The Donald Trump of Cities 🐪

Three Things #169: May 11, 2025

Modern Dubai from street level. It’s as bold, brash, loud, and iconoclastic as everyone’s favorite orange-haired personality.

I just came back from a week in Dubai for a conference (plus a side trip to Abu Dhabi). It was my fifth or sixth trip to Dubai, by far the longest, and it left a very strong impression. Everyone seems to have a strong opinion about Dubai these days. Here’s mine.

Note that I’m going to talk a lot about Dubai (and a little bit about Abu Dhabi), but much of what I say here refers to the entire United Arab Emirates.

Thing #1: The Good ✈️

To be honest, Dubai is a difficult place to love (more on why in a moment).

The first thing I’ll say in defense of Dubai is that it basically didn’t exist 50 years ago. Abu Dhabi was always the seat of power and wealth in the region, and Dubai was just a small, dusty desert port, known primarily for fishing and pearl diving. The emirate and its rulers are ambitious and had a remarkable vision, which is well on its way to coming true. The discovery of oil in the late sixties and early seventies helped, but today oil represents less than 1% of Dubai’s economy, which is quite diversified.

A big part of that vision was taking advantage of Dubai’s unique geography: it lies in a strategic position that’s more or less in the center of the world, weighted by things like population and economic growth. It sits in between Europe and Asia. It’s extremely well connected to important cities throughout Europe, Africa, China, India, and the rest of Asia, and, thanks to its excellent, eponymous airline, it’s well connected to even farther-flung places such as North and South America, and Oceania.

That airline, by the way, was the vision of the sheikh 40 years ago when Dubai was still a dusty desert port, as a way of promoting economic growth and diversifying the economy away from oil. At the time no one believed it would be possible to build a major world airline in such an underdeveloped place, but today Emirates is one of the world’s best airlines (take it from a frequent flyer) and is the second-largest by number of destinations.

Zooming out, another thing I like about Dubai is that it’s honest about itself, about what it is and what it isn’t. It’s not pretending to be something that it’s not. It’s not pretending to be a major world city, yet, although it’s getting there anyway. It’s a highly transactional place, for better and for worse, but this makes doing business in Dubai much easier than in other places. The city is very much open for business, and it’s famous for its liberal policies. For example, it’s one of the most liberal places on earth with respect to the number of countries whose citizens can visit visa-free. This, combined with the strategic location, makes it a popular choice for conferences.

Your perspective on Dubai depends on your goals. The vast majority of people I meet in Dubai don’t think of it as a permanent home and don’t plan to stay very long. Someone used an analogy from Dune that I can’t help but mention. Dubai is like Arrakis. You come and do a tour of duty for a little while. It’s hot, it’s dusty, it’s intense, and it has plentiful spice. You do your time, you mine some spice, you try to avoid all of the (figurative) dangers and temptations, and then you go home a little bit wealthier.

That’s Dubai in a nutshell. If you don’t think of it as more than that—in particular, if you don’t think of it as a permanent home—then it’s just fine. Nearly everyone I meet there is transient. It’s doubly true because, not only do people plan to leave after a few years, everyone also leaves for at least a couple of months during the summer when it’s just unbearably hot (more on this in a moment, too).

In spite of all of its flaws, Dubai is also a highly functional, impressive city. In very little time it’s become an important destination where people from all over the world gather to do business. It has one of the world’s best, most well-connected airlines. The light regulatory touch, including easy access to residence visas, has allowed people to come from all over. Dubai has allowed development to flourish, albeit in a very chaotic, disorganized, inconvenient way. Everyone reports that it has one of the friendliest, most accessible, most responsive governments in the world: things just get done, easily, quickly, and cheaply. It’s also one of the safest places on earth. That’s more than I can say for any of the places I’ve lived. Dubai is a city that gets stuff done, with minimal bureaucracy.

