The Financial Times—“Dubai: A trade to ply”

From the lede:

Old Dubai” evokes the bustling area around the Creek, where the Gulf emirate’s commercial tradition began, with dhows plying their trade with eastern ports and merchants haggling in the souks.

But in the wake of a global financial crisis that hit the city-state hard, old Dubai has come to represent something deeper – a longing for a return to roots, to the basic businesses that transformed it from sleepy fishing village to flourishing port town.

Strategically located between Africa, the Middle East and Asia, Dubai has long thrived as a trade hub. Many residents now hark back to the Dubai they knew before the city became obsessed with real estate. The frenzied development of apartment blocks, malls and business parks dazzled the world – before the property market collapsed and, along with the impact of the global turbulence, left the emirate with more than $110bn (€87bn; £72bn) of debt.

Al Maktoum International Airport appears a neat case study of all this. It opened last week with a solitary runway and cargo terminal. Windswept desert stretches around the 140 sq km complex, dotted with camels and industrial estates. Rather like the seaport developments in the 1970s, the airport seems impossibly ambitious: within 20 years it plans to add four runways and four terminals to serve more passengers than London and Atlanta combined.

Sceptics only have to look across the desert littoral of Dubai, where clusters of half-constructed tower blocks stand as embarrassing monuments to the misguided belief that property booms can last forever. Yet the airport is a prime example of Dubai reverting to the sounder economic foundations of trade, aviation, tourism and logistics – its economic drivers before the doomed love affair with property began in 2003.