Dubai Mall is the most popular place on the planet. Why?
IN the middle of a desert city is a giant mall that attracts more people than anywhere else on the planet. Why?
WHAT’S the most popular place on the planet, the place most people think they should visit before they die?
Is it somewhere old, say, the Taj Mahal or the pyramids? Somewhere hedonistic, such as Las Vegas? Somewhere for the family, maybe Disneyland? Or one of the natural wonders of the world, the Grand Canyon or Uluru? The best place in the world is only five years old. It has no natural beauty. It is a giant, dirty grey shed in a sun-scorched sandpit in what used to be the middle of nowhere. It has no culture, no depth. But more people go there than anywhere else on the planet — almost 80 million in the past 12 months. That’s more than the number who go to the Eiffel Tower, Niagara Falls and Disney World in Florida combined. By 2020, the total is forecast to exceed 100 million. I’m about to become the latest click on the ticker. I’m walking under a vast, self-important red sign that reads: THE DUBAI MALL.
At first sight, Dubai Mall looks much like any other supersized shopping centre. There are the escalators carefully arranged to route visitors past all the shops, the introverted architecture and the strange smell — a cross between sweetness and plastic. But this is the mall of malls, the one every other wants to be. Despite a recession that hit Dubai harder than most, it is full — all 1200 stores and 200 restaurants and cafes, all 550,000 square metres of space, all 22.5km of store fronts. Sales are rising by about 20 per cent a year and rents by 10-15 per cent. On a busy day, the mall’s turnover exceeds $18 million. Annually, it takes more than $5.4 billion.
It’s so successful that Emaar, the Dubai developer that built it, is adding a new $360 million, 93,000 square metre wing next to the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, which Emaar also built. Another $540 million, 93,000 square metre wing, including a bridge of shops over a highway, is being built at the other end. When the new bookends open in two years’ time, the goods and services for sale on any given day will be worth more than $7.2 billion.
The mall’s mind-bending size and popularity make it uniquely revealing. It is the closest thing the world has to a black box, a place that exposes what we want: our foibles and our failures, where we’re coming from and going to. It’s the place to go to discover the state of modern man.
I begin at the I [Heart] Dubai kiosk because if the visitor numbers prove anything, it’s that the world likes Dubai. The stall is not up to much. It has the usual cheap-looking pens, cuddly toys and fridge magnets. I pick up a postcard of a camel that grins at me as I turn it from side to side. What, I wonder, is the appeal of this place? I decide to ask Hussain Jaber Belshalat, who runs the kiosk. He is softly spoken and studiously polite. He hands me gooey dates and Arabic coffee laced with cardamom. But even he cannot resist giving me his best “You really ought to get out more” look when he hears my question. “This place is not about Europeans, or for Europeans,” he says. “It’s for the whole world. Look around.”
I do. There’s every kind of person. Conservative Saudis, Kuwaitis and Qataris snap up baubles between visits to prayer rooms. Iranians stock up on goods that economic sanctions mean they cannot buy at home. Coach loads of Japanese, Chinese and Russian ram-raiders race to Louis Vuitton, led by flag-waving guides. Exhausted tangles of window-shopping Indian and Pakistani families clog up the marble-lined arteries. Westerners stand out because they ignore the dress code posted at the entrances that discourages shorts and strappy tops.
Dubai Mall represents the triumph of globalisation over every other economic, social, political and religious force. Every kind of person from every country comes to Dubai to get a taste of the modern world — by shopping. Six years after global capitalism faced its gravest crisis, money talks again and it’s saying: “Do buy.”
What does the resurgent global consumer want? New money craves some very old-money, often British, class. Burberry, Paul Smith, Alfred Dunhill and Hackett all do a roaring trade in the mall. Fortnum & Mason has just opened a store and cafe, and sells so much shortbread and lemon curd that it’s always running out. The only supermarket is Waitrose. “The world likes British things more than we Brits sometimes imagine,” says Martin Primett, a former British RAF liaison officer with the Royal Saudi Air Force who is now helping Waitrose to win the retail battle in the Middle East as a business development manager.
