Dubai renames world’s tallest building to Burj Khalifa

On the day of its official opening, the world’s new tallest building the Burj Dubai has been renamed to Burj Khalifa. The new name honours the president of the UAE and the ruler of neighbouring emirate Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al Nahyan ("Burj" means tower in Arabic). The renaming shows that despite Dubai’s glittering exterior, it is now totally reliant on the oil wealth of Abu Dhabi to see it survive the financial crisis. Sheik Khalifa’s multi-billion-dollar bailout in November helped Dubai's biggest developer avoid a potentially disastrous debt default.

The official height of the astonishingly tall building was a closely guarded secret until yesterday when it was formally announced as 828m (2,716 feet). The building’s owner Emaar Properties flashed the announcement onto a giant screen during a spectacular fireworks and water show. 400,000 people watched on as fireworks cascaded from the tower's spire to the base and lasers blazed out from all levels. It was here the name change was also announced. The Burj Khalifa is a mixed use development which will house residential apartments, offices, and an Armani hotel. The tower’s first tenants will be moving in next month.

Burj Khalifa is the tallest building in the world according to the three main criteria of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH). The CTBUH ranks the world’s tallest buildings based on ‘Height to Architectural Top,’ ‘Height to Highest Occupied Floor’ and ‘Height to Tip’. Burj Khalifa is 320 metres taller than the 508m Taipei 101, which had held the record for the world’s tallest building measured to the architectural top since 2004. The Burj is also the world's tallest structure surpassing the 630m KVLY-TV mast in North Dakota, USA. The tower also beats the 31-year-old record of Toronto’s CN Tower, which had been the world’s tallest free-standing structure on land since 1976 standing at 553m.

The vital statistics for the new building are hugely impressive. It took 22 million man hours to build. It has 200 stories using the world’s fastest lifts which travel at 18 metres a second (64 kph). It uses 330,000 cubic metres of concrete, 39,000 metric tonnes of steel reinforcing bar and 142,000 square metres of glass in 26,000 windows. An Australian company Cox Gomyl has won the contract to clean them all. Dale Harding from Cox Gomyl has no doubt about the scale of the project his company is taking on "It's an amazing building, people focus on the height of the building,” he said. “But really the breadth and width of the building is just huge when you're standing next to it."

But Blair Kamin in the Chicago Tribune wasn’t so excited by the new building; he was more upset by the impacts of the sudden name change. He says the t-shirts and caps for sale in the skyscraper's observatory and gift shop emblazoned with Burj Dubai are now outmoded on the first day that the observatory is opening to the public. The district in which the skyscraper is located is called "Downtown Burj Dubai” and is identified as such on road signs and maps. He also says the tower's owners just spent $2 million on Burj Dubai uniforms for security and hotel personnel. “How much will it cost to change the uniforms?” he asked “Or might it be easier to put patches on the uniforms that cover up "Burj Dubai" and say "Burj Khalifa" instead?”

Kamin says Dubai's leaders must have known that problems like this were coming when they agreed to the name change to the Abu Dhabi leader who bailed them out of their debt crisis. He said they were so desperate that they had no choice. This may be true. But it may also be true that Dubai’s rulers are truly grateful for Abu Dhabi’s intervention. Without Khalifa’s billions, Dubai would have been in such strife, that yesterday’s opening would have resembled a funeral rather than a celebration. The opening of the Burj Khalifa will certainly be a major psychological boost to the troubled emirate. Changing t-shirts, uniforms and street signs is a small price to pay for survival.

Dubai teetering on the brink of financial collapse

Dubai markets have collapsed on the first day of local trading since the collapse of the state-owned Dubai World conglomerate. There was no trading last week in Dubai because of the Eid al-Adha festival and analysts had predicting carnage when the exchange opened for the first time since the crisis broke. They have not been proven wrong. According to Al Jazeera's Dan Nolan the financial indicators are “all flashing red” and the main bourse dropped 5.6 per cent instantly. Major securities in the construction and banking sectors fell to almost the 10 per cent maximum allowed. And the Nakheel property developer at the centre of Dubai World’s problems took its bonds off the Dubai and Nasdaq stock exchanges. (photo credit: Joi)

The meltdown followed the reaction of markets around the world which fell on Thursday after the Dubai government requested a debt standstill. The government's investment arm, Dubai World, asked investors for extra time to make its debt payments. The conglomerate known as “Dubai's flag bearer in global investments” is now $60bn in debt and has sought a six-month moratorium on repayments. This amount is greater than Dubai’s GDP meaning that the Gulf emirate is now officially bust and the construction boom economy that turned Dubai into an international business powerhouse has collapsed spectacularly.

The Dubai news sent shockwaves through world markets. The emirate was already in a bad way having borrowed $80 billion to fuel the boom. In the global recession investors are now deserting Dubai in droves as it becomes "toxic". Profits have declined and assets are worth a fraction of the inflated boom prices paid. Dubai's ruler Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum has been feeling the pressure of the crisis. The Al Maktoum family has run the emirate since 1833 and brooks no criticism of its rule. He told journalists to “shut up” last week when they questioned him about tensions between Dubai and the other senior emirate partner Abu Dhabi.

There was more blatant media censorship yesterday. Authorities removed yesterday’s London Sunday Times from circulation featured a double-page spread graphic illustrating Al Maktoum sinking in a sea of debt. An executive of the paper in Dubai said The National Media Council ordered the paper blocked by distributors without providing a reason. UAE's media code prohibits publications from criticising the emirs and local media slammed international press coverage of the debt crisis.

