Dubai
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[Dubai is] a schizophrenic place because you'll walk down the beach and see Muslim women wearing hijab... then you'll see European men in speedos. You'll see a mosque, and right across the street from the mosque, there's a nightclub!
—Ahmed Ahmed, The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour
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Quite simply put, Las Vegas on steroids. Lots of steroids. With mosques. A Boom Town and a half, since 2010 it possesses the tallest building on the planet, the Burj Dubai Burj Khalifa,[1] which is 828 metres tall, along with the Burj Al-Arab (a sail-shaped, self-proclaimed 7-star hotel), the Palm Islands (three massive, palm-shaped artificial islands that will be the site of major development—or at least, were intended to), and The World (similar to the Palm Islands, but the archipelago is in the shape of Earth's continents, and is nine kilometers wide).
Considering the place went from mostly desert in The Eighties to major metropolis by the end of the Turn of the Millennium, its some achievement. This boom seriously couldn't last.
And it didn't. Thanks to the late 2000s economic crisis, workers were fleeing (to avoid debtor's prison), luxury cars were sitting abandoned, and towering skyscrapers were left empty with nobody to move in. Despite massive financial offers, it also proved impossible to find any world-class chefs that wanted to open restaurants there. Which goes to show, obscene wealth can't compensate for a total lack of fresh produce (such absurdities include a bag of lettuce being sold for around US$10, at the time enough to buy a decent meal at a restaurant in much of the world). To some, it appeared that Dubai would be looked at as a symbol of the Turn of the Millennium—an entire metropolis built upon a mountain of debt, where everybody (apart from the peons who built the place, that is) lived like King Louis XIV, until the debt was finally called in, and the whole thing came crashing down. The state-owned investment company Dubai World looked like it was about to default on $60 billion of sovereign debt and the state got a large bailout loan from Abu Dhabi. (Their crowning achievement, a 2,717-foot-tall office tower, is now named for Abu Dhabi's ruler.) It's an entire city that was on the verge of becoming Deader Than Disco, going from the ultimate Boom Town into a real-life, desert version of Rapture... minus the Big Daddies and general anarchy (and any genuine devotion to actual market economics; the city's boom was, after all, funded by government debt), of course.
Through The New Tens the people and investors of Dubai turned these troubles around. Not all of Dubai's issues are gone, and there are serious questions regarding the long term viability of such a major city in the desert in the face of global warming, regional conflict, and human rights concerns. That said, for the time being Dubai is one of the most important international cities, being a hub for business, logistics, and tourism that is relatively open to international trade and investment.
Some of us would like to know whose idea it was to build an area of a huge shopping mall with 300 jewelry shops. In The New Tens, if an opulent and luxurious middle eastern city was shown in media, there was a good chance it was either Dubai or some sort of expy.
- Features in the Iraq War drama Occupation.
- The game Escape From St Marys is set in a Dubai school. A Dubai Catholic school.
- The game Spec Ops: The Line takes place in Dubai after the city is wrecked by a disastrous sandstorm.
- The game Ace Combat game Ace Combat: Assault Horizon features Dubai and the Tower ingame.
- Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol set the second quarter of the plot (and 90% of the trailers) inside (and just outside) the Burj Khalifa.
- The "Hotel Oasis" in Modern Warfare 3 is pretty much ripped straight from the Burj Al Arab.
- Briefly mentioned in Cyberpunk 2077 which discussed two are two Dubais in flavor text; a dangerous Old Dubai, free from corporate oversight contrasted with a separate and shining New Dubai.
- ↑ Named after the ruler of Abu Dhabi, who bailed the place out