A ‘new paradigm’ built on sand
At Dubai’s soaring, spurious peak, one factoid the emirate’s bling-burdened battalion of ‘corporate communications consultants’ liked to slip to junketing media was that Dubai had the world’s densest concentration of cranes. Impossible to verify but too good to ignore, the glib observation almost always made it into media reports. It compelled people to want to go where the action was: subliminally, it suggested an economy where the fast buck came easy.
And it certainly seemed true from the spas of Dubai’s ‘seven-star’ hotels, rising over a city-state-as-building-site which was also constructing that contrived archipelago for Premier League millionaires and their ilk. One towering temple to the Al-Maktoum clan’s ‘vision’ was so tall — or so it was often said, over flutes of Cristal at the China Moon champagne bar — that its Pakistani crane operator slept in the cabin nearly a kilometre up because to descend to ground level took so long and ate into his overtime earnings.
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