Making of a Global Port-City in the Middle East: The Dubai Model
The abundance of literature on port geography is mainly concerned about the Western developed world and some limited cases of the Asian and African ports. The available theories and models, as well as empirical studies are therefore based on these two pol
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Making of a Global Port-City in the Middle East: The Dubai Model
4.1 Dubai Model: A Laboratory for Port-City Development Studies Since its founding in the early nineteenth century, Dubai has developed with an unprecedented pace to emerge as the main trading hub in Middle Eastern region, as well as a major global player. Strategically located along the south eastern coast of the Persian Gulf—200 km south west of the Strait of Hormoz1 —between Abu Dhabi and Sharjah (Fig. 4.1), Dubai with a current land area of approximately 4000 km2 and over 2.8 million population (year 2019) is the second largest city estate among the seven emirates of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Since 1950, Dubai population grew about 100 times from a small town of 20 thousand inhabitants to about 2 million inhabitants by 2010, while its urban built space extended rapidly 400 times approximately (Government of Dubai n.d.). Starting from its formal creation in 1971, and thanks to the wealth brought by the oil income, United Arab Emirates has been growing with an unprecedented speed, to mark itself as one of the fastest developing nations, while currently it accounts for the second largest economy in the Arab World (after Saudi Arabia). The oil revenues heavily, invested in the so-called branded mega-projects (Ponzini 2011), has led to particular urbanization patterns, especially in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. As outlined in the introduction of this book, UAE and its major emirates, mainly Dubai and its rapid urbanization and construction boom has drawn great attention from researchers in varied disciplines, especially with respect to other Arab States of the Middle East; in this regards, architects, urban planners and designers have shown particular interest in the development strategies applied by the emirates, to boost business, real estate, tourism and trade (among others Acuto 2010, 2014; Bagaeen 2007). Though some scholars have made attempts to study the importance of trade 1 Strait
of Hormoz is the only sea passage from Persian Gulf to the open ocean and a vital transit point for world crude oil. With around 35% of the petroleum traded by sea passing through this straight, it is considered as an important strategic location for international trade.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 M. Akhavan, Port Geography and Hinterland Development Dynamics, PoliMI SpringerBriefs, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52578-1_4
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4 Making of a Global Port-City in the Middle East: The Dubai Model
Fig. 4.1 Satellite image of the Persian Gulf. Source Elaborated by the author, base image from Google Earth
and logistics in Dubai’s making (Fernandes and Rodrigues 2009; Keshavarzian 2010; Thorpe and Mitra 2011; Ziadah 2018), only recently a very limited number of studies have actually considered Dubai as a ‘port-city’ (Akhavan 2017; Broeze 1999; Jacobs and Hall 2007; Ramos 2010; Sigler 2013) and yet still we know little about the interaction between its maritime ports and the city itself. In this chapter, I s
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