In Dubai, and within the UMPs-based planning approach, UMPs could be considered as one particular form of planning instruments among the large arsenal of instruments deployed by its planning regime in order to produce the adequate urban form, dynamics and facilities that allow the city to embrace globalization while maintaining a strict control of its development and (re)distribution of its resources. As we have seen in previous chapters, this arsenal includes, among others, strategic planning, regulatory, fiscal, facility and infrastructure creation, networking and communication instruments. However, the UMPs as planning instruments seem to hold a central role in this approach.
This role is quite complex and ensures many of the assets behind this approach. Mainly, it can be said that:
• UMPs are considered as the ultimate tool for significantly and rapidly extending the city’s boundaries. UMPs constitute a way to develop, through a single project, hundreds of hectares.
• UMPs are the essential instrument that marks the ‘globalized’ image of the city, through spectacle and fascination architecture and urban design.
• UMPs provide the main facilities and necessary functions for the implementation of international and regional headquarters of large firms in Dubai.
• UMPs are also a form of development that could serve as vehicles for diverse investments in different sectors, representing a considerable vector of economic development.
The assets of this instrument are however undermined by challenges to its capacity to articulate with other planning instruments. UMPs are in fact to a large extent self-standing autonomous: socio-spatial fragments with their own stakeholders, financial processes, spatial forms and temporalities. They are also first and foremost financial investments for large parastatal and private actors implicated/integrated in global financial markets. Hence, UMPs might relate/be exposed more to global processes and fluxes than to local ones. But at the same time, UMPs depend for their success – at least as financial investments – on local conditions: e.g. good city infrastructure, the sustainability of Dubai as an attractive destination for work and leisure, a minimum stability of real-estate markets, etc. By using UMPs as an instrument in Dubai’s planning and development, policymakers are constantly challenged to strike the right balance between regulation and laissez-faire and articulate this instrument to other instruments. In the following we look into these challenges by focusing on the cases of two instruments: infrastructure development and strategic planning.
The tension between UMPs and infrastructure development could be illustrated through the case of the RTA, the authority for roads and transport, and the way it develops new roads and highways to service potential developments. Two opposite situations could be identified. One arises when a highway becomes unused or its construction is stalled because developers were not capable of bringing their projects to completion, a situation that was especially common following the 2008 crisis. The other is when projects develop with a need for road infrastructure that RTA fails to provide.
Indeed, in an interview with professionals in RTA, they explained how they adopt a ‘wait and see’ stance regarding the development of UMPs. Building infrastructure in Dubai is very costly. During and after the 2008 financial crisis many projects were stalled, downsized or re-phased. This had a significant impact on road construction. In Dubai’s system, the RTA is responsible for building national and secondary roads, while local roads within developments are part of the developer’s responsibility. With many of the stalled megaprojects, the RTA had already completed the construction of roads intended to serve the future development.
Fig 3.3:Roads put on hold around cancelled or stalled UMPs
Such outcomes are deemed abortive investments for RTA. This is what had led it to proceed by stages as the RTA waits to be sure that the developer is capable of delivering his projects, and the road network expands only following the completion of individual construction phases. Many of the stalled or not-yet-commenced megaprojects are located well outside Dubai’s existing urban limits, and it is this that explains why there are so many roads that have still not got beyond the drawing board (see fig 3.3).
Tension between strategic planning in Dubai and UMPs’ development is also significant.
The general dissatisfaction among those who favour a strategic planning based approach to developing the city relates, among other things, to the minor roles that these strategic and city master plans are having in reality. For years now, strategic plans have been continuously and rapidly changing with each plan replaced by a new one. In that UMPs play a major role (see fig 3.4).
The planning tools existing before the real estate boom in Dubai have proven inadequate to keep up with the quick urban transformation of the city, and the complexity of procedures adopted by UMPs. Two contradictory logics mark the attitude of Dubai Municipality facing the uncontrolled UMP-based development.
Fig 3.4:Palm Jebel Ali, Palm Jumeirah and The World Islands, built starting in 2005.
However they were not planned in Dubai Structure plan 2003. They were included in Dubai 2020, prepared in 2012 (Source:Google Earth)
At the strategic plan level, the Municipality’s position has changed and evolved over time.
It has adopted two different positions. First, it tried to include the already built UMPs in the city’s adopted strategic plans ex post facto. Then it adopted a ‘go with the flow’ attitude, committing certain lands for special development, or in other words, for UMPs. Even this second approach is more reactive than proactive. In fact dozens of planned UMPs are promoted before their construction, in locations across almost the entire area of the emirate.
The developers of these planned UMPs are usually well known and are most often the same parastatals that are developing other UMPs. This aspect forces the Municipality not only to include built UMPs in its plans but also many planned ones. This reveals flexibility towards developers and a will to facilitate and encourage new developments.
The second logic, opposite to the first one, is rejection by the Municipality of the idea of UMPs as a development tool. This came after the 2008 crisis and can be noticed mainly in the Dubai 2020 document that suggests that the uncontrolled trend toward the spread of UMPs across the Emirate has generated fragmented development, unexpected infrastructure costs and trivial competition and duplication of uses between various megaprojects. Its main recommendation, however, is to proceed by in-fill development on the un-built lands scattered between megaprojects. In other words, UMP-based expansion has not been prohibited, but a serious review of the way they are done is recommended. Even with such a recommendation, now considered the main basis of urban planning principles, a new artificial island emerged facing Dubai Marina just after the document was issued. This new UMP was not included in the 2020 Dubai Urban Masterplan (see fig 3.5). It is clear that the
balance between official municipal planning and an urban development through UMPs driven by the agenda of developers is still tilted toward the latter.
Fig 3.5:A new artificial islands (Bluewaters Island) hosting ‘Dubai Eye’ opposite Dubai Marina. It was not planned in Dubai 2020 Masterplan. (Source: respectively,
www.meeras.com and Google Earth)
In both cases – infrastructure planning and strategic planning – tension with UMPs as planning instruments comes from the fact that they stem from a different rationality regarding what urban planning and development are and how they should operate.
Infrastructure planning and strategic planning are long term processes closely tied to
government’s political choices and budget. They rely on thorough data, regarding existing physical, social and economic conditions, coming from a large variety of institutions and compiled by the bureaucracy. They interact closely with other existing planning instruments (fiscal, real-estate market organization, etc.) and are usually conceived in articulation with them. To the opposite, UMPs are short or mid-term investments, linked to financial markets and opportunities and led by parastatals and private actors. It is these discrepancies in temporality, nature of actors and operational modes that bring this tension. In order to deal with these tensions and discrepancies, UMPs as instruments have developed what could be called mitigation capacities. The latter are of substantive and procedural nature and are explored closely in the next part through the case of Dubai Marina UMP.