Fear and Money in Dubai

Fear and Money in Dubai is a piece of work by Mike Davis. Mike Davis is a US urban studies scholar who is very famous. Davis in his piece of work exposed a hidden part of Dubai which has never ever been seen behind the amusements in Dubai and the tasteless hotels which are found in Dubai. Davis thinks that Dubai is not economically free country because he thinks that only the true champions of a free market. He argued that Dubai was not a free country because all the wealth which was found in Dubai was not from the hard work from the local people’s abilities and entrepreneur skills but he believed that the wealth in Dubai was as a result of the people who lived there being very lucky by being born with very many gifts from God and they were able to learn how to suck them out and even sell them.

Davis compared Dubai with the Russian dolls where he described it to be bright, shiny, and its ability to increase in its geometrical progression where it was unknown to anyone on the number of the skyscrapers that it was going to hatch in the future. Dubai is a city within a city because it operates independently as in independent economic entity with its own set of rules and regulations. In this piece of work, it was very ironical because most of the slights which Davis applied to Dubai were originally from his own past backyard in California and Los Angeles. This is so because he failed to explore all the reality which he subsidized with his own vehicular excesses where he got shocked in finding the petrodollar excesses in Dubai.

Davis in his writing conveyed how he was really uneasy around all the big Dubai projects like the gated residential communities and the Dubailand although some of these models were derived from his backyard back in South California. Davis brought out Dubai as a fake city as compared to all the other cities since it did not exhibit a growth rate which was normal. The internet city, the grotesque architectures, and then media city were immodest, obnoxious, loud, and very ugly according to Davis. Davis argued that Dubai, which is one of the world’s biggest oil producing country, an international oil distributer, and an acting middleman between the Islamic Militant groups and the West commonly use fear as the stable currency so as to fund all the building sites of the country.

Davis in his article wrote that Dubai was like a brand which has done a great job in advertising itself as a city which has no slow down with its leader al-Maktoum who is the ruler of Dubai. He believes that the brand might have a possibility of being reconsidered by other foreign investors. Dubai has its own religion which is unprecedented and is a religion of fear which drives all the layers of the Dubai society where the slave like workers are forced to work out of the fear of the power that their employers have and on the other hand, the employers also have the fear that they might lose their absolute power which has caused the employers in most cases to ignore all the labor regulations and replacing them with Draconian laws which are local laws.

All the perspectives of Davis mostly resided in a larger post-urbanism critique which is better understood as cities are seen to create more appetites other than solve the existing problems. This is seen when Davis analyzed the city of Dubai where the surface mirage blinded him and he was able to reveal the fact that Dubai was very ambitious in creating appetites for more tourists who in actual sense hadn’t considered the alternative of visiting the Middle East and they also solved the problems of the unskilled and the skilled workers who had been affected by political strives in their own countries where they were offered a better life in Dubai as compared to the life back at their home countries.