Can Abu Dhabi transform itself from a city for cars to one for people?
By Jessica Hume, re:place Magazine
(as originally printed in Spacing Magazine)
A few weeks ago I found myself walking down a narrow side street in Abu Dhabi, where I currently live, when my phone rang. My friend, who also lives in this city, tried to tell me about his day, though the sounds of car horns honking loudly on each end made it a somewhat difficult affair.
“Horns are so third world, aren’t they,” my friend, a fellow Canadian, observed.
And indeed they are. In fact, the excessive use of the car horn is an integral part of the social life of cities, both here in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and in the handful of other Middle Eastern countries I’ve visited. Whether you’re in Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Oman, Morocco, or Turkey, the horn honking is relentless but its meaning is contextual, (“Hey! I’m coming through. You wait,” or “I don’t think you see me; I honked; now you do,” alternatively “Why are you walking where I am driving? You know I won’t slow down. Fool!”; it can also mean “You cut me off. I am angry. Now, I will drive dangerously close behind you. You’ve been warned,” or the universal, “Yay! I am happy! The sports team I love just won!”).
Abu Dhabi may be the richest city in the world — it’s the capital of the UAE, a tiny country squashed between Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the Persian Gulf, sitting on the world’s fifth largest known oil reserves — but the speed of its development has far outpaced that of its tribal mentality. Nowhere is this more clear than its streetscape.
There were no roads in Abu Dhabi until the late 1960s. Four-wheel-drive vehicles made paths through the sand and drivers only knew they hadn’t lost their way thanks to strategically placed oil drums.
Most of the first permanent settlements were established in order to facilitate the burgeoning oil industry and support the influx of labour that accompanied it. When the extent of the voluminous oil and gas resources was realized, so too was the urgent need for infrastructure. Plans for the city were drawn up, followed by, one imagines, an order to put a serious rush on them. This entire country was literally built around the needs of vehicles.
The country’s furious rush to modernize and collect accolades for its design superlatives and developments that defy nature has earned Abu Dhabi a rather dubious title: the country with the largest carbon footprint in the world.
This shouldn’t be too surprising, perhaps, for an oil country, whose roads are dominated by enormous SUVs, where the air conditioning is cranked to 11 for much of the year and for whom recycling remains a firmly Western ideal. Probably unbeknownst to Canadians is that Abu Dhabi has declared its main goal, on its way to becoming a world-class city, to be a city that exemplifies sustainability. It also wants to be seen as clean and a
beacon of pedestrian friendliness.
In September 2008, an ebullient Falah Al Ahbabi exclaimed that Abu Dhabi would soon emerge on the world stage, a leader and example for all in sustainable urban planning.
“Abu Dhabi is a key player in the world,” the general manager of the emirate’s Urban Planning Council told me. “We want the city to be sustainable and we have an advantage over all the others. Other cities don’t have the guts or the resources. We have both.”
The city’s ambitious foray into green city building is called the Plan 2030 Abu Dhabi. A thick, glossy book, Plan 2030 outlines all the ways in which Abu Dhabi will become the City of the Future. Developed by an all-star team led by the Canadian urban planner Larry Beasley (Vancouver’s former chief city planner), the plan, like most, looks perfect on paper. Where it gets slightly more difficult to understand is when you compare Plan 2030 to the reality of life on the streets here.
One need not walk far in Abu Dhabi to be made painfully aware that this city was built for drivers. A recent walk I took across the city revealed much about the unspoken rules that govern the streets, the sidewalks, and how public space here is used.
Abu Dhabi is an island, shaped like a uterus. I began my walk at the offices of the newspaper where I work; and, like a sperm, I attempted to make my way to the egg, which, also not unlike that of a sperm, is not an easy trip.
The first obstacle is crossing the road outside the newsroom. I often wait for more than ten minutes to cross this street. Picture Lakeshore Boulevard, but with more aggressive drivers in bigger vehicles clocking in at easily over 100 kilometres per hour.
After enough waiting time that I’ve developed a nice base tan, I emerge triumphant on the other side. I continue the walk relatively unbothered, passing mosques, small Pakistani bakeries, and a handful of shisha cafés, outside which plastic tables are set up, at which robust Egyptian men sit, talk, play cards, and stare at women like myself, wondering quietly how much we cost (my own fault perhaps; I am showing both my ankles and wrists).
