If you build it, they will come ... to Saadiyat Island

Urban sprawl or a balanced development? Deborah Lindsay Williams says we’ll just have to wait and see

In a place like Abu Dhabi, where so many of us are already from “somewhere else”, we can create a sense of community that goes beyond the walls of our compounds. Silvia Razgova / The National

I think of the view from my apartment on Saadiyat as a kind of litmus test for my mood. There are two perspectives: in the near view are strips of unfinished motorway, their neatly painted traffic lines vanishing into a sandy expanse that stretches hundreds of metres towards the horizon. If I take the long view, I look past the unfinished road to the cars zipping along Khalifa Highway and then beyond that, out to the Gulf, where the shifting colours of blue shade into the sky.

Looking out of the window becomes one of those “is the glass half-empty or half-full” questions: will I focus on the snarl of unbuilt roadways and sand, or on the serene spread of ocean?

When we first moved into this apartment, the stretch of sand outside our windows seemed rather grim, but I’ve come to appreciate that emptiness not only because when it’s finished the motorway will run almost directly underneath my apartment, but also because the patch of desert reminds me of a part of Abu Dhabi that is, quite literally, getting paved over with lightning speed.

Regardless of whether I give priority to the natural or the human-made landscape, my apartment feels like a viewing platform for Abu Dhabi’s expansion.

If I lean out of the window, I can see the bubble of the Louvre and in the other direction, the hotels and housing compounds of Saadiyat Beach march relentlessly towards the horizon. The swoops of motorway leading out to Yas remind me of the line from the movie Field of Dreams: “If you build it, they will come.”

Long ago, pioneers would settle somewhere and eventually roads would stretch out to the people. But now? The highways come first and suburban pioneers follow, filling the towers on Reem, the myriad developments of Al Raha, and Khalifa City.

Moving into a brand-new “community” has its frustrations: you move in thinking everything is in place and then you realise there’s no grocery store without a 25-minute drive, no place for the children to play other than the street in front of your house, and no one knows where you live because a few short months ago the whole neighbourhood was nothing more than a construction zone.

Driving directions become a sequence of “turn right at the third construction sign, then go past the place where they’re building something, then take a left where they’re building something else”. In the scheme of world problems, it’s not precisely hardship duty, but doesn’t it seem sometimes as if we’re all involved in a citywide game of “watch this space”, wondering what will emerge and when?

People talk about all these new neighbourhoods being “off-island”, but Yas, Saadiyat and Reem are also islands; it is the paradox of Abu Dhabi to be a desert surrounded by water. Bridges have been built between the islands, of course, so technically we are all connected, but sometimes it seems as if all the new construction has simply created smaller islands: we live in gated compounds, high-security apartment buildings, walled-off townhomes.

What does all this spreading into the desert mean for Abu Dhabi city proper, I wonder? How does a city maintain its sense of self as it reaches further outward? Are we headed for the attenuated sprawl of Los Angeles and long conversations about traffic jams and clever shortcuts, a city where entire neighbourhoods are unknown territories to one another? In a place like Abu Dhabi, where so many of us are already from “somewhere else”, can we create a sense of community that goes beyond the walls of our compounds?

Sometimes the view from my window makes me think we’re doomed to an LA-style sprawl; other times I think that as long as we can maintain the balance between desert and ocean, we’ll be fine. I guess we’ll just have to watch this space and see what happens.

Deborah Lindsay Williams is a professor of literature at NYU Abu Dhabi