The city of Dubai, one of the seven United Arab Emirates, is everything the Arab world isn’t: a freewheeling capitalist oasis where the market rules and history is swept aside. Until the credit crunch knocked it flat, Dubai was the fastest-growing city in the world, with a roaring economy that outpaced China’s while luring more tourists than all of India. It’s one of the world’s safest places, a stone’s throw from its most dangerous. In City of Gold, Jim Krane, who reported for the AP from Dubai, brings us a boots-on-the-ground look at this fascinating place by walking its streets, talking to its business titans, its prostitutes, and the hard-bitten men who built its fanciful skyline. He delves into the city’s history, paints an intimate portrait of the ruling Maktoum family, and ponders where the city is headed. Dubai literally came out of nowhere. It was a poor and dusty village in the 1960s. Now it’s been transformed into the quintessential metropolis of the future through the vision of clever sheikhs, Western capitalists, and a river of investor money that poured in from around the globe. What has emerged is a tolerant and cosmopolitan city awash in architectural landmarks, luxury resorts, and Disnified kitsch. It’s at once home to America’s most prestigious companies and universities and a magnet for the Middle East’s intelligentsia. Dubai’s dream of capitalism has also created a deeply stratified city that is one of the world’s worst polluters. Wild growth has clogged its streets and left its citizens a tiny minority in a sea of foreigners. Jim Krane considers all of this and casts a critical eye on the toll that the global economic downturn has taken on a place that many tout as a blueprint for a more stable Middle East. While many think Dubai’s glory days have passed, insiders like Jim Krane who got to know the city and its creators firsthand realize there’s much more to come in the City of Gold, a place that, in just a few years, has made itself known to nearly every person on earth.
Jim Krane is a longtime reporter for the Associated Press in the Persian Gulf region who has written an energetic new book on Dubai. The book, City of Gold, benefits from his unique insider-outsider perspective. Insider, because Jim got a rare look at the inner workings of government as a consultant in the office of Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed; Outsider because his is the first popular work with the scope and courage to examine every angle of Dubai's development - from the swish offices of the city's top policymakers to the grimy labor camps housing the underpaid men who built the city.
Jim has been a journalist for nearly 18 years. He reported from the Middle East and beyond as the AP's Dubai-based Gulf correspondent from 2005-2007. Prior to that he was AP's Baghdad correspondent, covering the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion and the rise of the Iraqi insurgency in 2003 and 2004. He also reported frequently from Afghanistan during those years. Previously Jim was an AP business writer in New York, focusing on technology news.
Besides writing his book, Jim also pens freelance articles for the Financial Times and contributes to the Economist Intelligence Unit.
Jim also reported for U.S. newspapers including The Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey); The News-Tribune (New Jersey); The Laredo Morning Times (Texas); APBNews.com, a now defunct news service; and Newhouse Newspapers' online operations. He is the winner of several journalism awards, including the 2003 AP Managing Editors Deadline Reporting Award, for coverage of Saddam Hussein's capture in Iraq.
Why a book on Dubai?
Jim arrived in Dubai in January 2005, where he found a city erupting onto the earth. Thousands of new residents streamed in each day. The entire city was a construction site, with more than 10 percent of the world's building cranes at work. Neighborhoods spread across the desert like kudzu. In the course of its six-year boom, Dubai swelled from a modest city the size of Milwaukee to a bloated megalopolis the size of Houston - doubling in population and quadrupling in area. Most incredibly, this wild growth was taking place within a short distance of the carnage in Iraq, and was receiving little notice in the United States.
Dubai, it turned out, was the antithesis of Baghdad. As fast as Iraq was being destroyed - bombed, dismantled and otherwise collapsing - Dubai was accomplishing the opposite, casting off the vestiges of primitivity and rising into magnificence.
There are few, if any, places on earth where the span of modernization is so compressed, where extreme capitalist excess is just a generation removed from Third World poverty. Here, men born in palm shacks became billionaires. Shrewd professors, holders of PhDs from American universities, had been raised by illiterate parents.
The fact that such a success story has risen in the Arab world is of great importance, both inside the region and out. With little notice, Dubai's undemocratic capitalism has become the development model for the rest of the Middle East. Like it or not, the Dubai effect has already touched your life.
But all is not well with this brash city-state. Dubai accomplished its feats on the backs of a vast labor force of mistreated men who have never received their due. The city's success has destroyed far more lives than was necessary. And its wild growth upset the demographic balance, leaving the city 95 percent foreign and nearly 80 percent male. Dubai's pampered natives are such a tiny minority that retaining their sovereignty has become a major worry. Meanwhile, prostitution has become a necessity, spawning the tragic industry of human trafficking.
And, in the months since the onset of global recession, Dubai has emerged as the poster child of the previous era's gluttonous excess. Dubai's once soaring real estate values have collapsed further than anywhere on earth, and unemployed expatriates have fled for the exits. Krane's book examines the viability of Dubai's economic model, going forward.
In short, Dubai is a fascinating topic.
