“The past, he thought, is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other…” wrote Chekhov. Nothing could more accurately encapsulate the sentiments more accurately than looking at Dubai over the astonishing year that has transpired, as the
The post-Covid craving for investments and security together with anxieties about rapid technological change in the global marketplace were ideal purgatives for Dubai’s leadership, which moved quickly to galvanize capital market activity through a series of companies that will be listed. These announcements have been
What a difference a year makes. This time last year, the writing was on the wall. It was all but decided that the property market was a spent force, on the verge of being wiped out by the great pandemic. Its residents should have succumbed
“What do such large, loose, baggy monsters, with their elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, mean?” Henry James asked in 1921 about the evolution of cities. A city could be exciting and resonant and yet “of no more use of expressing a main intention
The UAE construction and contracting sector is still suffering from the after effects of the liquidity crunch and which intensified with the onset of COVID-19. Initiatives by the government have helped from preventing an even worse outcome – however, the structural issue of post–handover payment
The city is bristling again. As the gates of the World Expo open to welcome the world, Dubai stands on the cusp of reinventing itself once again for the future, increasingly asserting its importance in the world of commerce and life. As asset prices rebound
A distinctive feature of Dubai’s freehold boom was that a great many people began to think of the property market as a place that welcomed, empowered and informed outsiders. The real estate industry, in this ideological phantasm, became the medium in which one discovered freedom
In Dubai, the real harbinger of things to come was neither the World Trade Center landmark in the 1970s, nor even the iconic Emirates Towers and Burj Al Arab prior to the freehold boom. It is the asphalt passages that crisscrossed the city – and
Emaar and Nakheel may well have been the first mass developers of real estate in the region, but globally that accolade first went to Realty Associates in New York, which by the early 1920s was marketing itself as ‘The largest homebuilders in the world’. At
Of all the dignitaries at the opening of the New York World Fair on April 10, 1939 – President Roosevelt, Albert Einstein and New York Mayor LaGuardia – none spoke more grandiloquently than Grover Whalen, otherwise known as ‘Mr. New York’. He had worked tirelessly
