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Ed Webb

'Five years ago there was nothing': inside Duqm, the city rising from the sand | Cities... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ity-sand-luxury-hotels-housing

Oman economy trade investment infrastructure China OBOR culture beduin oil

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • a long line of plans stretching back to the 1980s aimed at developing and populating barren parts of Oman. Around 70% of the country’s population resides within a thin 150-mile-long coastal strip in the north near Muscat. The government now sees its hundreds of miles of unused coastline as full of economic potential.
  • “Duqm is a huge industrial city being built out of thin air,” says Manishankar Prasad, a local researcher who worked on the new city’s environmental and cultural impact assessments. “It will essentially change the locus of industrial activity from the northern parts of the country, which are heavily urbanised. [Having this] huge geographical expanse with this sparse population and no industrial activity is really not the way forward.”
  • We are in the midst of an era of new cities – with more than 200 currently under construction. Remote deserts all over east Asia, the Middle East and parts of Africa are being urbanised. There’s Nurkent in Kazakhstan, Aylat in Azerbaijan, New Kabul City in Afghanistan, New Baghdad in Iraq, Rawabi in Palestine, King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia, New Cairo in Egypt … Morocco has nine new cities in the works, and Kuwait has 12.
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  • Oman is desperate to diversify away from its oil and gas dependency. Research by the US Energy Information Administration puts Oman’s known crude oil reserves at 5.6bn barrels. While this is only enough to rank the country 21st in the world, its economy is disproportionately dependent: oil and gas accounts for nearly half of the country’s GDP, 70% of exports and between 68% and 85% of government revenue.
  • “Several dozen new cities are being constructed in the Middle East, mainly to transition away from the petroleum industry to a variety of other industries, including tourism, manufacturing, education and hi-tech,” says Dr Sarah Moser, a McGill University geography professor and author of an upcoming atlas of new cities.
  • Duqm sits on the Arabian Sea near the Strait of Hormuz, the gateway to the Persian Gulf – and the world’s most glaring oil supply chokepoint. Nearly a fifth of the world’s oil currently flows through this passage, ever prone to disruption. If the Duqm project succeeds, the shipping industry would be able to dock at the gates of the Middle East without needing to go all the way inside.
  • attracted the attention of Beijing’s much heralded Maritime Silk Road. More than three-quarters of Oman’s crude oil exports go directly to China.
  • While Duqm was never very densely populated, around 3,000 Bedouin – mostly fishermen and semi-nomadic herders – called the area home before the bulldozers arrived. These villages have now been demolished and the Oman government has built a new, modern town for them to relocate to. The houses look as if they were copied and pasted from Muscat – bright, white buildings two storeys high with garages and ornate gateways. There is a mosque in the centre. The houses stand empty. The local Bedouin prefer their traditional way of life – and want space to keep camels.
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