Kuwait Beach Party

Despite its reputation for not being the most exciting place on earth, Kuwait and the Pearl of Dubai had a meeting this weekend that proved there is a lot more to the country than sand and oil. Beautiful weather, perfect water temps, great music and food converged with over 100 party-goers at this wonderful spot south of Kuwait city. Thank you to Dari and my hosts for including me in the festivities.

Competitive Advantage

In his book "The Competitive Advantage of Nations," Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter argues that a nation's competitiveness is determined by how productively it uses its human, capital and natural resources. A review of many of Dubai's business plans over the past two decades reveals how prominently Porter's work has figured into the Dubai growth model. The most direct linkage between Porter and Dubai appears to be the notion of clustering, whereby complementary industries operate in close proximity to one another, fostering higher productivity and attracting other similar businesses to settle. The Dubai "free zone" strategy is the local example of clustering, with Dubai's inherent natural resource advantage being exploited to enable these tax-free environments.

Porter's views on the relationship between government and the private sector, however, may not be reflected quite so vividly in Dubai. While Porter's writing tends to favor a "collaborative" relationship between government and the nation's institutions representing its human, capital and natural resources, the Dubai model tends to place government at the helm of these institutions. Click here for a custom report by Porter about the United Arab Emirates.

Saskia Sassen

The writings of Saskia Sassen have had a tremendous influence on me, and in many ways underlie the idea of place branding and certainly have huge relevance to the city of Dubai. Sassen is best known for her 1991 book "The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo" which looks at the effect of globalization on the organization of urban economic activity and the changing role of the state in structuring it. Place and its relationship to business in the global city also figures prominently in much of Sassen's work. The 2002 anthology edited by Sassen titled "Global Networks, Linked Cities" elaborates on much of the theory behind her earlier writings through various essays about different global cities. Ali Parsa and Ramin Keivani from South Bank University in London contribute their essay titled "The Hormuz Corridor: Building a Cross-Border Region Between Iran and the UAE" and flesh out many of Sassen's theories in looking at Dubai's economic activity in the context of this Hormuz Corridor.

Dubai Creative Class

Continuing the discussion on Pearl of Dubai about academic perspectives on the project of place branding in Dubai, I wanted to discuss the notion of urban creative classes as described by sociologist Richard Florida. Florida's book "The Rise of the Creative Class" considers people, rather than corporations, as the central building blocks of urban growth. While traditional studies have emphasized the factors driving firms to locate in one city over another, Florida focuses instead on what attracts people to settle in cities, and specifically what drives 'creative' people inclined to foster innovation and economic development, to cluster in certain places over others.

Florida argues that in America, creative people (a somewhat broad and vague label I would say) are human capital requirements for growth and that this sector of the population, numbering around 30% of the US workforce, tend to settle in "innovative, diverse, tolerant" places. While Florida's conception of this creative class can basically be understood as those who work in knowledge-based occupations, his thesis is that attracting this creative class is an imperative for US cities; those American cities with higher concentrations of this class also have higher growth rates, and higher levels of innovation, diversity, and tolerance.

In a place like Dubai, there is no shortage of workers given the current supply of jobs and economic opportunity. According to Florida's model, one would have to question how successful Dubai will be in the long-term at attracting this creative class to work in Dubai's growing knowledge industries like high-tech, financial services, legal, health care and business management? Will this class of workers feel satisfied by Dubai's level of innovation, diversity and tolerance? Or will other cities win out in this competition for the global creative class? It's too early to tell, but not too early to consider the current state of knowledge-based industries in Dubai as an indicator for what the future may hold.

Click here for Ms. Wikipedia's synopsis of this topic.

Post Urbanism

Mike Davis, a prominent US urban studies scholar best know for his book City of Quartz about Los Angeles, published a racy and thought-provoking piece about Dubai last fall in the New Left Review.