Minutes later, the first dramatic moment presents itself. Someone is throwing eggs off a balcony onto the Rubik’s Cube of a parking lot below, barely missing the shiny grey car of a highly emotional Lebanese man. His car stops, he gets out. He looks at the broken eggs beside his car then looks up just as another lands within feet of him. A small crowd has already gathered to watch this man gesticulate wildly and yell to the insensitive goof who has just offended him, his land, and his honour by throwing eggs in his direction. When the offender fails to make an appearance the crowd disperses and my walk continues.
Sidewalks don’t exist throughout the whole city. In fact, they often lead to high, temporary walls constructed to separate them from the plethora of construction sites that mark every street. And where sidewalks do exist, they are peppered with huge potholes, covered in litter, and made with unevenly laid bricks. Pedestrians must pay attention at all times.
On select streets (read: the two main ones), subways have been built. Not subway in the public transit sense and not Subway in the sandwich sense. These subways are underground passes for people who want to cross the road, because to do so above ground would be to interrupt traffic and expose yourself to extreme danger. Though useful (and though plans have been proposed to add cameras), these subways are used infrequently because they are dimly lit, unmanned, and creepy, for lack of a better term.
On every street in Abu Dhabi, between the road and the sidewalk, is a patch of grass. These long stretches of lawn were not intended for any purpose other than to separate driver from pedestrian, but they are used, nonetheless, almost constantly. Groups of Pakistani and Afghan labourers and cab drivers sit and lie here for hours on end, talking and listening to music on their cell phones.
Today is no exception. As I head to the fallopian tubes of Abu Dhabi island, I pass dozens of these groups of men on the grass. They spend their time here because they prefer it to their homes — most often small rooms they share with more men than can be comfortable.
A white SUV comes dangerously close to hitting me as the driver turns off the main road into a gas station. Irritated, he honks. Irritated, I look at him, wishing it weren’t illegal to flip him the bird. But alas, I am an infidel in Allah’s country, and a woman. The odds are not in my favour, so I walk on.
In a shaded alley between two tall, run-down apartment buildings, a soccer game is well underway. In the absence of any planned public recreational areas (there is one, the Corniche), use of outdoor space here is truly organic. There is nothing about this alley that indicates it was intended for human use, but these three soccer players have appropriated it; set up a net, brought a ball, and even the guy without shoes is concentrating fully on scoring. Just outside the alley, three old men have set up plastic chairs, bought tea from the Pakistani bakery a few doors down, and chosen to spend this afternoon watching their younger comrades play the game.
Next to the alley is a convenience store, outside which an old bicycle is propped up on its stand. There is no need to lock it; a bike is not a valuable commodity here. No one will steal it. Indeed, few have the nerve to ride one. And with no dedicated bike lanes and only sporadic sidewalks, biking becomes an extreme sport.
Finally I reach the Corniche, Abu Dhabi’s only real pedestrian part of town. A long walkway with benches, cafes and gardens lines the Arabian sea. The breeze is salty and groups of people — Emirati families, men from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Westerners all sit here, not mingling, but enjoying the same space.
I pick a bench of my own, take a seat and make an extended international phone call home to my mother. She remembers the Corniche from when she was here in 2009, and recalls her own trip down this polyglot runway, seeing everyone wearing their respective forms of national dress.
The Corniche is separated from the rest of the city by an eight-lane road (sound familiar, Toronto?). To get back home from here I must catch a cab. So I wait, my hair getting in my face from the wind of the speeding cars whizzing past me. When I see a cab coming straight for me I stretch out my arm and take a quick, instinctive step back, so as not to get hit.
“Sorry,” the driver says as I get in and take a seat. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Thought you were going to hit me, there,” I said, smiling.
“I know,” he replied, smiling back. “That’s what everyone thinks. We have to drive fast, because everyone drives fast. This city, not good for people.”
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Jessica Hume is a Torontonian who has spent the last two years in Abu Dhabi. She has contributed numerous articles to Spacing.