New money also wants some old-fashioned fun. Irina Litkova runs the risqué Agent Provocateur’s first stand-alone shop in the Middle East. At first she had few customers. One Emirati woman only came in to spit on a poster of a woman in stockings and suspenders. But then something remarkable happened. Women whose only peephole is the eye slit in their niqab started coming in for peephole bras. Today, Litkova’s store is one of the brand’s top 10 global performers. “No matter who they are or what their religion, women enjoy the same things,” Litkova grins, as she tries to bend the thong-clad mannequins in her window display over a few inches more than the government inspectors allow. Her best-selling item is a kinky riding crop with a Swarovski crystal handle. In Dubai, even bonking is bling.
Twenty years ago, few of us could have spelt Dubai, far less found it on a map. The city state has been built from scratch in a generation. Most of those who fly to Dubai to seek their fortune, or simply to have fun, are not Arabs. They are from everywhere. Why do they choose Dubai, over Delhi, Mumbai, Abu Dhabi, Doha or, further afield, Paris, Madrid, Istanbul, New York or Tokyo? Those cities have malls, jobs, wealth and way more culture and history. “Dubai makes everything so, so simple,” says Charlotte Hall, 28, who works in PR in the world’s most successfully PR-ed city. “Everything’s done for you here. You don’t even have to think.”
The mall is blissfully/vacuously undemanding. As I arrive, I walk past a small army of security men and greet the concierges. It is a tarmac-melting 40°C outside, but inside it’s spring. Always. There’s so much water in the aquarium, lakes, fountains and Olympic-sized ice rink — 160 million litres, to be precise — that I quickly forget I am in a part of the world that Wilfred Thesiger called “a bitter, desiccated land which knows nothing of gentleness or ease”. The food is as familiar and dull as day-old pizza. Almost all of the restaurants and cafes serve some variation on burgers, pasta, sushi or frozen yoghurt. You have to look hard to find Arabic food in the heart of modern Arabia. Waitrose even sells bacon, ham and salami in its vast non-Muslim section.
In a region noted for stifling religious and social strictures, the mall is strikingly liberal. I can have a glass of wine at an outcrop of restaurants that the mall folk call Souk Al Bahar but everyone else calls Booze Island. You only have to spend a few minutes in Dolce & Gabbana to realise that gays are welcome, even though homosexuality is illegal in Dubai. There’s even gambling, of sorts. Outside the aquarium, Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank is giving away a $360,000 Bentley in a prize draw.
I’ve spent three days in the mall now. My hotel, The Address, is part of it. Turn left at Bloomingdale’s cosmetics counter and you’re in the lobby. I’ve scarcely seen the sun. By day four, I’ve forgotten I am in the Middle East at all. And that’s the point. Dubai’s east-meets-west mission is to create an economically and socially liberal success story in one of the most economically and socially troubled regions on Earth. The mall is its purest expression, its calling card. “What’s good for the merchants is good for Dubai and for the whole region,” says Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.
It’s tempting to think that all the shops, bars and restaurants are bait to lure the westerners Sheikh Mohammed needs to make his “Arabia-lite” business model work. But their most dramatic effect is on locals, according to one of the Sheik’s top lieutenants, Mohamed Alabbar, the US-educated boss of Emaar. He says the mall offers Arabs the economic and social freedom they need to compete in the modern world. “Three hundred million Arabs in this region feel they can make it here. They can get their break here,” he says. “It’s a beacon of hope.”
It sounds an absurdly grand notion, until I meet Sarah Belhasa at Coffeöl Cafe. She tells me that, until recently, “women in Dubai were housewives. The end.” But Dubai wants women — it wants everyone — to work to make its desert dream reality. So she started a local women’s fashion retailer. At first she had to work with suppliers in Europe. When the mall opened, she took a gamble. She hired local garment-makers to create the dresses and opened a boutique, Studio 8. Business is good, she tells me — and, judging by the ruby-studded gold Rolex Daytona she is sporting, it is. “This is the best place in the Middle East to be a woman,” she grins.
