Dubai’s signature architectural achievements, from its ridiculous skyscrapers to its already-sinking artificial islands, would only begin to make sense if constructed by a city with an extremely limited amount of land available to build on, not a city surrounded by huge swaths of empty desert.
Manhattan and Singapore didn’t just start building skyscrapers as dick-waving vanity projects, they started building skyscrapers because they have strictly limited geographical boundaries available to build on. Absent that condition it is rarely practical to build anything above ten stories or so.
