The Dubai Effect

In Aerotropolis, I describe what might be called the “Dubai Effect,” i.e. the emirate’s overbuilding during the boom for a transient population of millions who inhabit the city only a few fleeting moments at a time. Rem Koolhaas realized it first:

The architect Rem Koolhaas barely came to grips with this while designing Waterfront City, Nakheel’s abandoned city within a city within a city (and the collateral on Dubai World’s debt). “There is a weird alternation between density and emptiness,” he confessed. “You rarely feel you are designing for people who are actually there but for communities that have yet to be assembled.” He learned that its “density is virtual. Almost everybody who lives in Dubai also lives somewhere else . . . The actual inhabitation of the city is a fraction of its maximum capacity.”

Now the trend toward “absenteeism” has gone global:

“The more money you have, the more rootless you become because everything is possible,” says Jeremy Davidson, a property consultant who specialises in properties that cost £10m or more in the most sought-after postcodes in London.

“I have clients who wake up in the morning and say, ‘Let’s go to Venice for lunch.’ If you’ve got that sort of money the world becomes a very small place. They tend to have a diminished sense of place, of where their roots are,” he says.

This increasingly global lifestyle has led to the stateless super-rich buying a larger portion of the world’s most expensive homes as they look to park their wealth in perceived havens. On average they own four to five properties, usually consisting of two in their country of principal residence, one in a “global city” such as London, Paris or New York, and a holiday home in a hot climate – or one in the Alps.