demonstrates a substantial degree of ignorance in even questioning whether or not there is any air half a mile above the ground.
- "Burj Dubai was originally meant to be entirely residential; when I saw it, it was entirely empty." - no it wasn't, it's mixed use. And of course it's empty, it's not finished yet.
- "The Armani residences are apparently selling at US$3,500 per sq ft and office space for rather more," - might have been correct last year but prices have dropped since then.
- "but I had an eerie feeling no one would ever live there." - Ms Greer has already demonstrated how she feels so I would describe all her feelings as eerie.
- "Soaring up from that tongue of sand, with the Empty Quarter stretching away to the south, Burj Dubai seemed outrageously megalomaniacal," - Ms Greer, for all her efforts at promoting women's equality, sets the whole cause back substantially with one simple comment. Misogynists will no doubt use her geographical error for years to come to support their view that women can't read maps. The Empty Quarter is nowhere near the Burj Dubai ... unless she was referring to "The Empty Quarter" as in the new art gallery in Dubai (but I doubt she'd even heard of it).
- "Emaar, has lost 75% of its value on the Dubai stock exchange." - true, and even more depending on where you start from.
- "The only dhows on Dubai Creek these days take tourists on one-hour pleasure cruises." - incorrect, very few dhows do that - there are a handful that have been renovated as floating restaurants, and there are also abras that take tourists on sightseeing tours, but most abras are used for commuter traffic, and most dhows are used to transport goods between the UAE and other countries.
- "Though in Dubai you are surrounded by the poor, who labour on every building site, clean the streets and the houses, and wait on the children, they are as invisible as the plumbing." - there is plenty of criticism that can be levelled at the treatment of the working class. There are also plenty of positive comments that can be made. That's nothing new, it seems as though any journalist that has heard of Dubai has written an article about the long-suffering migrant laborers. What would have been different, and more interesting, is what the Dubai Government is doing to address their plight. However, they are not invisible, even on a 4 hour bus tour you can see them.
- "Crassest of all the real estate initiatives are the three Palms," - an opinion, and one that many disagree with, however Ms Greer is entitled to her opinions - which say more about her than Dubai ... in my opinion .
- "At Palm Jumeira, still largely undeveloped," - no, it's largely developed (there is still plenty to do but to call it underdeveloped reflects the preconceived negative bias Ms Greer had). Palm Jumeirah is the first of the 3 palm islands in Dubai, Palm Jebel Ali is largely undeveloped, and Palm Deira has barely started.
- "the water between the branches is stagnating and algae is forming along the man-made beachfront. How this will affect the dolphins that are shipped from the South Pacific ... is anybody's guess." - there was an issue with stagnating water but I thought it was resolved with more gaps in the outer wall. No guesses needed as to any effect on the dolphins, they are not in the "stagnating" water anyway.
- "In December, Nakheel, developer of the Palms, cut 15% of its workforce." - Nakheel cut 500 jobs at the end of November 2008, and suspended some projects. I'm not sure what point she's trying to make, perhaps she thinks that Guardian readers are more ignorant than most people and are not aware there is a global financial crisis with companies and industries in all sectors and countries laying staff off.
- "Dubai's stock market has lost 70% of its value." - true, depending on what your start point is.
- "Half of the 100 Dubai estate agents interviewed for the Christian Science Monitor in December said they had not sold a property in the previous month." - I guess this is correct, the property market has frozen up by most accounts.
- "Some of the unfinished buildings I saw will never be finished." - could be correct, there are a number of projects on hold already, but hardly a revelation. There have been unfinished buildings ever since humans crawled out of caves.
- "Many should never have been started." - opinion
- "For all its extravagant novelties and its masses of petunias, Dubai is a city with neither charm nor character."- opinion
The Guardian, or Ms Greer, acknowledged there were errors. An amendment was published, although hardly sufficient ...
This article was amended on Tuesday 24 February 2009. In the article above we said that "the only dhows on Dubai Creek these days take tourists on one-hour pleasure cruises". In fact they are regularly used to transport cargo as well. We also said that the man-made group of islands arranged to resemble a world map was called Dubai World. Its actual name is The World and this has been corrected.
Original report about Dubai by Germain Greer in The Guardian is here:http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/feb/09/dubai-architecture-greer