Dubai inaugurates one-building ‘City’

Dubai inaugurates one-building ‘City’

As signs that the economy is picking up become more obvious, Kipp wonders whether a one-building city might be a step too far

October 28, 2010 1:14 by shafeer

Kipp knows Dubai is no normal city; what with its steroid-induced growth, glamorously bad credit record and love for flashy world records. Puzzled at first, then a little queasy, we’ve gotten used to the idiosyncrasies. We’re shrugging our shoulders at the latest Dubai-ism in the news, and sighing, ‘Well, that’s Dubai’. Yet one of the few things that just leaves us stumped – through property announcement after property announcement – is the city’s penchant for creating cities within itself.

You know what we are talking about: a couple of residential and commercial buildings thrown together and wrapped up with the status of being a city, or perhaps just a village. From the relatively recent Motor City, Academic City, Studio City, Internet City, FalconCity of Wonders (tell us about it) to the pioneers in Dubai’s city/village-genre of developments, Knowledge Village and Media City.

Perhaps it all started with Global Village, during the city’s first ever Shopping Festival in 1996. But ‘Global Village’ is an actual academic term popularized by Canadian mass communication theorist Marshall McLuhan in the sixties when studies on multiculturalism were still in their infancy. So branding your retail-version of multiculturalism under one tent is just plain smart, not to mention awesome because it pays homage to one of the finest thinkers of mass communication theory of our times.

It seems the logic of wise naming of property developments ended with the Global Village, but the silly habit of classifying developments as cities and villages stuck on. A And now, in possibly the best symbol for what Dubai post-recession is, Gulf News reports the inauguration of yet another city called – wait for it – Business City. (How did it take them so long to come up with this one, you ask?)

But get this; Business City consists of just one building.

The one-building Business City, will help business interact with the Dubai Economic Department as they have easy access to various services from the building, including business registration and licensing. But it has us wondering if this is what Dubai-isms post-recession will look like? Either way, what can we say, but just when you thought you saw it all…