Titled "Fear and Money in Dubai", Davis' article is impressive in its anecdotes about the city and hip pop cultural references. Yet unlike his books, especially Ecology of Fear, Davis appears like a fish out of water when discussing Dubai and leaves readers pondering if the fear he defines as an underpinning to Dubai's financial success is in fact, his own grappling with a fear of how a post-urban, Middle Eastern city like Dubai could actually succeed.

Ironically, most of the slights Davis applies to Dubai originate from his own backyard, in Los Angeles, California. While seemingly shocked at the excesses of the "petrodollar" in Dubai, he fails to really explore the reality that he and his LA neighbors subsidize this with their own vehicular excesses. Davis' writing conveys an uneasiness around Dubai projects like Dubailand and gated residential communities, even though again, these models are derived from his own backyard in Southern California. And while he rightly sympathizes with the plight of unskilled, South Asian laborers in Dubai, he fails to acknowledge that all cities are built and sustained by imported labor of some kind; one would be hard-pressed to imagine LA functioning without the presence of cheap Mexican labor.

Ultimately, Davis' perspective resides in a larger critique of post-urbanism, understood as cities that "create appetities rather than solve problems." Yet a deeper analysis of Dubai, below the surface mirage that blinded Davis, reveals that Dubai does both, creating appetites for tourists who wouldn't have otherwise considered visiting the Middle East and solving problems for skilled and unskilled workers who due to political strife or a general lack of economic opportunity in their home countries, come to Dubai for a better life. Had Davis dug deeper beyond the predominantly Western media sources he references and the glitzy image which distorts anyone's vision of Dubai, he would perhaps find more comfort from his own fear of money in Dubai.

Dubai Development

In a city like Dubai, often referred to as "development on steroids," it's interesting to consider the structure and growth of the city in the context of trends in development studies. Amartya Sen's book "Development As Freedom" considers freedom as both the means and the ends of development and in the process reconfigures the notion that rising GDP and national income are the sole indicators of successful development.

While Sen's analysis is too complex and nuanced to summarize here (he did when a Nobel Prize after all), one aspect of his book related to "Lee's thesis" deserves to be highlighted in reference to Dubai. This thesis, named after Lee Kuan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, argues that rapidly adopting political and civic liberties in developing countries risks hampering economic growth and development. Sen disagrees with this claim, arguing that Lee's perspective is too narrow (mostly derived from his experience in Singapore and perhaps considering China and South Korea's experience) and doesn't hold up when broadened to a more global study.

The Dubai case is a compelling one for Sen to consider against Lee's thesis and his overall theory of development as freedom. This is partly because of Dubai's youth and the fact that Dubai's story has yet to be studied extensively. But Dubai is also interesting because it contains variables which aren't addressed much by Sen's study. Dubai's majority expatriate population, Islamic heritage and pre-existing oil wealth are three very distinct factors which I believe would complicate Sen's analysis. As the majority of Dubai workers lack citizenship and the presence of oil revenues limits the need of the state to tax its population, the Dubai model injects a new set of variables into this important discussion.

Academic Overview

In part due to the positive response I had to features on upcoming Dubai projects, I have decided to dedicate the next week or so on Pearl of Dubai to exploring different academic angles on the topic of place branding. As some of you know, my research here is about the branding of Dubai and how these efforts in marketing and public relations have furthered the economic development of the city. While place branding is a somewhat undefined field in both academia and the private sector, it is gaining relevance in today's globalized environment and relates to various compelling areas of scholarship in the academic world. Hopefully this will be interesting to people and of course, please feel free to contribute comments throughout the week of writers or perspectives I may have missed.

Labour TV

I have argued in various forums this year that a more pro-active approach to labour issues in the UAE is needed to counter rising international criticism of the plight of the UAE workers and the resulting damage to the image of Dubai internationally. With the announcement today of the impending launch of a TV channel focused exclusively on labour issues in the UAE, it appears that the Ministry of Labour is stepping forward on this issue in a more public way. Broadcast in English, Arabic and Urdu, the new channel will "adopt a proactive approach, will spread awareness about the ministry's rule and regulations and provide information on how the labour market operates."