Women own and run dozens of retailers in the mall. Alabbar’s daughter, Salama, runs the Symphony fashion boutique. The senior director of the mall is a woman. That might not sound like much by western standards, but it is nothing short of a revolution in a region where women are still airbrushed out of photographs in some newspapers, merely for being women.
Not everyone celebrates Dubai’s sun, sea, sand and shopping. I find out by doing what no one in Dubai ever does. Walk. I sweat my way through the furnace-like car park, past conga lines of SUVs, onto the main drag, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Boulevard. It is lined with construction workers, slumped in front of billboards advertising Dior and all the other fashion boutiques they are building in the new extensions to the mall. They rest in the shadows cast by giant concrete blocks, nibbling hard-boiled eggs from white plastic bags. A workforce of 20,000 toiled for 24 hours a day to build Dubai Mall in just four years. One worker, Umprakash, who earns $180 a month, tells me: “I wish the rich people who shop here would realise who is building these shops. I wish they could see how sad this life is.” Most don’t notice. They’re too busy caning their credit to care.
The same goes for the environment. It costs gazillions of dirhams to air-condition Dubai Mall, to keep all the fountains spurting and the ice in the drinks and on the rink cold. Thousands of litres of fresh salt water are delivered to the aquarium every day, trucked in from 30km away. Every morsel of food, every drink is flown in. “We import 10 tonnes of berries from California every day,” Waitrose’s Primett tells me. “People here want and expect winter and summer food all year round.”
The longer I spend in the mall, the clearer it becomes how willing modern man has become to trade just about anything for a little slice of modernity and luxury, even if it’s just a punnet of blueberries. We work, we spend, we consume, therefore we are. More than ever, money is the autocrat and the architect of our dreams.
The best illustration is something you cannot see, touch, buy or enjoy in the mall. Locals call it “the bargain” — and they don’t mean two-for-one offers. They mean the deal they all sign when they move to Dubai. Almost every one of the 25,000 people who work in the mall, from wealthy western chief executives to the Pakistani cleaners, casts aside rights and freedoms hard fought for over centuries. They agree not to join a trade union or bargain on pay and conditions. And no matter how long they spend in Dubai, how much they contribute, they agree that they will never enjoy any political or residency rights. Lose your job in Dubai and your visa expires.
Dubai Mall opened in the worst possible climate — in November 2008, two months after Lehman Brothers collapsed and the recession began. In those days, newspapers gleefully bid Dubai “Bye-bye”. “We were really panicking,” concedes I [Heart] Dubai’s Belshalat. Six years on, the mall’s record-breaking performance represents the total victory of a business model based on no rights, no freedom, no questions asked, cheap credit, even cheaper labour and wealthy foreigners. Dubai built it and, in the end, every Tom, Dick and Mohammed came. It’s what they — what we — want.
The nagging question is: should we? Is Dubai Mall a good thing? I decide to ask a man dressed in a pristine white dishdasha and sporting a wispy beard whom I meet sitting under a giant Armani sign. He is Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi, a writer and commentator. He acknowledges the mall is a shallow, planet-shredding temple of greed, built by sun-dried slaves. It feeds the stereotype of spendthrift Arabs frittering away their petrodollars, buying things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like. It creates the illusion of freedom when, in fact, like everything else in Dubai, freedom comes at a price. Yet, like Alabbar, he thinks the mall, the merrier.
“The Middle East — the world — needs a new place where east meets west, as it used to do in Cairo, Alexandria, Algiers, Beirut and Baghdad. Here, Arabs and everyone else all rub along together. Is that important? Does it change things a little bit for the better? I think so. And if you don’t agree, you don’t have to come.”
He’s right. You don’t. But, if the figures are anything to go by, you soon will.
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