...the ghost of Metropolis.

Column by Francesco Grillo for the Italians newspaper Il Messaggero e Il Gazzettino del Nord Est.

One of the most influential films in the history of cinema dates back one hundred years. German director Fritz Lang tries to imagine a city - Metropolis - that becomes a representation of a future set in our times. Staring at a metropolis like Dubai, one cannot help but think of that vision that became the manifesto of futurism and the inspiration for great science fiction films. More than in New York or Shanghai, in Dubai man has created from nothing a world of glittering skyscrapers, elegant surface subways, rivers and artificial islands. A fast world in which coexists an economy that seems to be able to buy everything (including European soccer); and millions of migrants who survive on a few hundred euros a month to keep their children at university in Pakistan or Sri Lanka. A fast future that Europe cannot ignore, lulling a sense of superiority that we can no longer afford.

Fifty thousand inhabitants in 1970. Nine hundred thousand in 2000. Today there are almost four million. With an average age of 27 and 85% immigrants from all over the world. It is the numbers of demography that say more about the success (or decline) of a society than those of Gross Domestic Product. Those of Dubai are important because they point a development path to an entire region that is trying to move from a long period of wealth based on oil (and gas) to another in which the entire energy production and distribution model will be reorganised.

In the early 1970s when Saudi Arabia - after being humiliated, along with the Syrians and Egyptians, in yet another war with Israel - organized the first embargo that led to the first great recession, Dubai was little more than a village of pearl merchants. The discoveries of deposits condemned the small kingdom to being the only one almost totally deprived of the black gold that made the other emirs immensely rich and influential. And it was then that the Sheikh of Dubai, Saeed Bin Al Maktum, had the idea that managed to turn disadvantage into strength.

The gamble was to invest in Jebel Ali, the largest artificial port in the world, built opposite Iran and a few kilometres from the desert that reaches Saudi Arabia. A free zone was set up around the port (with very low taxes and few bureaucratic constraints) in which, in huge industrial parks, large western companies would bring in components to be assembled into cars and electrical appliances to be re-exported to other Gulf countries.
Dubai's real competitive advantage, however, was the massive and controlled immigration of workers who arrived from poor countries - from Bangladesh to Malaysia - and who were willing to work long hours in order to put their families out of poverty.

That model worked until that September morning in 2001 when other Arabs decided to tear down the towers that were the 'centre of world trade' in New York. When the 2008 financial crisis closed a phase of limitless globalisation, the new emir, Saeed's son, found the strength to revive the model. Today Dubai is no longer just a big shopping mall, but a mega amusement park that focuses on tourism and businesses attracted to its "internet city". In the future, however, there is solar energy on which the desert countries have an obvious location advantage. In Dubai, which will host COP 28 this year, the world's largest solar park is being planned and it would need European technology.

Today, alongside the least expensive workers in the world, there are some three hundred thousand professionals capable of running world-class companies and two hundred thousand oligarchs (mostly Russians) who have moved to a place so artificial that it seems out of touch with an increasingly complicated world.
The Middle East factory has progressively shifted its focus towards the 'world factory' that was China and is, by far, the emirate's first trading partner. Europe has almost disappeared: the first for trade with the emirate is Germany in seventh place. The only constant seems to be that the city of the future does not stop running.

As in the Metropolis imagined a hundred years ago, coexisting in Dubai are a humanity accustomed to observing the world from terraces suspended in the void and a much larger 'social class' of guests willing to live in dormitories designed to ensure maximum efficiency. In Lang's film, revolt is avoided thanks to the 'power of love' that unites the son of the town's owner with a factory worker. In Dubai, uniting two such distant social classes is the convenience of sharing a method that, for some, creates wealth and, for others, the only alternative to absolute poverty. It is a development model that contains a great contradiction. And yet, Europe must confront it if it wants to invent another one capable of winning back consensus in the global South. To give substance to the programme of “Defending its own style of life”.