India has unbelievable diversity of cities, says Nadia Verjee of Expo City Dubai
Expo City Dubai executive director Nadia Verjee speaks to HT about the potential cooperation between India and UAE for sustainable urban development
Behind Dubai’s glitz and glamour lies a city facing real-world challenges, including population growth, shortage of affordable housing, traffic congestion, air pollution, and the climate crisis. But it is “testing” solutions, said Nadia Verjee, executive director of Expo City Dubai, with the 4.38 square km legacy site of World Expo 2020 serving as its “urban lab.”
In Delhi to participate in the recently held Raisina Dialogue, she spoke to HT about the potential cooperation between India and UAE for sustainable urban development. Sharing the best practices and effective frameworks emerging from Expo City, which was the venue for COP28 in 2023 and is all set to host the Asia Pacific Cities Summit in October, Verjee said the diverse experiences of India’s urbanscape must be showcased at international platforms. Edited excerpts:
With the Expo 2020 behind you, what does the future hold for Expo City Dubai?
In 2011, we submitted a bid to host the World Expo. We began by considering how a mega project, which cost more than $8 billion, would integrate itself into the fabric of Dubai’s growth—the population here is expected to double by 2040—and become an extension of the city once the show was over.
When we first looked out, there was just the desert and one Ghaf tree. But the plan was that Dubai would almost flip on its axis. The airport is now moving to Al Maktoum Airport, which is in the vicinity (of Expo City). Dubai Ports World and Jebel Ali Port are in our transport corridor. The new Dubai Exhibition Centre takes the chokehold (caused by large events) out of the city’s centre.
The Expo City is a multipurpose project where residents will move in next year. With the anchor industry, top companies, real estate firms, and SMEs… it is a real ecosystem. People visiting the Expo can take the train or the Metro. We have access to six highways. It’s highly connected, but it’s also a work in progress.
How sustainable is this project?
If you were to consider us an urban lab, our infrastructure allows us to test solutions. We must improve our efficiency, lower our costs, make sustainability a business opportunity, and triple the bottom line instead of just cost or carbon offsets. How are we going to get to net zero by 2050? We all have to get there by multisectoral collaborations and community engagement.
When Expo 2020 closed in 2022 (it was delayed by a year due to the pandemic), and after we hosted COP28, we looked at all of the elements (of the SDGs or ESG from social, governance and environmental perspectives) and created 131 metrics for what could be a city health check. (For) Any city in the world -- and we’re working with cities in the global south -- we are an example. We’re not perfect. But no city is perfect.
Dubai and many Gulf cities are associated with glitz and affluence. So, how inclusive is this development? Is there space for people who build and service the city?
Historically, in the Gulf, there has been criticism about some mega-events and the growth of the country originally… when you go back 20-25 years, you had these news articles about how a city is being built. So, as we embarked on this massive reputational and commercial project for the nation, one of the primary priorities was ensuring that we had a good worker welfare programme and setting a global standard for what that could look like.
At the very core layer are the people who built it, the hundreds and thousands of blue-collar workers… and as you went down the value chain, the people who were busing them in, those who were housing them and feeding them. Our contractors and suppliers had to subscribe to worker welfare requirements. We took the existing UAE law and raised the bar to address questions about the duration of working hours, ensuring they were provided with the right kind of health and safety and connectivity to family (through phone) SIM cards. We have inscribed the names of every single worker on a monument.
However, there were certain limits to what we could do as well. There’s a huge cost involved. We’re not hiring them directly, but our responsibility as project management was that all contractors and subcontractors comply with our rules and regulations.
But then, not everything in the country is government-led. There are also the private sector (undertaking) construction projects in Dubai. There are elements of the glitz and the glam as well.
Dubai is an expensive city, so does Expo City have an affordable housing element?
The residential community is not what you would classify as affordable housing. However, there are areas close by, such as the Expo Village, a hidden gem in terms of price point. Also, there is easy access for people (coming into the Expo City for work) because our Metro station is one of the busiest stops.
The Roads and Transport Authority is responsible for the affordable housing programme. As there is very little affordable housing in Dubai, people working in or around the city often live in Sharjah or other cities in the Emirates. This (the car commutes) causes a lot of traffic and congestion. Now, 800 meters of each metro stop is becoming an affordable housing node with integrated transport solutions. Dubai is not 100% there yet. We’re a work in progress.
Additionally, they are also introducing an incredibly ambitious walkable city concept across Dubai with different levels for pedestrians and non-motorised vehicles. It connects the more disconnected parts of the city to the highway level to reduce reliance on cars.
It also addresses our challenges. Climate change in the UAE is as much as in any other country. We suffer from air pollution like you (Indian cities) do. Our air quality is not great because we’ve got the desert on one side and the sea on the other. When you put all of that and construction together, it’s not a great mix. The plan is to greenify and create shading. Expo City Dubai has catalysed thinking around how we achieve all this in our area and the impact that we can have on the rest of the city.
How does Expo City compare with Saudi Arabia’s Neom, another greenfield project in your neighbourhood?
Neom is vast and multi-project. I don’t think you can compare it, firstly in terms of scale and secondly in terms of purpose. There are residential, cultural, destinations, and business hubs. The comparison, if any, could be this idea of a greenfield city. Nine out of ten charter cities coming up are in our part of the world—the MEASA (Middle East, Africa, and South Asia) region. And there’s that need to accommodate growing populations.
What is important to highlight are the best practices, lessons and frameworks—looking at the physical built, the operational capability, community engagement and the digital layer, which is very much a parcel of the 100 smart cities effort undertaken in India. There’s a big focus on digitisation and access to data, which is quite critical. The governance structures and frameworks that enable legislative and regulatory regimes to flourish are wrapped around all that. As new cities emerge, these are things that you can draw comparisons around.
Since India launched the Smart Cities Mission, the debate has veered around going high-tech versus meeting the basics. Can the two go hand-in-hand?
You cannot have one without the other. Also, it’s most important to have the right kind of data, not just the Internet of Things and AI and technology for the sake of it. It is essential to ask: what are you using technology for? Where are you deploying AI? How are you getting your satellite technology to speak to your public sentiment data and your publicly sourced data so that together, you have a pool of data that understands the connection between, say, crime, lighting on the streets and traffic? The three are seemingly unrelated issues, but all are fundamentally connected. The role of prioritising women in cities is directly related to the amount of lighting you have on your street or the amount of traffic you have or don’t have in the vicinity. Using data, if you tackle one intervention right, you can address so many others.
What is it that Indian cities can showcase on a global platform?
Indian cities have an unbelievable amount to showcase. Urbanisation for one. If it’s not evident in India and the impact it will have—positively or negatively—then I don’t know where else in the world it would be. The second is diversity. You’ve got cities of culture, tourism, business, and historical, coastal, and technological cities. This diversity hasn’t shown up as strongly in these (international) cities platforms as it should.
