The German magazine, Der Spiegel is speculating that the American credit crunch will lead to less urban development in the West. Simultaneously, Asian and Middle Eastern countries are wallowing in their newly found wealth, building more outlandish structures by the minute.
I can’t see this as anything but a positive development for North America. There’s hardly a day that goes by that I don’t read a press release about some new, random or weird five-star hotel being built in Dubai or China.
Not only is it embarrassing to see such frivolous spending in developing nations, when money could be better spent on eliminating starvation and poverty, but it’s also an annoying eyesore for the rest of the population.
Personally, I’m glad engineers are planning on building these structures so far away from me. If I lived in any of these places, I’d have serious aesthetic and moral objections to such developments.
What do you think?
Tell me in the TravelPod travel forums.
See you there,
Louise Brown
TravelPod Community Manager
October 29, 2008 at 2:20 pm
I think you’re an elitist prick.
January 17, 2009 at 9:38 pm
umm, UAE isn’t developing, it’s already developed. It’s per capita income is among the highest in the world. Both China and the UAE have billions of dollars to spend on these types of projects with billions more left over.
January 19, 2009 at 10:28 am
China and the UAE are indeed both countries with a significant amount of undernourished people.
See map here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Percentage_population_undernourished_world_map.PNG