Crossing as Destination

Al Maktoum Bridge, Dubai, as seen from above. Courtesy of Heli Allen and Linda Pearson.

May, 2021

This month, 58 years ago, Dubai’s first bridge opened. Named Al Maktoum Bridge, it spanned Dubai Creek to link two districts, Bur Dubai and Bur Deira, not yet forged into a unified city.

Before the bridge, crossing Dubai Creek was easy for pedestrians—aboard the pleasurable abra crafts departing from various wharves. For the limited number of cars, getting across required driving out of town and rounding the marshy reaches of Dubai Creek. One traveler described the route as a “rough trip” that could take hours to complete. Reducing travel to a matter of minutes, the bridge readied Dubai to become a car city.

Records don’t reveal that an official ceremony opened the bridge, but around this time there was a custom for celebrating completion of asphalt roads. It typically started with the cutting of a ribbon stretched across the ledge of new roadway; it came to conclusion with a slow procession of cars ascending from compact sand to the jet-black asphalt layer. I imagine the opening of Al Maktoum Bridge was something like that, a crossing as the destination. A slow pass over the bridge, or later in line at the ¼-rupee toll booth, afforded patient passengers a view unlike any other of the city.

Part of proposed elevation for Al Maktoum Bridge by Sir William Halcrow & Partners, 1960.

British consulting engineers Sir William Halcrow & Partners designed Al Maktoum Bridge, and Overseas Austria was the contracting company. Both companies secured their roles simply by having already arrived in the city. In the years before, they had cleared Dubai Creek of sandbars and planted steel training walls and concrete wharves. The bridge project offered them a chance at expansion, and entrenchment in Dubai’s future.

Halcrow designed Al Maktoum Bridge as bare bones, initially estimated at £200,000, then £250,000, and after drastic cost-saving measures, it came in at £194,000.1 Even with a price less than half that of the first contract on the creek, the bridge had its critics. British officials who encouraged the project knew that the local government did not have the funds (or lending capacity) to have it built, and if there was funding, then there were so many more urgent needs.2 There was, for example, a problem with water that a bridge could not solve: it seeped onto land from the creek and from the ground below into the city. Cesspools materialized overnight.

Halcrow insisted on the bridge, even before there were enough cars to justify it. Preparation for a car-filled future, they advised. British officials predicted that the bridge would increase the market for British “saloon cars,” but American officials in Saudi Arabia were the ones who celebrated: the bridge’s opening resulted in a sudden order of twenty-five American-made automobiles—Rambler was the brand—to supply Dubai’s newest business, a taxi service.

Perspective drawing of initial proposal for Al Maktoum Bridge, with a swing component to accommodate the passage of ships.

Halcrow’s initial proposal for the bridge was dated March 14, 1960, but the company’s grave miscalculations for the dredging contract were exposed in early 1961.3 That caused delay and also bought time to find benefactors. There was, in the meantime, a way to bookmark the project for the future: the bridge was inscribed on the town plan by British architect John Harris, which was delivered in May 1960. Like most of the roadways drawn in the plan, the bridge was to be built nearly exactly as it was represented in Harris’s document.

In the 1960 town plan, the bridge lies in the lower margin. It is a component of the city’s outer ring road, the means of accessing trails to the neighboring cities Sharjah and Abu Dhabi. A sign of its edge quality was that, just east of the bridge on the Deira side, there was proposed a garbage processing site, a “refuse destructor.”

In this commercial, a US-made Rambler travels over a desert plain.

The engineers argued that the distant site would leave the active city undisturbed. Also, land there was cheaper. The bridge’s two pedestrian pathways, the engineers admitted, would not get much use that far out. In the end, Halcrow’s proposal to include a bascule, as a means to let tall ships through, was discarded to keep costs down. That meant the bridge had to be pushed even further inland, further from the city, so that ships hauling equipment to and from Continental Oil Company’s staging site were not hindered by the low-hanging road. On June 17, 1962, with the oil company appeased, construction began on Al Maktoum Bridge.4

In the months after the bridge was completed, Dubai’s ruler, also the bridge’s debtor, visited New York City. His official itinerary detailed that he crossed the George Washington Bridge. In the year prior to his visit, the bridge over the Hudson River, once the world’s longest in suspension form, received a second layer of traffic hung from the first—“a masterpiece of traffic engineering.” In Showpiece City and in earlier dispatches, there has been a focus on the visual impact made by infrastructure in Dubai’s 20th-century history: built works revealed present capacity and foretold that more was to come.

Al Maktoum Bridge did not qualify as a masterpiece. Some worried it would cause “a diminution of Dubai’s particular character and appeal.” The bridge was a showpiece, though, in another way. It demonstrated that infrastructure was powerful enough to reconfigure a city. By the time John Harris delivered the 1971 development plan, the bridge was no longer the city’s edge. New and proposed projects further out, including the airport and the proposed Rashid Hospital, relied on it. Cars accessing new schools, health centers, and offices crisscrossed daily over it. The bridge was joinery. In a city with two urban districts once united only by their mutual need for the creek, the bridge manifested how engineering could materialize the center as something more than an abstract point in the middle of a harbor. It was discernible as concrete and steel.

Halcrow Study for Dubai Harbour Crossing, 1960.

The city’s most monumental structure, the Deira Clock Tower, marked the Deira entrance to the bridge. It was wrapped in constant traffic. By 1971, the bridge was the nexus of the city. And also the bottleneck. That year, the bridge was outfitted with a bascule, which, when it was lifted for passing ships, only increased onland traffic problems and therefore also underscored the bridge’s essential role.

Harris called for the city to remain focused at the bridge and prescribed additional creek crossings to alleviate congestion. Another bridge and a tunnel were soon thereafter realized. The lesson of engineering had by then been amplified: the ability to infuse engineering with so much meaning, also came with the opportunity to take the meaning away. If the center could be moved once, it could be moved again and again. Blacktop roads, bridges, power stations, telephone lines, water pumps could shape and move a city, the way sluices and dams guide water over land. Instead of heeding the current center, the city was stretching south, toward the Abu Dhabi border.

Even if its creators didn’t comprehend the lasting effects of their decisions, engineering encrusted Dubai. Beyond just giving shape to the city, engineering became its center.

1. Today, that would be about $4.75 million.
2. It’s mentioned in multiple sources that the emir of Qatar provided the money for the project.
3. These failings are briefly described in this previous dispatch and further detailed in Showpiece City, Chapter 3.
4. The concession contract with Continental was not signed before 1963, so it’s unsure whether negotiations were with Continental or Shell, the previous concession holder.

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This is the tenth dispatch around the publication of Showpiece City. You can read the first nine: Telephones & Dynamite; A Season of Migrations, West; A Circumscribed World; Gathering at a Roundabout; John Harris Comes to Dubai; and Wild Machines over Dubai; Have Some Fun; Thrown to Stand; and A Shipwreck Seen.