It’s also, in its own way, a beautiful city. While it does lack overall structure and theme, while it feels disjoint, and while a lot of it feels extremely artificial—like Disney in the desert—it does have more fine dining and more luxury hotels per capita than any place on earth. Famous chefs have flocked to Dubai from around the world, and many global luxury brands have flagship properties there. What’s more, luxury properties in Dubai tend to be newer and more extravagant than elsewhere due to looser constraints on space and more drive to impress. Dubai is known globally for excellent service, modern opulence, and novelty.

It can be overwhelming, but in a good way, to be surrounded by so much beauty, spectacle, and wealth. Ordinary coffee chats that would happen at the crummy corner Starbucks back home instead happen in a royal tea house, immaculately clean, with rich aromas in the air and top-notch service. The food is universally good. In my week in Dubai I ate French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Lebanese, Emirati, Indian, and several other cuisines, and literally every meal was good. Really, really good. One or two were among the best meals I’ve had in my life. Even the cocktails, which usually aren’t my thing, were especially good and quite creative. Service is pretty universally excellent, to the point where the one time I had an issue with service at a restaurant, it was extremely surprising.

In short, Dubai is a place that knows how to live and knows how to enjoy life. It took me some time to understand this but if you meet it on its terms, if you understand that it’s transient and unsustainable, if you take it on its strengths and bear in mind its weaknesses, it’s really enjoyable.

Thing #2: The Bad 🛣️

I previously lived in LA, and I can’t help but compare Dubai and LA since they have a lot in common and they’re both awful in similar ways. Believe it or not, Dubai is more LA than even LA in many ways. It’s worse than LA in almost every dimension in which LA is bad.

First and foremost, there’s the weather. I complained about the tropical Kenyan weather after my trip there a few weeks ago; Dubai this past week was much hotter, with highs around 45° C (113° F). Some evenings were a little better, and it was cool enough to sit outside and have dinner. But it’s the sort of weather where you just never want to be outside if you can avoid it, and to me that’s very sad because I love being outside: I typically spend one or two hours outside every day, regardless of the weather.

But Dubai is so hot that for around half the year, you just can’t spend time outside. Even if there were a place to walk or run (there mostly isn’t), you just can’t do it in this weather. The few times I was forced to be outside in the middle of the day, walking from one event to another or trying to find a taxi, it was brutal. I began to feel exhausted after just a few minutes, and I’m in pretty good shape. The winter is apparently pretty nice, but for 6-8 months out of the year, the weather is just oppressive, and I for one don’t enjoy sitting inside in air conditioning all day.

Then there’s the fact that Dubai is literally the least walkable city on earth. I’ve seen some poorly designed cities, but Dubai really takes the cake. I don’t know what the city’s planners were smoking (or if there were any planners at all), but most of the city is an urban hellscape. One of the most common Dubai experiences is being literally 200-300m from your destination with simply no way to get there on foot: Google Maps will happily give you a route for cars, but none for pedestrians.

With vanishingly few exceptions, there are no sidewalks anywhere. To get from point A to point B you’d have to cross a massive highway on foot, which is impossible. Whatever the opposite of a walkable city is, that’s Dubai. It makes LA look walkable by comparison, and that’s saying something. When I’m in Dubai I find this continually depressing, and I struggled to stay active when I was sitting down almost all day long and couldn’t easily go for a walk or a run.

Then there’s the ridiculous display of wealth everywhere. Every third or fourth car is a supercar (I noticed this when I went to Abu Dhabi and suddenly the cars were normal again). As mentioned, there’s an insane number of luxury hotels—basically every event was at a fancy pool or beach bar at a luxury hotel. I visited at least a dozen of these during my week in Dubai, and while they were each individually pretty nice places, by the end of the week they all started to feel the same.

I feel the same generic, cookie-cutter sameness in Dubai that I feel in Hong Kong, as if everything caters to the lowest common denominator. Just as in Hong Kong, it feels like there are no real artists or designers in Dubai because they can’t afford to live there. The number of fake people I saw during the week with plastic surgery faces and fake breasts and fake tans was truly disturbing—the ugliest people I’ve seen anywhere on earth. Something about Dubai seems to attract the tackiest, most ridiculous nouveau riches from all around the world, especially from Russia. Again, Dubai is so superficial that it makes LA seem substantive by comparison, and that’s saying something.

