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| When this gaseous burp explodes in the desert air, we'll still have the Burj Dubai | Simon Jenkins The 818-metre tower is a true wonder of the world, a fitting monument to Dubai as the capital of excess and irrational exuberanceThe scaffolding has cleared from the most astonishing man-made structure I have seen. It is outrageous, wasteful, egotistical, ridiculous; but ask if the Burj Dubai is beautiful and I cannot deny it. When it formally opens (mostly empty) early next year, this Dubai tower will, at 818 metres, be the highest building anywhere, its "sneer of cold command" thrusting a finger at the outside world even as its Ozymandian surroundings sink beneath the economic waters of the Gulf.With the Dubai property market plummeting, the Burj is the final grandiose gesture of the emirate's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, on his long campaign to make Ludwig of Bavaria seem like a jobbing builder on the North Circular Road.Unlike most new skyscrapers, the $8bn (£5bn) Burj Dubai does not rise until the point where an accountant calculates the lifts can take no more. Its 20-acre base has the plan of a six-leaf desert flower, from which it launches itself into the sky in a diminishing cluster of rocket-like cylinders, spiralling and soaring to a celestial climax.This is no pastiche Mies, pastiche Corb, pastiche Foster, like the postmodern blobs, slices, wedges and cornets that crowd every Gulf skyline, screaming "look-at-me" at the brain-dulled passerby. Burj Dubai, designed by the Chicagoan architect, Adrian Smith of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and closely watched by the sheikh himself, leads the eye ever upwards. It has the exhilaration of a Gothic spire. At the top, a spike rises further, swaying 1.5 metres in the wind and appearing to bend towards the viewer, as if appalled at its own presumption in puncturing the heavens.Dubai this week lay in the shadow of its new tower, a partygoer still dancing in the streets hours after the party has ended. Its hyperbolic malls are crowded, its freeways jammed and its latest attention-grabber, an international film festival, mobbed by crowds. On Monday Dubai's more sober neighbour, Abu Dhabi, tossed its defaulting property market a $10bn note for one last drink, with another $1bn in pocket money for the embarrassed Maktoum family.The sheikh's obedient media barely mentioned the humiliation, as a drunk cares not who pays for the last round. The construction sites, once host to a quarter of the world's cranes, are mostly still building, but no one holds out much hope for the sea-girt ocean palms and "cities" planned at the height of the most reckless property bubble in history. The chairman of Dubai World, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, might cry earlier this year, "Dubai has a vision like no other place on earth," but it is a vision few want to share just now.A quarter of new residential units stand empty and 34,000 are still under construction. Nothing is heard now of a plan to build a tower higher even than Burj Dubai in the port area. An archipelago in the form of a map of the world remains as piles of sand offshore, crazily shipped like coals to Newcastle from Australia and rumoured to have disgorged antipodean snakes into the Gulf. The capital of irrational exuberance has embarked on an almighty hangover.Since I have long seen Dubai as a speculative accident waiting to happen, I could not resist a debate on its future, held on Monday in the rival statelet of Qatar up the coast – and held with not a little schadenfreude. Dubai's protestation of open markets, an open society and western freedoms have long been absurd. Its rulers reacted to the debate (broadcast next month by BBC World) by trying to have the Qataris suppress it and ensuring that three Dubai speakers and all Dubai journalists boycotted it.This was absurdly self-defeating, since a motion critical of Dubai's breakneck expansion was defeated 60-40. Twitter and Facebook were flooded with the good news for Dubai, in a week when there had been precious little. Yet none of this was allowed to be reported in Dubai's censored media. Never were so many well-groomed heads buried in so much desert sand.The surest sign of a polity that has lost confidence in itself is when its rulers cannot tolerate a debate on its affairs. Even the word default has had to be replaced in the Dubai press by "debt restructuring" or "new legal framework". Outsiders are routinely blamed for the property market collapse, which the emirate's buccaneers and paid stooges have for years been stoking with hyperbole. Property values are reported to be 50% down from their peak and are predicted by UBS analysts to be heading for 75%. Those who mimicked the 17th-century Dutch who believed that tulip prices could never fall are left with the paranoid's last gasp, blaming foreigners for their woes.The most mesmerising thing about Dubai is not its present but its future. Will it be Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat or Fatehpur Sikri? Will it become a place of sand and weeds, so many "trunkless legs of stone" lost on a scorching Gulf shore?What will happen when the world's funny money starts to flow elsewhere? What happens when a future sheikh goes either environmental or religious and tires of boosterism, returning to tents and camels, to order and respect for his ancestors? What happens when some political whirlwind sweeps across the Gulf from Iran, or down from Iraq, or across from Saudi Arabia?At a certain point in the decline in property values, it no longer pays owners to maintain lifts, services and utilities (as on a British tower estate). More likely Dubai will be a desert Detroit, a place of widespread dereliction with some money remaining at the centre but with ghost towns and squatted housing in the sweltering suburbs. The smart money is already on the more cautiously developed Qatar and Abu Dhabi stealing its financial thunder and leaving Dubai with its bizarre hotels: Las Vegas to Los Angeles, or Atlantic City to New York.There is a touch of Vegas to the gold-plated atrium of the "seven star" Burj Al-Arab hotel, with its casino baroque and computerised fountains like leaping dolphins. There is more than a touch of Disney to the $1.5bn Atlantis hotel, opened this year by Kylie Minogue, with shark-filled aquarium wall, garden gnome interior and giant conches for capitals.Already the office towers of Dubai look like those of a pre-cyber age, when the rich had to live near the oil, and celebrities could be induced to buy off-plan and sell before the fireworks ended. Why live in Dubai and shop at an ersatz Harvey Nichols when you can live in Knightsbridge and shop at the real one?Dubai is a gaseous burp about to explode in the desert air. But when it explodes it will leave behind the sensational Burj, standing visible across the desert, gleaming proudly in the sun. One day the cost of keeping it up will exceed its income, its steel will rot and the swaying summit will become dangerous. The mother of all demolitions will have to begin. Then Shelley can have his moment and Ozymandias his epitaph. But for the time being Dubai can at least boast a true wonder of the world.DubaiDubai WorldQatarLe CorbusierGlobal economyGlobal recessionArchitectureSimon Jenkinsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Lincoln legacy Past and present debated in Lincoln bicentenary year news.bbc.co.uk |
