More heart, less bricks

Many of us will have been on holiday and returned enthusing about a new city. Not everyone then plans to build a version of the city in their home town. Buti Saeed Al Gandhi is not everyone.
Al Gandhi, boss of Eminvest, a Dubai-based investment firm, is to build a version of the French city Lyon in Dubai. He is reported to have firmed plans after traveling to the city as part of a scheme to design a new French-language university in Dubai. The university plans remain, but it will now form part of a huge new district featuring public squares, restaurants, outdoor cafes and museums. French urban planners are on board and the project is expected to complete in 2012.
"We're not going to just copy the buildings and make a type of Lyon decor, but reinstitute the city's atmosphere with boutiques and cultural places in the heart of the city, transport, a social mix, streets and lanes," said urban specialist Jean-Paul Lebas, who is working on the project.
Al Gandhi could have picked a worse city to fall in love with. Lyon is famed as the home of French gastronomy; two of France's best known wine-growing regions are located nearby the Beaujolais to the north, and the Côtes du Rhône to the south; and parts of the city were named as UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 1998. It is the birthplace of cinema and has an agreeable summer temperature of around 27°.
How well wine, pork sausages and French art house cinema will translate in Dubai is anyone’s guess, but Al Gandhi needs to be commended for aiming to recreate an atmosphere, rather than just the architecture. With Dubai absent from any of the ‘world’s most livable city’ charts, it is no surprise to see developers go for the quick-fix solution: rebuild winning formats from elsewhere in the world.
What can we expect next? Business Week’s annual survey, conducted by Mercer Human Resource Consulting, ranks cities by political stability, currency-exchange regulations, political and media censorship, school quality, housing, the environment and public safety. Zurich, topped the list last year, followed by Geneva, and Vancouver and Vienna tied for third. The full list, including slideshow, is here.
Four of the ten most livable cities surveyed by the Economist Intelligence Unit are in Australia, and two of the top five are Canadian. Vancouver is the most attractive destination, Melbourne second. A developed public transport system is a high priority.
Monocle magazine rates Munich as its number one, with a winning combination of investment in infrastructure, high-quality housing, low crime, liberal politics and strong media. Copenhagen and Zurich are second and third.
There may be some differences in the three rankings, but all agree that ‘soft’ features (media freedom, political freedom, laws) are as important as ‘hard’ (transport, housing). Al Gandhi’s Little Lyon will do well to remember this.