Gathering at a Roundabout

Sixty-one years ago next week, on November 6, 1959, British architect John Harris received an invitation to Dubai. He booked his flights quickly before anyone could reconsider his nomination as the city’s first town planner. The British government summoned him on behalf of the eventual client, Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum. Later that month, Harris landed at neighboring Sharjah’s airport, but his client and the British political agent, Donald Hawley, were out of town, enjoying some hawking together. There was someone ready to meet him—Neville Allen, a British engineer from the firm Sir William Halcrow & Partners. The architect and the engineer had each other’s company for two days before the others returned to town.

Letters, telegrams, and typed-out itineraries establish and organize these facts. History writing can be described, in the plainest way, as the sequencing of facts: what happened, and then what happened next. A writer of history relates the dots that she can map out on a temporal, geographical landscape. In between inked dots wafts speculation, like haze not yet condensed into shape. Speculation betrays some of the trouble in writing history. It exposes the truncated pathways that cannot be extended, the intersections that cannot be welded.

On the town plan Harris eventually drew, there is a literal intersection, a roundabout, that I cannot resolve. Speculative clouds hover over it. Circles etch it as one of the plan’s largest roundabouts but at a location that would not attract much traffic. At the edge of the built-up city, it is circumscribed on flood-prone land not far from the low-slung coastline. Harris placed it where a ribbon of seaside palm-frond houses tapers off beyond the harbor. From the roundabout, a proposed road extends southward, following an existing shoreline sabkha trail to Abu Dhabi. While the trail was a historical route to Abu Dhabi, other aspects of the plan reveal another way to Abu Dhabi would prevail.

I suspect that the roundabout functioned as less a traffic solution than a planted stake for an unvoiced idea. The roundabout could offer an exit to a place that didn’t yet exist but maybe was already imagined. Port Rashid, Dubai’s bastion of a seaport, was eventually entered from that point. Is that a coincidence? Or what if the roundabout was the engineer’s key slot, an oversize but shorthand gesture, to store a profitable idea until a more opportune moment to propose it?

Beginning in 1954, Halcrow won contracts to convert the marshy Dubai Creek into an industrial harbor. From that year onward, the company’s knowledge of Dubai was unmatched by any other foreign consultant. Even before arriving in Dubai, John Harris relied on the company’s London-based engineers. After his Dubai visit, the aerial photography Harris required to complete the town plan was delayed several months. His six-month assignment was compressed into a matter of weeks—all the more reason he relied on input from Dubai’s uncontested advisers.

Consultants survive by finding new problems to solve. The 1960 town plan pins down work that Halcrow pursued after its issuance. At the time of the plan, for example, the bridge designed to connect the two shores of Dubai Creek was nothing more than hearsay. Harris, nevertheless, placed it almost exactly where Halcrow eventually had it built in 1963. Harris’s precision must have resulted from his contact with Halcrow. Why couldn’t there be other, and more profitable, inked futures for Halcrow on the plan?

Halcrow’s first commission in Dubai was based on a £388,000 price tag. Company representatives treated it like a courtesy call. The British government mustered an annual £2,500 retaining fee to keep Halcrow in Dubai. The rest was payment in kind as an unwritten promise. By depositing the check, Halcrow accepted a near-guarantee of a monopoly on Dubai’s future infrastructural contracts, although no one guaranteed there were more contracts to come. Soon after Harris’s town plan was approved, Halcrow sent three prefabricated houses to Dubai for its staff, in addition to the one already installed for Allen’s family. They opened an office and waited.^⁠

Neville Allen would remain in Dubai for the rest of his career, but at first there was little work to keep him there. The simple, repetitive work of building roads according to the 1960 plan did not pay much: Dubai could afford only twenty kilometers of asphalt as of 1965. Neville Allen’s permanent presence in Dubai was indicative of the company’s commitment to Dubai’s growth, but it needed to be justified with more profitable contracts. Even Al Maktoum Bridge, scaled down to a minimal production effort, was not enough. In order to invest in Dubai’s future, Halcrow had to propose its own. All the more reason, then, that Halcrow would have investigated future sites in 1960.