The people aren’t the only thing that’s ugly. The buildings are too. There’s some nice architecture and some bright spots, but it’s mostly drab, cookie-cutter designs. I had severe deja vu multiple times in Dubai, visiting a new neighborhood that looks and feels identical to another neighborhood I’d visited a day or two prior. Nothing is organic; everything has been carved out of the desert from scratch over the past 5-10 years in the most tasteless possible way. The total lack of top down planning is a bit surprising for an authoritarian country. Nothing connects to anything else. There’s no connective tissue, no common theme, no thought given to the city layout. There are at least a dozen special enclaves within Dubai—Internet City, Media City, Knowledge Park, Silicon Oasis, Healthcare City, International Financial Centre, etc.—and each is a long, annoying, traffic-jammed taxi ride away from the next one. Dubai feels as if composed of a set of competing fiefdoms.

It doesn’t help that public transportation is basically non-functional (again, it makes LA public transport look good by comparison), and traffic is atrocious, up there with Bangkok and among the worst I’ve seen anywhere in the world. It’s just one of the most maddeningly frustrating cities to navigate. What’s worse, Uber drivers can never seem to find you. They end up in totally the wrong place, and they drop you in the wrong place, too, which is probably down to the horrendous traffic and byzantine road design.

All of this might be forgivable if Dubai were affordable, but it’s not. It’s become one of the most expensive cities on earth. While the food was universally good, as mentioned, it was rare to have dinner for less than USD $50-100. All of those taxi rides add up as well, and I’ve been told that, due to the rapid population influx and lack of supply, rents are sky high. We’re talking New York prices, without most of the perks of New York.

One possible reason for the shortfall in the housing supply is that the sheikh’s family (and the family’s holding companies) owns 80% of the undeveloped land in Dubai, which is anyway only 5% of the land of the country. This, too, feels similar to Hong Kong, which has a similar issue and similarly high real estate prices. In Hong Kong there isn’t much land that can be developed, and most of the improvable land is owned, and monopolized, by the government. Except that in Dubai, the sheikh is the government. It’s a modern take on a traditional, feudal system, and quite frankly I’m not sure how to feel about it. This feels excessive, and reminds me of my criticism of Urbit back in the day, for centralizing control of address space (i.e., digital property) in the hands of a small group of people. Having said that, the 80% figure is a common estimate and isn’t confirmed, and anyway I don’t fully understand the history or the local context, so there may be something I’m missing here.

Thing #3: The Future 🔮

The most beautiful building in Dubai, and maybe the entire world, is the Museum of the Future. The museum’s exhibits take you through a fictional, post-apocalyptic future scenario where, after global war and intense climate change, humanity finally unites peacefully. Future humans launch an enormous international space station, use the moon to mine energy from the sun, and closer to home, establish a genetic bank and begin to repair the ecological damage done to the planet. Of course, the exhibit portrays Dubai as a utopian, green, solarpunk city of the future, where everyone commutes in flying cars.

I wouldn’t believe it just about anywhere else, but Dubai is truly a unique, and uniquely ambitious, place. The breakneck pace of change is unmatched anywhere, except possibly in China during its heyday of growth 10-15 years ago. But Dubai is trying to grow in a greener, more sustainable way than China did, and for all of its flaws, described above, it’s getting a lot of things right, too. It occurs to me that Dubai is like the Donald Trump of cities: it pisses a lot of people off, but it gets things done, and people resent it for this.

Driving south from Dubai, the endless thicket of buildings, golf courses, palaces, mosques, and waterfront properties gradually thins to a trickle, and then you cross desert for around 30 minutes before the same process happens in reverse as you approach Abu Dhabi. I was told that, just a few years ago, there was no real highway between these two cities: there was a small, unlit road with blowing sand dunes and you had to look out for the occasional camel on the road.