International markets were calmed after the UAE’s Central Bank offered to stand behind Dubai World’s debts. Abu Dhabi's emir, Khalifa bin Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, who is also president of the UAE, has said his government will bail out his debt-laden neighbour. Later this week, the Emirates Government will announce a rescue package. This will underwrite payment of a $4 billion bond for Nakheel, Dubai World's real estate developer, which matures in two weeks.

However Abu Dhabi may extract a high price for bailing out Dubai. It could take over lucrative assets such as the Emirates airline, Dubai ports business and the International Financial Centre. It may also seek to impose stricter Islamic standards on acceptable public behaviour. Abu Dhabi always looked askance at Dubai’s ostentatious wealth which was based on a brash culture of borrowing and exploitation of cheap labour. Without Abu Dhabi’s oil, Dubai launched an ambitious strategy of economic growth which turned an Arab fishing village into a global trading metropolis in 30 years.

Meanwhile the government lured construction workers from India, Pakistan and China with promises of big wages. They arrived in their hundreds of thousands only to find they were indentured, had their passports confiscated on arrival, hit with huge "fees" for their travel and accommodation and attacked by police if they had the temerity to strike for better conditions. They were also forced to live in slum conditions hidden away from the ostentatious wealth of the city. As Johann Hari in the Huffington Post wrote, Dubai is “a dictatorship based on slaves”. Abu Dhabi may bail its sister city out now, but as Hari says “there is no Bank of Morality that could provide a bailout for this sinister mirage in the desert.”

The National: Abu Dhabi English language newspaper's test of independence

The wealthy United Arab Emirate of Abu Dhabi is the home of a brave new experiment in Middle Eastern media: an English language newspaper that promises editorial independence from its royal family owners. The National published its first edition on 17 April to close scrutiny in the Arab world. On Monday, Deputy editor Hassan M. Fattah, told his former employers The New York Times that there would be no government ministers in his office telling him what to write. “Being government-owned does not equal being government-run,” he said.

Some of the paper's early issues seem to back up Fattah’s claim with reports on the city’s accommodation crisis, overcrowded schools and hospitals turning away critically ill patients. However many observers are doubtful the National will be able to maintain its independent stance in a part of the world not renowned for its press freedoms. Until September 2007, journalists who wrote critical stories in the United Arab Emirates could be jailed for defamation, and the country also recently signed on to an Arab League broadcast charter asking media not to offend governments in the region. Neighbouring Qatar-based Al Jazeera hit out at the charter as a “risk to the freedom of expression in the Arab world”.

However the charter does not yet apply to newspapers such as The National. The paper’s owners, the newly formed Abu Dhabi Media Company, is a diversified government-owned media conglomerate with interests in TV, radio, magazines and Arab language newspapers. They unveiled the newspaper in a glittering event at the Emirates Palace Hotel attended by the most important members of the Abu Dhabi royalty that rules the emirate. The chairman of Abu Dhabi Media Company Mohamed Khalaf Al Mazrouei told the elite gathering that The National “was born out of a vision that recognises the key role that a free, professional and enlightened press plays in the national development process."

The newspaper’s first editor-in-chief is Martin Newland, formerly of London’s Daily Telegraph and Canada’s National Post. He sits at the head of 200 journalists mostly ex-Telegraph employees and also from other British and American newspapers and magazines, including The New Yorker. Before the launch, Newland spoke to the Guardian of his thrill to be launching a national newspaper at a late stage in his career. “If truth be told, it is also a late stage of the career of newspapers themselves for an event of this kind to be occurring,” he said. “I cannot imagine many parts of the world where anyone would think of embarking on such a project."

But while newspapers may be in decline elsewhere, The National is at the crest of a wave of new publishing ventures in the United Arab Emirates. There are currently eight English newspapers and five major Arabic newspapers in the UAE and that number is rapidly growing. The National itself reported that the 30-year-old Khaleej Times (Dubai’s English language paper will soon announce a publishing partnership with the New Times Company’s International Herald Tribune. Meanwhile the UK based Financial Times launched a bi-weekly Middle East edition this Tuesday based in Abu Dhabi with a branch office in Dubai. These ventures follow the UAE-based Arab Media Group December 2007 launch of Emirates Business 24/7, the Middle East's first English-language daily dedicated to business and economic news.

The cause of the media explosion in this part of the gulf can be traced to the country’s exponential economic growth in real estate, government and financial sectors. These in turn have generated massive increases in advertising spend. Ad spend in the UAE increased from $869 million in 2005 to $1.3 billion in 2007, the highest in the Middle East, according to the 2007 Advertising Spend Report of Pan Arab Research Centre. Of this around two thirds went to Arabic and English newspapers.

The newspaper growth is part of a drive for Abu Dhabi (the national capital) to come out of the shadow of its flashier Dubai relative and establish itself as a cultural hub of the Middle East. Abu Dhabi's urban planners are determined not to repeat the mistakes of Dubai's unchecked growth and erosion of local heritage and instead are channelling its massive wealth into the creation of a new cultural and entertainment oasis in the desert. Abu Dhabi is set to become home to branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums while the prestigious Sorbonne university is opening a campus. The city is also getting a new opera house.

Editor Martin Newland sees a major role for The National in this cultural shift. He said he wanted the paper to “reflect society, help that society evolve and, perhaps most importantly, promote the bedrock traditions and virtues that must be preserved even in times of change.” A healthy share of the $1.3 billion ad revenues would help Newland’s cause immensely.