In the East, West looks best. Take the names on the skyscrapers in Hong Kong and Macau, the labels on the bags Ginza girls tote, the chrome logos atop the hottest car bonnets in Shanghai, and the neon signs hanging over the restaurants in Kuala Lumpur. They're the same ones you see in Toronto, New York and London. The boss of HSBC, Michael Geoghegan, may be leaving London and heading to Hong Kong to run the world's biggest bank from its birthplace, but Asian consumers and businesses are looking in the opposite direction in a desperate attempt to fit in, to be more like us.
Nowhere is the rush to acquire Western cachet as intense as in Malaysia. But the country has decided that mere symbols of Western success are not enough. It wants to buy the real thing: an entire Western city. And, like any canny Asian trader, it thinks it has found a way to get one on the cheap. Malaysia is paying the United Arab Emirates to, essentially, clone the UAE. A group of investors from the Emirates are catalysts in building thousands of upmarket homes, self-styled six-star hotels, a financial centre and leisure parks in an economic development zone called Iskandar, in the south of the Malaysian peninsula. Spain, Japan and Britain are also putting a lot of money into Iskandar-a joint venture between Japan and Spain being the largest to date.
Malaysia is gravitating toward such grandiosity to take advantage of its two key advantages: price and location. Wages and other costs, notably rent, are 30% lower here than in neighbouring Singapore, which is only a half-hour drive away from the new zone. Malaysia hopes to lure businesses from Singapore, in part to offset a slowdown in its exports to the West, which have slumped since the credit crunch. It needs new sources of growth.
For the UAE, the attraction is the chance to offset the deep depression that has settled over the Gulf's once-white-hot economy, notably in Dubai. Limitless, a subsidiary of Dubai's state-backed port operator and property developer, Dubai World, is building a residential, commercial, leisure complex in Iskandar, called Puteri Harbour. And the Abu Dhabi investment house Mubadala is leading a consortium to sink $1.2 billion (U.S.) into another mixed-use project, known as Medini. Dubai World had plans for further development of Iskandar's Port of Tanjung Pelepas, but these are on hold owing to the financial crisis.
House prices in Dubai have fallen by as much as 50% from the 2007 peak, the big state-backed developers are being bailed out by the UAE Central Bank to the tune of $20 billion (U.S.), and even Dubai Ports World, the jewel in Dubai's crown, is seeing a decline in volumes and revenues. House prices and rents are falling in Abu Dhabi, too.
But does the world really need another East-meets-West hub? The world's new cities are already all too familiar. They have the same "international architecture," branded restaurants, homes in the same neutral tones, "culture-lite" character, and celebrity-designed golf courses (all of which somehow manage to look and feel the same even though they are in the Arabian desert of Southeast Asia). We-and Malaysia-deserve better than the urban equivalent of giant freeway service stations with everything we need but nothing we really want.
But there's a deeper, more substantive, objection. The new cities won't work. The global centres that are thriving today are not those that look like 21st-century copies of Pleasantville. If that model was attractive, we would all have moved to Switzerland years ago.
The 21st-century towns that will prosper are the ones with some grit in the oyster. No one goes to London, New York, Shanghai or Hong Kong for the weather or because the trains run on time. We go because, in spite of all the frustrations that growth and success bring, they have one key advantage: They attract the most creative people on the planet who want to surround themselves with other creative people. These types can spot a fake a mile off, and the Malaysia project is a fake of a fake: an outdated vision of the West, imported into the Gulf and repackaged for sale to unsuspecting Asian buyers. It belongs in a Hong Kong street market, alongside the suspiciously affordable "Rolex" watches and "Louis Vuitton" bags.