Speculation gathers more densely over the large, seaside roundabout without hardening into fact.

The earliest evidence of Port Rashid is dated 1964, but the problem that begged for the new port was planted in the 1960 town plan. In November 1960, a half year after the plan’s issuance, a British development official visited Dubai and realized as much. He observed that Halcrow’s engineered creek suffered from its own success. Slipshod warehouses were springing up as fast as their kits of parts arrived, but the built-up city obstructed the wharves’ access to the new roads proposed beyond. The British official criticized the proposed road system for insufficiently connecting the harbor to Dubai’s new districts and Abu Dhabi. He correctly estimated that the port would suffocate on its own growth if the road system remained as planned. The plan was not revised. When Halcrow proposed it in 1964, Port Rashid must have seemed a gasp for air.

The engineering company expected to secure the development contract. It had helped create the problem and, its engineers thought, they owned the solution. When Rashid’s advisers recommended hiring another British firm for the job, Neville Allen protested. He cried of an “unethical entry” into Halcrow’s “own preserve.”^⁠ With his monopolistic and territorial claims, Allen spoke of something as of yet unspoken. His exasperation was based on years of investment, biding, and forethought. His tantrum, delivered with a threat not to deliver other projects, coerced the British government, in an act of apparent obligation, to cajole the competing company into standing down. For them, British officials found work in Abu Dhabi.

There are other hints in the town plan that Halcrow had its eyes on the roundabout. Just inland was land reserved for an “industrial zone.” As the visiting British government official had observed in 1960, the supplemental area was poorly connected to the creek, where most needs for industry were located at the time. The zone was, however, very well linked to the mysterious roundabout. The designated zone, and beyond, served as the eventual staging area and worker estates for building the massive Port Rashid.

Eventually, asphalt roads realized the junction in question. Pinpointed at the lateral center of the future port, the junction served as an early entry to the project’s construction site. It channeled raw materials arriving from the new roads that originated not at the existing port but at quarries further inland.

One more cloud gathers at the roundabout: Donald Hawley, the political agent who met Harris in Dubai and who worked closely with Neville Allen, issued a report in 1968 about his return visit to the city. He had not seen Dubai since his departure in August 1961, well before any announcement of a new seaport. He found the city “comparatively orderly” and noted that there was “little which was not already projected as early as 1961.” At this point, planning for Port Rashid—not “projected” in 1961—was already well underway. Estimated at first to cost £9 million, the project was big news even beyond Dubai; so much money focused on the coordinates of the roundabout had not been spent anywhere else within hundreds of miles. Port Rashid was for Dubai not a scalar change but a tectonic one, shifting the city’s future toward unbuilt land south of the old harbor. It nearly rendered the 1960 town plan obsolete. If Hawley thought in 1968 that the city was on the same track as it had been in 1961, then he either overlooked drastic changes or knew about them already in 1961.

If it could be proven that Port Rashid was planned as early as 1960, then what would that mean for Dubai? Would it matter that the transformative project was in the works a few years before it was officially proposed? Significance would lie in the fact that the town plan’s roundabout held a dormant, secretive seed. The usual, factually challenged telling of Dubai’s expansion dwells on royal decree and farsighted vision. Had Halcrow planted that seed in the 1960 town plan, then it would mean there was indeed vision for the city, though shaped and articulated by a profit-minded consultant.

It does seem an awfully patient act for Halcrow to wait more than eight years to secure a well-funded project. Maybe too patient? If the Foreign Office offered Halcrow off-the-record assurances that bigger things were in store, that could have helped make the time go by faster. It is speculation, I realize, but when the archives of cities rest not in public archives but in the inaccessible file cabinets of private firms—and the records reveal that much did happen—then speculation is what we have left to give form to history.

Sources:

FO 957/231, British National Archives

FO 1016/838, British National Archives

Reisz, “Master Planning with a Land Rover,” Al Manakh, 2007

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This is the fourth dispatch to celebrate the release of Showpiece City. You can read the first three: Telephones & Dynamite, A Season of Migrations, West, and A Circumscribed World.