Lost Horizon: The Ugly Reality of Dubai
Source: Your Golf Travel
In 1933, the English author James Hilton wrote a novel titled “Lost Horizon” about a diplomat named Hugh Conway and his journeys that end at Shangri-La, a mythical utopia filled with gentle residents who live for hundreds of years. Conway saw it as a place of peace where he could relax after his dangerous journey. His brother George instead saw it as a prison that the two must escape from.
While Hilton placed Shangri-La in the Himalayas, the name has also been used to refer to Dubai, the real world-renowned city that sits south of Saudi Arabia in the United Arab Emirates. For most, it is seen as a place of extravagant wealth and extreme excess. The city’s police force includes million-dollar supercars and many residents even have maids. Its citizens get free healthcare and live lives of extraordinary luxury. It may seem like paradise to any unassuming spectator scrolling through clickbait articles.
This mirage of a modern-day Shangri-La is used by Dubai and its benefactors to hide a rotting underbelly of a deteriorating metropolis struggling to sustain its own existence. Migrant workers from Asia and Africa are told they will receive high wages and free visits to family at home. When they arrive, their passports are taken from them by their employers and their wages are frequently withheld. With no rights, no healthcare and no way home, the workers are forced to endure the abuse of the desert sun to construct the towering skyscrapers that create Dubai’s international image. Thousands of slaves and indentured servants are being used as the backbone of the city’s massive construction projects.
The spoils of the servants’ labor is exploited by an Emirati elite. Dubaian citizenship is restricted to the native-born, and expatriates constitute 85% of the city’s population, making for a bizarre case of parasitism. Emiratis are afforded free healthcare, free education and live like the world’s wealthiest executives. Expatriates from more developed countries are treated to the same lifestyle until they falter financially, and the lack of bankruptcy laws lands them in prison. Dubai may claim it is the most welcoming city in the region, but the experiences of the city’s non-Emirati residents reveal the reality of a government exploiting the labor of outsiders to fund the lavish lifestyles of the elite.
However, a metropolis can only thrive for so long in the middle of the desert. Dubai suppresses any negative information that threatens to upend its nebulous image, such as the declining state of its urban areas. Dubai rapidly urbanized in the late 20th century as an ambitious ruler sought to construct an oasis in the Gulf. Hasty real-estate development with little usable capital in a desert region led to patches of skyscrapers and towering marble malls being separated by 14-lane highways. No one dares to step out onto the sidewalk in the midday heat, making Dubai a venerable ghost town. Retailers are also reportedly struggling with rising prices, particularly as the COVID-19 pandemic reduced mall traffic.
Failing development is also contributing to Dubai’s troubles. A proposed air-conditioned beach that would allow wealthy vacationers to step on cool sand and enjoy an artificial breeze was hyped in the late 2000s as the latest show of extravagance. However, the Great Recession halted many of these projects, leaving them to wither in the hot sun. Dozens of partially-completed hotels and artificial islands sit idly, creating something akin to an apocalyptic landscape. The completed buildings have their own set of issues; like much of the Arab world, Dubai lacks a proper postal system, instead relying on a digital GPS program to pinpoint destinations.
The city is also facing a water crisis, though it does not act like it. While being a metropolis with a population of nearly three million in the middle of the desert already leads to massive water consumption, Dubai’s luxurious attractions result in even greater waste. Ski Dubai, a resort that uses real snow to emulate a ski mountain in a place extremely hostile to the cold, uses massive amounts of water and energy to keep temperatures low. One report notes that it expels at least 500 tons of greenhouse gas emissions to achieve this, making Dubai an environmental threat to itself.
Despite its government projecting Dubai as the modern-day Shangri-La of the Middle East, a closer look reveals a city facing an existential threat. The lives of wealthy Emiratis and expatriates may resemble Hugh Conway’s reports of peace, relaxation and even utopia. However, for many, the city remains George Conway’s worst nightmare: an oppressive prison constructed by the excesses of unconstrained human ambition, filled with decaying megastructures and faced with the reality that its model is simply not sustainable in the real world.
Shangri-La is fictitious, but the urban denigration and human suffering Dubai perpetuates is not. If the deterioration continues at its current pace, the attempted oasis will inevitably collapse under the weight of its own ambitions and become its own lost horizon on the Persian Gulf.