The very rich, but temporary, city

There's an interesting opinion piece about Dubai in the New York Times, questioning whether (or perhaps, how easily) the city may recover after losing its "luxury safe haven enclave" status abruptly in the current war.

A few extracts:

Nearly nine in 10 Dubai residents are nonnationals — by far the highest percentage of any major city in the world. Across the Emirates as a whole, about 10 million of 11.4 million residents are foreign nationals. Many are from Britain or the United States, but many more are guest workers who do the service jobs on which the city depends and typically come from South Asia, Southeast Asia and the wider Middle East. Even a traffic violation can trigger deportation. Citizenship is based almost entirely on descent; it’s been intentionally made very difficult for even long-term foreign residents or their children to become Emirati, even after decades of living and working there. The system is designed to rely on migrants while keeping them permanently temporary. That makes it extremely hard to be rooted, to belong, to be attached.

And so it is a city of flows — organized around an airport that connects thousands of routes and a free-trade port that channels global shipping. It is a hub focused on attracting people and their money and providing opportunities to make and spend more money.

For a time, that model worked exceedingly well. Dubai grew from about 917,000 residents in 2000 to nearly four million today, roughly quadrupling its population in a quarter-century — one of the fastest growth spurts of any major city on earth. It has climbed into the top ranks of global financial centers, now around 11th in the leading indexes and serving as the main hub for finance across the Middle East, Africa and South Asia.

It is home to more than 81,000 millionaires (a number that more than doubled between 2014 and 2024), including over 200 centimillionaires and 20 billionaires. In 2025 alone, an estimated 9,800 millionaires were projected to move to the Emirates, bringing some $63 billion in personal wealth — more than any other city in the world. Dubai now sits just behind New York and London and ahead of established global cities like Tokyo, Singapore, Zurich, Paris, Frankfurt, Los Angeles and Chicago in its ability to attract global white-collar talent, based on LinkedIn data covering more than a billion knowledge workers worldwide.

And the Dubai model is spreading. Other cities — including Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Istanbul; Miami; and Doha, Qatar — are attempting to adopt some variation on the same basic formula to compete for the same class.

But that duplication also means these cities can be replaceable. If one falters, another steps up to take its place. The elites can flit among them, because any real attachment they feel lies elsewhere...

And this paragraph sums it up:

The Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh argued recently that Dubai would survive the current turmoil precisely because, even if there have been people living there for hundreds of years, “the bit the world tends to see might be the closest thing on earth to a blank slate.” Such a place makes no demands on your identity or your loyalty, echoing the urbanist James Howard Kunstler’s idea of the geography of nowhere. And yet that could be its fatal flaw: The very quality that makes it useful is what makes it ultimately disposable.