My friend Alex Feldman just shared this New York Times opinion piece with me. Along with it, he said, "Thought you'd appreciate this." And he was right, because he knows me. He and I have a long history of geeking out about cities, hosteling around Europe together, and booking irresponsible flights at odd times in odd locations.

The article is by Richard Florida, and it's called "Dubai Was Not Built For War." It follows one of the themes that we recently spoke about, here. People come to cities in search of opportunity. Cities are labour markets. But Dubai is perhaps an extreme example of this. You could say it's a city designed almost exclusively for opportunists. From Florida:

Nearly nine in 10 Dubai residents are nonnationals — by far the highest percentage of any major city in the world. Across the Emirates as a whole, about 10 million of 11.4 million residents are foreign nationals. Many are from Britain or the United States, but many more are guest workers who do the service jobs on which the city depends and typically come from South Asia, Southeast Asia and the wider Middle East. Even a traffic violation can trigger deportation. Citizenship is based almost entirely on descent; it’s been intentionally made very difficult for even long-term foreign residents or their children to become Emirati, even after decades of living and working there. The system is designed to rely on migrants while keeping them permanently temporary. That makes it extremely hard to be rooted, to belong, to be attached.

The result is a new urban model ("Dubai-ification") compared to how we used to think about cities:

This new kind of city is a sharp break with the past. For most of human history, people lived and worked in the same place, and cities grew up around that basic fact. They transform, rebuild after fires and disasters and become richer and sometimes poorer, but they draw their resilience from their rootedness, the fact that people feel they belong there. To say “I am a New Yorker” or a Londoner or “I am from Pittsburgh” or Detroit or Rome or Barcelona — that is not just a map. It conveys a deep sense of history, belonging and meaning, a personal identity, not just a transaction. Those identities are messy and unequal, but they are substantial. They are one of the primary ways people answer the basic questions of who they are and where they belong. And they are part of what brings people back to hang on and rebuild, no matter what.

At the time of writing this post, Polymarket shows a less than 50% chance of a ceasefire with Iran by the end of May, and a 71% chance of one by the end of December. That's not 100%. So, we'll see. Maybe it becomes even more protracted. Hopefully not. Regardless, the question everyone is asking is: How many of the "permanently temporary" will actually stick around if they no longer feel safe?

My view is not many.

Cover photo by Christoph Schulz on Unsplash

It is worth reiterating that one of the main reasons the majority of people live in cities is because they would like to make money and improve their economic status. There are, of course, other reasons too, but making money is an enduring attractor. In Alain Bertaud's book, Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities, he famously argued that cities are, first and foremost, labour markets.

Because of this, the success of cities depends on their ability to harness talent and turn it into economic progress. New York City, for example, is the city it is today because it was the largest port of entry for immigrants. And because transportation costs were high at the time, people arrived in New York and stayed in New York to work and create businesses.

The same thing is generally true today in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is estimated that roughly 50% of all tech startups and 59 of the top 100 highest-valued unicorns have a foreign-born founder. (I'd love to know what percentage are Canadian graduates of the University of Waterloo.) These are immigrants looking for money and economic opportunity, and the local ecosystem is providing the right preconditions.

But if the preconditions for success disappear, people will start to both leave and not come in the first place. So, it's also worth reiterating that the fortunes of cities have always risen and fallen over a long enough time horizon. Here's a great excerpt from a recent Bloomberg article by Richard Frost and Mary Hui, talking about what "war-rattled Dubai can learn from Hong Kong's expat exodus."

Financial centers rise and fall with the tides of geopolitics. From the mid-1500s, the tiny Portuguese enclave of Macau served as the primary intermediary for trade between Europe, Japan and China. In the mid-1800s, it was displaced by Hong Kong, which Britain secured by defeating the Qing dynasty. Hong Kong, in turn, was overtaken by Shanghai in the 1920s, when its more glamorous though still Western-run rival became the wealthiest city in East Asia. Both were occupied by Japanese forces during World War II, and their expatriate elite were interned in camps.

Shanghai never regained its prewar status. After their 1949 victory in China’s civil war, the Communists seized foreign-owned assets, bringing an end to the dominance of one of Asia’s most prominent business dynasties — the Baghdadi-Jewish Sassoon family, known as the “Rothschilds of the East.” The exodus of wealthy Shanghainese to Hong Kong helped lay the foundations for the city’s modern-day revival as Asia’s leading financial hub.

But between the protests of the 2010s, the 2020 national security law, and the draconian pandemic lockdowns, in recent years, it did feel like Hong Kong might be at risk of losing at least some of its status as a global financial hub. According to the latest Global Financial Centres Index, Hong Kong is still ranked third, behind New York and London, respectively. But Singapore is nipping at its heels in fourth position.

Today, some are arguing that the current turmoil in the Middle East has broken the promise of Dubai as a stable, global financial capital where influencers roam freely on the beach. People are, not surprisingly, leaving in the immediate term, but will it be lasting? I think it's too early to be calling the fall of Dubai, but there's no question that this is a meaningful exogenous shock. Its real estate index fell 30% in two weeks.

History shows us that there are no guarantees. Preeminence exists until something happens, and then it doesn't. If this war becomes protracted, it will be a major problem for Dubai. Capital and talent want openness, stability, opportunity, and a favourable business environment (keep taxes reasonable and get out of the way). After all, it's arguably the main reason why people come to cities in the first place.

Cover photo by Sepehr Moradian on Unsplash

Chart via the Global Financial Centres Index

Last September, Dubai announced a new initiative called the Urban Think Tank & Design Lab (officially D.M-ULab). Then, this month, they announced that architects Santiago Calatrava and Kengo Kuma would be joining the think tank as "principal contributors."

The lab is focused on several key areas, but grouping them together, it's broadly focused on encouraging participatory design (as opposed to top-down planning), driving the use of new technologies such as AI, and enhancing quality of life through human-centric urban design.

This includes the creation of 20-minute communities where 80% of daily needs are within walking or riding distance.

This last focus area is particularly interesting because one could easily argue that modern Dubai started on the opposite end of this spectrum. Rather than focusing on the human scale, it was focused on the global-attention-grabbing-superlative scale.

When a remarkable new building is announced, the focus tends to be on the building as a symbolic object, not how it meets the ground and fits into its broader urban context. That's largely irrelevant to a global audience.

But it is this latter quality that will largely determine how human-centric the city ends up feeling — it's the spaces in between the buildings where public life happens.

So, how does this think tank intend to shift the city's focus? One of the first projects is the renewal of the city's older neighbourhoods through the creation of Barcelona-like superblocks that push vehicular traffic to their edges.

It's an admirable move, but it is noteworthy that this implementation is planned for the city's older neighbourhoods. Older neighbourhoods have the advantage of street grids that are already more human-centric in scale.

The true test of this lab will be whether it can transform its newer neighbourhoods. If it succeeds, it will be a model worth exporting to the rest of the world.

Cover photo by Dubai Travel Blog on Unsplash