About
One day while I was in the Cultural Foundation’s coffeeship in Abu Dhabi, I overheard a conversation between two Englishmen. One seems to be living here and the other a visitor,so the first asked “so how do you find it here?”. The other guy answered: “Well it’s not what I expected”. I though he was going to say the usual “Oh i thought it’s going to be all desert and camels but it turned out to be a civilized place”. But thankfully, to my surprise, he said something different and something that we all keep saying. “Well, it’s not what I expected: Abu Dhabi markets itself well with all the Formula One and they show you the huge clean towers at the Corniche and the hotels they have here in pictures. But when you come here, the actual city is dirty, shabby, carelessly kept place. The buildings inside the city are so dirty and crumbling, it’s arid, barely any poedestrian places, it’s like a poor city in a third world country”.
Finally someone said it! A foreigner who’s been here for a few days was able to see that. This got me to start writing. So this blog is a criticism, a postive criticism, about Abu Dhabi’s dirtiness and stifling bad urban planning, or lack of urban planning; about how Adbu Dhabi is developing while being so unwell-kept, with no maintenance, with little laws and rules to govern buildings’ and outdoors cleanliness and maintenance, and about the hypocricy of a lot of the marketing going on. The new peripheries of Abu Dhabi, i.e. the Corniche, Emirates Palace, the Yas, Rim and Saadyiat Islands, the older Mushrif area and soon the new Salam street are what are do look new and sparkling, but then between them, in the city proper, there is a core of shabbiness, dirt, aridness, lack of urban planning and loss of amenity that make Abu Dhabi look as bad as a poverty stricken third world city outgrowth. And the problem is this core of the city is not a poverty stricken place, it is an affluent place dubbed as ‘Abu Dhabi downtown’ and ‘prime location’ when it comes to rental prices. This Abu Dhabi proper has been turned into an arid industrial zone: building material shops and construction works are in every corner: the living and industrial place is the city are one.
The problem is the solution would have been easy: just a bit of urban and population planning would have solved a lot of the problems: small city expansion instead of cramming up every conrner with buildings, strong public cleanliness and maintenance like in Dubai, siezing the construction of new buildings in already cramped areas, keeping parking spaces in mind when building and planning a neighbourhood, and control of rents depending on the affluence of the place.
So when it comes to rent, Najda and Tourist Club are ‘prime downtown location’, but when it comes to cleanliness, maintenance of building and areas, the environment, and the overgorwth without any planning, they’re very arid areas.
The recent development in Abu Dhabi meant that these areas became more backward as the municipality does no more heavy works. The whole city can’t all look as green as the Corniche, but a tree every few meters in neighbourhoods would not have been a bad idea.
There are many other problems with the social development in this country, already described in other articles and videos, but this blog is mainly about the lack of any matinenence, cleanliness, amenity, and urban planning in Abu Dhabi.
Articles are in the category or archives in the menu.
The pictures here give an idea of the message this blog is trying to convey.
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- This is how pedestrian pavements in Abu dhabi proper look like. This is not a poverty stricken area (no tthat those areas do not deserve cleanliness), but this is in what is dubbed as ‘downtown’ and ‘prime area location. When it comes to rent its prime location, when it comes to cleanliness the city looks like a third world city outgrowth
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- Collecting material for recycleing from garbage dumps makes the neighbourhoods look like this all the day.
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- The owner of the only three clean buildings for miles keeps the buildings and pavements like this out of his initiative. Simple laws could have made the city whit way, the way it looks like in the Corniche.
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- Spinneys liquor shop keeps its facade and pavement very clean and green. Simple municipal work could have made the neighbourhoods of Abu Dhabi proper (below Khaleej Al Arabi and before Defence roads) look like this instead of making the city one huge arid industrial zone.
