Dubai as NeuroPlastic Civilization
Dubai in 2005
My wife and I considered moving there in 2005 (which seems like forever as I review this article in 2026) and had a marvelous holiday checking out what was going on. The photo above is from then, before they extended the pool area behind the hotel into the ocean. I've been following what is occurring there with interest. More than any other city in the world, Dubai represents some new in the development of cities and civilizations.
The 21st century city is more likely to resemble an aerotropolis than a metropolis. The metropolis grew from the industrial manufacturing age, with the focus being heavy industry and its associated infrastructure. Now that whole cities like Dubai are being built around information, media, tourism and finance, they are more likely to be conceived as a global hub that centers around intelligence-based industry, and the transportation capability of a major international airport. Dubai is developing into such a city. It's built on a baking stretch of featureless sand 100km wide, with the only physical feature apartment from miles of glorious golden sand beaches, being jagged inhospitable mountains in the distance.
Everyone comes and goes through the international airport, with a huge port for goods and services located some distance from the city. Dubai is a city-state built from the perfect storm of globalization, rapidly accumulated oil weath and the control enabled by the city state model (the benevolent dictatorship). Selling the excitement of a new business, finance, media and tourism center using cheap third world labour but marketing it to the rich world luxury tastes.
Accelerated Development
Why Dubai is an important model for us to study and use to predict the developments of civilizations in other parts of the world is that its development is so accelerated. And it represents some concepts that will contribute to the development of a new type of thought-based civilization. Without knowing it, this new type of civilization will have the rapidly developing concepts in the field of neuroplasticity as its core meme.
Neuroplasticity is the ability to deliberately rewire the human brain though conscious intention and mental training. This means it has profound implications on our very idea about what our limitations as individuals and societies are.
In Dubai, we see a city state that created itself from little more than audacious vision, concentrated attention, and effective utilization of generous amounts of financial capital. Dubai represents a incredibly pure example of the idea that whatever humanity can dream, it can create. In being a place that was created out of nothingness using sheer power of vision, it has called into being a whole new concept for civilization - what I call 'Neuroplastic Civilisation'. A Neuroplastic Civilization is one that is only really limited by the imagination of its creators.
Why this is an important concept is that in completely created cities like Dubai, there is huge opportunity to bring in many new important ideas - like ecological building design, alternative energy (Dubai is ripe for fields of Solar cells just outside the city limits, or wind farms off the coast). The way Dubai evolves is probably going to be one of the most interesting sociological phenomena of the early 21st century.
Keep watching - Dubai is just warming up, and will get to be a very hot place indeed...
Authors Note: Looking Back from 2026
I wrote this original article in 2025, more than twenty year ago. We looked at the marina area, and the Palm Jumeriah, as they we construction sites. During the intervening years, I've kept an eye on Dubai, and my sense of Dubai's future from back in 2005 has largely played out, and it's become one of the most forward thinking, innovative cities in the world.
The ecological ideas that I anticipated are also taking root in Dubai, in terms of new nuclear power, large quantities of solar, and experimental eco-suburbs.
