Nerd’s Eye View: Nine things you need to know about Dubai

1. With a population of 4 million, and as many as 6 million in the wider metropolitan area, Dubai is the largest city in the United Arab Emirates and the capital of the emirate of Dubai. That population has doubled in the last 15 years, and quadrupled in the last 25. As recently as 1968, Dubai was home to fewer than 59,000 people – roughly on a par with Gravesend.

2. Just two centuries ago, in fact, Dubai was little more than a pearling and fishing village on a creek off the Persian Gulf. For a century and a half after 1820, today’s UAE was a group of tribal confederations known as the Trucial States, which used the Indian rupee as de facto currency because it was a protectorate in the – oh good – British empire. The UAE – a federation of seven emirates, including Dubai and its capital, Abu Dhabi – formed three months after independence in 1971.

3. Since then, the emirate has consciously moved to diversify an economy previously based on fishing and frankly not very much oil. In 2004, the city established the Dubai International Finance Centre, a special economic zone intended to turn the city into the major financial hub for the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. A combination of tourism and being a convenient place to change planes mean that, since 2024, the city has also been home to the world’s busiest airport by international passenger traffic, too.

4. The big driver of that population growth, though, has been immigration: an estimated 92% of the city’s population are immigrants (or, as some of those with the bigger bank accounts prefer to think of themselves, “ex-pats”). Relatively few of these arrivals look like the sort of influencers you’re most likely to encounter on Instagram, or the famously patriotic Westminster WAG Isabel Oakeshott: as much as three-quarters of the city’s population hails from the Indian subcontinent.

5. Many of these migrants are construction or domestic workers there under the restrictive kafala work-permit system, which ties workers to their employers. In its 2023 Global Slavery Index, the international human rights group Walk Free ranked the UAE as the country with the seventh-worst modern slavery problem in the world. Many workers live in poor conditions and work long hours, and are in effect trapped after having their passports illegally confiscated and wages withheld. Walk Free did note that the government has been moving to improve things, at least.

6. The UAE also deploys what Human Rights Watch has described as “some of the world’s most advanced surveillance technologies” to monitor both public spaces and internet activity, and limit residents’ freedom of expression – sometimes to the point of incarceration. The BBC’s Adam Fleming recently asked free speech warrior Oakeshott whether she was comfortable with laws that say you can face two years in jail and a minimum fine of £40,000 for social media posts the regime disagrees with; she replied: “I have no issues with the authorities here.”

7. The city’s attractions to those who still have their passports include two artificial archipelagos created by land reclamation: the World – 300 islands that look like a map of the globe; and the Palm, which looks like, well, you can guess. Although the shape of neither can be fully appreciated at ground level, and construction of the luxury facilities has proved slow, between them they will add more than 700km extra to the city’s shoreline.

8. Another of the major sights of the city is the 163-storey Burj Khalifa, which at just over half a mile high is the world’s tallest skyscraper. It has appeared in lots of films, including Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, and more recently has appeared in footage showing an Iranian drone being blown up just before hitting it.

9. The beauty of the World, the Palm and the Burj Khalifa things were, I’m sure, of just as big an appeal to the western immigrants – I refuse to call them ex-pats – as the region’s competitive tax rates. It charges no tax on income, capital gains or inheritance, and VAT of just 5%.