Anne Applebaum: The New World in Dubai

Anne Applebaum is an op-ed columnist for the WaPo.

Foreigners visiting New York or Chicago in the 19th century often came away with conflicting feelings. Some found American cities ugly by comparison to their European counterparts: They seemed vulgar, blatantly commercial, lacking in taste. The natives had higher living standards but they were crude, and the ethnic mix — German, Irish, Italian, Jewish — was terrifying....

I thought about those old visions of urban America while strolling not long ago through the Marina, a neighborhood in “new” Dubai (as opposed to “old” Dubai, mostly constructed in the 1970s). The architects were hired in 1999, and the first phase was finished in 2004; soon, the Marina will contain 120,000 people, along with hotels, restaurants, yacht moorings, shopping malls and canals, meant to remind visitors of Venice. It might go bankrupt — it has once already; Dubai is plagued by real estate bubbles — but dozens of brand-new skyscrapers, some still with their scaffolding around them, are nevertheless pushing upward around the Persian Gulf.

The Marina, to a jaded American eye, is incurably vulgar. So is the rest of the city. There is almost no evidence of history or local culture. International brand names, from Applebees to Rolex, are plastered everywhere. Everything is imported, from the raw fish at Nobu to the coffee at Starbucks. In Abu Dhabi, the emirate down the road, they’ve bought the names “Louvre” and “Guggenheim” and are constructing museums to match. I am instinctively appalled — how can you buy the Louvre? — but perhaps visiting Europeans once felt the same way about Henry Frick’s New York mansion and the Old Masters within it....