Even in the empty in between, development projects are starting to sprout, which isn’t surprising given the country’s property boom. It’s not that hard to squint and imagine, 10 or 20 years hence, the entire expanse merging into a single megalopolis a la Shanghai-Nanjing-Hangzhou or Hong Kong-Macau-Zhuhai-Shenzhen-Guangzhou. What does this mean for the city, the country, the region, and the world?

To be honest, it’s hard to say since so many things are uncertain and everything is changing so rapidly. I have no trouble imagining Dubai emerging as a true, leading, global, world city in 10 or 20 years’ time, a future New York, London, or Tokyo. But I can equally see these ambitions being derailed by a combination of regional conflict, bad leadership, malinvestment, and climate change.

The city’s leaders, and the leaders of the UAE more broadly, seem serious about setting themselves up for success. They’re very much open for business, as described above, in a world that’s stupidly erecting more and more barriers to trade, capital flows, and immigration. They’re doing a good job of bringing in talent and capital. A few years ago, I wouldn’t have ever considered living there, no matter how much money you offered me. Now, while I’d still have serious reservations, I’d certainly consider it, and I suspect a lot of other people, especially those working in fields like tech and finance, would as well. I’ve already been there three times this year.

Overall the city seems to have installed reasonable policies, and in general the government is light touch. It’s not quite a libertarian fantasy given that it’s a ruled by a hereditary dynasty, but as long as the rulers are just and benevolent, it stands a chance of succeeding. I for one am excited about Dubai’s embrace of technology in particular, and programs such as Digital Dubai. The city and the country can and should continue to be a place for experimentation: a small, efficient place with responsible, responsive government, where things get done and builders and experimenters can congregate.

When looking at the current state of the world, and when considering which places are rich and successful and which are poor and downtrodden, it’s important to consider not only how things look today but also the rate of change. The USA, and in particular once-lovely, thriving places like San Francisco have really shot themselves in the foot and stunted, if not reversed, growth for a generation or more. By contrast, Dubai is moving in precisely the opposite direction. It has executed an incredible turnaround in a few decades, and the present trends are almost all positive. In spite of its flaws I’d say Dubai is off to a great start, and if it can keep the flywheel turning, these effects will only compound.

But there are risks. While the GCC countries have been remarkably peaceful for the past few decades and the UAE has never been directly involved in any major conflict, regional conflict among neighbors including Iran, Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, etc. could spill over or intensify. This could damage or break the flow of human capital to and from Dubai.

And with respect to leadership, while the current generation of leaders seem reasonable and competent, this is obviously not guaranteed to continue in a hereditary dynasty, and there’s no guarantee that the next batch of rulers will be so good. By and large investment seems to be going to the right places, such as tech, infrastructure, and land development, but Dubai runs the risk of going the direction of China and severely overinvesting in real estate projects during a bubble, which could crash and set things back.

Finally, the elephant in the room is climate change. It’s already 50° C (122° F) in Dubai in the summer, and the heat in the spring and fall are no laughing matter either. Can a place with such an unfortunate climate continue to thrive even as the planet continues to warm? On the one hand, well, the air conditioning works quite well and, as long as you stay indoors, it’s quite livable year round. Dubai and nearby Abu Dhabi even boast monstrosities like an indoor ski slope and an indoor wave pool. As if it wasn’t already ambitious enough, Dubai is planning to build a 93 km air conditioned cycling and running path, just to make the point extra clear. (Again: if any other city announced this plan I’d laugh. Dubai might actually pull it off.)

But, boy oh boy, I wouldn’t want to be in Dubai during a power outage. Dubai’s energy is probably reasonably secure given the abundance of nearby oil, but a supply shock would hit Dubai, and the region, quite hard. A combination of rising energy prices and rising temperatures is going to put increasing strain on infrastructure and energy security in places like Dubai. There’s slack in the system now, but the longer-term effects of things like climate change are unpredictable.

Time to start investing in the sort of futuristic infrastructure envisioned in the Museum of the Future, to prepare for this and other possible outcomes.