The sight of smoke rising between skyscrapers has shaken one of the Gulf’s most stable hubs, where construction and real estate sectors have thrived on perceived insulation from conflict, writes Building’s reporter Daniel Gayne
In January this year, I took a short train from Tottenham to Stansted airport and got on a flight to Dubai.
The journey took me over a fistful of countries that have experienced violent sectarian conflicts within living memory and deposited me on a peninsula with a civil war raging at its southern tip and a well-armed but increasingly unstable nation across the narrow gulf to its north.
But, despite these constant reminders of violence, I never felt my personal safety was at risk.
All of us know the world is full of chaos and fire and death. But, for most reading this, that is a reality that exists largely outside of our own. We move between spaces that we imagine to be separate, safe.
Despite an influential role in a region riven by conflict, the UAE and its Gulf neighbours have for a long time thrived on an assumption that they were part of this world of safety
Despite an influential role in a region riven by conflict, the UAE and its Gulf neighbours have for a long time thrived on an assumption that they were part of this world of safety – somehow insulated from the conflict that encircles them.
It is an assumption that may not have survived the past weekend.
After an extraordinary attack on Iran by the United States and Israel, the Islamic republic responded by expanding the conflict to American allies in the region, with heavy bombardment of several countries.
While the several tragic deaths in the Gulf are yet to match the scale of more than 150 people, including children, killed in the bombing of a girls’ school in southern Iran, the image of black smoke rising between the glass and steel skyline of Dubai was nonetheless among the most striking of the weekend.
It is shocking, not because of the severity of the destruction, but because it marks another sudden expansion of chaos and violence into parts of the world that had maintained the fragile illusion of separateness and safety.
I find myself cast in a similar role to those people who, after 9/11, thought back to their recent business trips to New York. The event seems impossible to square with the place as you experienced it. It is not so much “it could have been me” as “could it really have been there?”
The piece that I had travelled to Dubai to report on was about an Emirati developer, Arada, which has recently established itself in the London market. That article will be published soon and I had planned to write a companion piece looking at the opportunities for UK built environment firms in the Middle East, having interviewed quite a few people to get their views.
But, in the light of this weekend, it is unclear how many of their assumptions still hold. Construction consultancies with offices and staff in the region have told Building they are monitoring the situation carefully. The immediate priority is people’s safety and supporting those who are stranded after airlines cancelled flights to and from the region.
Potentially, the UK government will have to organise a mass evacuation of some 300,000 of its citizens who are in the region on holidays or for business. At the same time, companies will be assessing the risks to their clients’ projects and their own business exposure to longer-term disruption, rapidly pulling together different scenarios and corresponding mitigation plans.
Few people choose to live under a ballistic missile siege if they have no strong loyalty to the place in question
Before all of this, Dubai was a maturing real estate market in the midst of a residential boom, drawing in a moneyed crowd attracted by its low taxes and supposed high quality of living. Saudi, meanwhile, had ample commercial opportunities despite reports of a pullback on some of its more ambitious schemes.
How this will be affected by the current conflict remains to be seen – no doubt it will depend on how long it lasts and to what extent the Gulf states are drawn into it as active participants. But, once the assumption of invulnerability has vanished, it is difficult to get it back.
The risk of bombing might not have occurred to those previously drawn to live in Dubai, but it certainly will for the would-be expats of the future and their highly mobile wealth. Few people choose to live under a ballistic missile siege if they have no strong loyalty to the place in question. Likewise, there is a question around how much British engineering firms will be keen to continue their involvement in Saudi infrastructure projects if they continue to be bombarded by Iran.
How strange it seems now that so many people I spoke to unfavourably compared the UK’s political circus and unpredictable planning environment to the smooth authoritarianism of the Gulf. That is not to say that this is any cause for smugness. If this conflict is prolonged, Britain’s public and its construction industry will feel it too.
This decade has already seen unpleasant glimpses of a world where shipping and oil production are choked off, leading to inflationary pressures. But beyond this, the lesson of the bombing of the Gulf is that none of the seemingly safe places we move between are truly separate from a world of ever more impulsive and uncontrolled violence.
This is an era of endemic crises, in which states, businesses and hapless trade journalists are required to swallow fresh disasters before they have had any chance to digest the previous one
Nobody is beyond the reach of everybody’s ICBMs and the sight of fires burning between skyscrapers is an uneasy omen.
After covid and the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the second election of Donald Trump, it has become common to hear people refer to a “new normal”, to which all must get accustomed. “The world is not as it was, and we need to get used to it,” the argument went.
But recent events undermine this emerging consensus. There is no new normal. This is an era of endemic crises, in which states, businesses and hapless trade journalists are required to swallow fresh disasters before they have had any chance to digest the previous one.
If a weekend’s worth of current events is enough to undermine a journalist’s angle on the market prospects of a country or a region, one wonders where international businesses – or statesmen, for that matter – even begin to plot a course.
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