Togo football team bus attacked in Angola; 6 hurt LUANDA, Angola (AP) -- Gunmen in an area plagued by separatist violence opened fire Friday on a bus carrying Togo's national football team to a tournament in this southwest African country, wounding at least six people including two footballers, an official said.... hosted.ap.org |
Polls dictate the state of play. And sometimes get it wrong | Julian Glover The possibility of error in tracking voting intentions is increased by a spiral of silence. Labour shouldn't write off the election yet'Politicians say they don't look at the Âopinion polls – bullshit! Of course they do! We all do!" David Cameron exclaimed at one of his meet-the-people Âsessions this month. And he is right. Polls are not just a symptom of politics, a fever or a chill, but the difference between health and disease. A shudder in the Labour Ârating? The cabinet starts murmuring. The Tories slide below 40%? Cameron had better find kind words to say about Nick Clegg. Greens up; Ukip down; BNP anywhere – the predictive magic of numbers Âquantifying the thoughts of 45 million voters into 100 tidy units.Polls are why we think Labour is going to lose this spring. Polls are why there was no election in 2007. Polls are (in part) why Cameron is and stays leader. But before we trust polls, we should ask how they are created and whether they might be misleading. What if the British political class is Âchasing digits without substance?The Guardian commissions a poll at least every month, and at its core are voting intention figures that matter more and are calculated differently from the answers to any other questions. Our partnership with ICM runs back to 1980 and the record – the Great Polling Disaster of 1992 apart – has been excellent.In 2005 most firms got the vote shares almost spot on. In America, they Âpredicted President Obama. This winter, the broad outline of national opinion described by polls is surely right – an unpopular Labour government, a more popular (but not unshakable) Âopposition and an electorate that doesn't like Âpoliticians of any kind.It is likely that the polls are accurate. But the possibility of some serious and sustained fault is not negligible. Part Âscience, part art, polling is as accurate as its last mistake.A typical British poll includes the views of something over 1,000 voters – 1,000 being the statistical point at which the margin of error reduces to close to 3%. The tricky thing about polling voting intention, however you do it, is that it is no use asking people what they plan to do and just totting up the totals. When it comes to the ballot box, some of the people contacted won't vote. Others might not have told the truth. And few of us know for sure what we will do. Further, the kind of people who find the time to answer questions from a stranger calling their home, or who join an internet panel, will not be representative of the public as a whole. Pollsters know this, of course; and know they must weight figures to reflect the likely characteristics of the electorate. And this is where the difficulties begin.For the past 25 years telephone pollsters have been wrestling with a Âpersistent tendency of the polls to overstate Labour's share of the vote. Since 1983 the only final poll before election day to have proved to be too kind to the Conservatives was ICM's in 1997. Pollsters have got used to voters treating the Conservatives as the underdogs. They use adjustments to allow for the fact that telephone samples contain more Labour voters than the electorate as a whole, and that Labour voters overstate their likelihood to vote.They have also had to deal with the so-called spiral of silence – the fact that some voters whose party choice is unpopular will hide their party allegiance from pollsters. Plot election polls for the last 25 years on a chart, and most overstate the likely lead of the winning party. All this has had the effect of increasing figures for Tory support – and making the polls more accurate.But what if, in the context of 2010, these assumptions are turned on their head? We already know that in the last 18 months or so the spiral of silence has helped Labour: pollsters now find themselves having to increase Labour's share, to take account of people who say they have switched away from the party but may still turn out for it on polling day. Perhaps some shy Labour voters are even now evading the pollsters' radar.By correcting the error of 1992 – when Labour support was put too high – polling could have set itself up for a new fall in 2010, by putting it too low. The opposite might be true, too – that the spiral of silence is not working in Labour's favour at all. If this is the case the polls may, yet again, be too generous to the party.Evidence of error either way is thin. It would be irresponsible for pollsters to ditch methods that proved so Âaccurate in 2005, on a hunch that next time things might be different. But the interposition of weighting, between the raw data and the published poll, includes what is essentially a kind of expert hunch. Last year brought a poll every five days or so, from half a dozen companies using different weightings and research techniques. Their results were strikingly close. There is pressure in numbers, and no polling firm wants to break ranks without reason to do so.There is an obvious commercial desire to be the most accurate, but heavy commercial risk arises from being the most wrong. Pollsters have to wonder whether it is better to be in with the herd. That is fine if they herd around an accurate consensus view, as in 2005 – but look what happened in 1992. That the polls all say the same thing does not in itself mean they are right. When weary Labour ministers insist that the election is not yet lost, little as they may believe it, they may have a point.Elections pastDavid CameronLabourConservativesJulian Gloverguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
French call for veil ban in public buildings PARIS (AP) -- A French parliamentary panel will recommend a ban on face-covering Muslim veils in public areas from hospitals to schools but will stop short of pressing for the garb to be outlawed in the street, the panel's president says.... hosted.ap.org |