Bani-Yas Square and The Nearby Creek

The spectacular journey of Dubai: from a fishing village to the world's premier megalopolis

by Devasis Chattopadhyay (c)

Dubai Diary 4

Dubai is wonderfully sunny and hot during the day. A magical city during the night. It has incredible beaches, superlative skyscrapers, unbelievably efficient roads, and a rapid transit commuting network. It has an enormous number of international restaurants, watering holes, and every nationality of people around you. It has opulent and gargantuan shopping malls. And the world's tallest building - the Burj Khalifa - whose exterior is regularly used as a giant LED screen for light and sound shows, often congratulating movie star Shah Rukh Khan on his birthdays. Also, the 16-lane superfast main thoroughfare - Sheikh Zayed Road. Yet, practically every day, her traffic comes to a creaking halt on the opposite side of the city's Creek due to the congestion along the meandering narrow streets leading to this busy Square.??

The futuristic megalopolis of steel and glass skyscrapers and artificial islands also hosts a unique Museum of the Future. But it is not to forget that there is still a completely different side to Dubai, spanning the area north of Dubai Creek, in and around that busy Square, which was once the city's life force, and still represents her ethos.

Many ex-pat residents and most of the tourists rarely visit this congested yet historical and intriguing part of the city. This Square was the place that was once a part of the sleepy little village when members of the Bani-Yas tribe led by the ruling Maktoum family settled here at the mouth of the Creek around 200 years ago in 1833. The Creek is a natural harbour. It soon became a well-known destination for fishing, pearl, and other sea trades.

By the beginning of the last century, Dubai was a thriving port. The market on the northern side of the Creek and the Square was the largest on the coast. With 350 shops and a steady crowd of visitors and businessmen.

Welcome to the Baniyas square – the pivot of the history and heritage of Dubai.

In the mid-1950s, the Creek became blocked with silt. Then Ruler of Dubai, His Highness Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, decided to dredge the waterway. It was an ambitious and costly project. However, the act increased the volumes of cargo Dubai could handle. Ultimately it strengthened her position as a major trading and re-export hub.

Baniyas Square is a public square located in the central section of the Deira district in the centre of Dubai since the beginning of the city. Under the Square, currently, there is a rapid transit station with the same name on the Green Line of the Dubai Metro. The nearest metro station to the old neighbourhood of Naif and Al Sabkha.

Baniyas Square is also the hot spot for bargain shopping, filled with local artworks, textile products, carpets, rugs, dry fruits, electronic gadgets, glassware, and other goods. Close by at the Creek, there is the biggest wholesale fish market in Dubai, which has recently been relocated from its earlier spot.

Even today, on laid-back weekends, the Square and its surrounding areas become visibly alive. Though the architecture of the neighbouring buildings offers some touches of 'Arabia,' the goods bought and sold in the local shops, and the people milling around its busy streets give the Square an international character. Indigenous Kabab shops and McDonald's cohabit the space. Not far from the Square is a growing Chinatown. Indian and Pakistani merchants have also been hawking their fares for a long time in the area. Even recent migrants from the African continent throng the streets for their evening strolls or daily shopping.

In many ways, this Square still stands as a testimony to the early glory of Dubai as the Gulf region's premiere trading city. Just over half a century ago, this Square was the hangout of the engineers and workers who dredged Dubai Creek in 1963 to make it significantly broader. After oil was discovered three years later in Dubai, the economy went into overdrive. Dubai metamorphosed from a fishing and pearl trading centre to a hub of the gold and re-export trade, the economic gains that propelled the development on the other side of the Creek, turning the city into a steel-and-glass megalopolis.

Unlike the world's older metropolises, each carrying the burden of a long and complex past and constantly changing power equations, Dubai has the advantage of being built from the ground up by rulers who knew precisely how they wanted the city to look. Everything is planned and executed precisely: the government even grows palm trees in the desert and transplants them whenever a newly constructed site requires embellishing. An old tourism brochure says, "We have beach resorts and mountain ranges! Desert camps! And fancy cruises! Cavernous theme malls rubbing shoulders with heritage villages! Even a skiing slope, the only one in the Middle East!"

Since Dubai became a vital part of the UAE, the city has continued living life in the fast lane. But while the Creek allowed Dubai's re-export business to explode, the freeports in Jebel Ali, Al Hamriya, and the Airport Free Zone have further cemented its international status. And since then, the business activities went further away from the Dubai Creek, which now has turned into the Arabian version of the Seine in Paris with airconditioned dhows in place of tourist flatboats cruising along the Creek's shoreline for the benefit of the tourists.

Dubai had traditionally served as an entrep?t for trade between the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. Indian merchants dominated both the gold and textile trade. Dubai was also an important trading post for Indians before the discovery of oil in the UAE. The emirate was also at the centre of a smuggling route of gold via small boats to India when importing gold to India was illegal. Subcontinental subaltern operatives regularly sailed across the Arabian Sea in dhows carrying gold to the Indian ports of Bombay and sometimes Cochin, as per the intelligence experts of the bygone days.

While the Ports of Rashid and Jebel Ali represent the high-end scale of the current maritime activities in Dubai, a lower volume of trade still occurs around the dhows mooring alongside the Creek. Business with southern Somalia, for example, relies heavily on these smaller boats and is avoided by larger vessels. The areas in and around the Baniyas square near the Dubai creek, where the dhows anchored, became a home for traders and merchants not just from Africa but also from India, Pakistan, and Iran, turning the Creek into a genuinely global space for a long time.

Proclaimed the website for the Baniyas Square Project, 'Most cities may be said to have a centre – a central square which lies at a city's heart. Dubai, at first glance, lacks such a centre. Yet there is one – known officially as Baniyas Square…… this space is still representative of an 'authentic' Dubai. It has retained the erstwhile character, with its variety of shops and, most importantly, its cosmopolitan flavour'.

The Square has been a snapshot of the city. Many residents said that the changes within the Square represent transformations that have moved Dubai, within a half-a-century, from a small fishing and pearl trading village to a major centre for tourism, new media, financial services, and luxury. Dubai today is one of the fastest growing metropolitan cities in the world and is acknowledged as a critical economic and trading hub. An international city. The megalopolis. (end)