Looking down on Dubai, the parallels are hard to ignore. A few decades ago, much of this really was a blank canvas. What we see now is the result of extraordinarily fast decisions, capital, and confidence, played out at scale.

In the game, growth was the reward. If you got it right, the city flourished. If you got it wrong, districts declined. Buildings darkened. Citizens left. Urban decay was crude but visible.

I never reached the end of Sim City 2000. Apparently, it concluded with an “exodus”, with vast arcologies - massive, self-contained, with ecologically sustainable habitats - launching into space to form new civilisations on distant planets.

It’s safe to say that Dubai is unlikely to follow that storyline! However, the underlying question still applies. How does a city designed for rapid growth sustain itself over time?

A city that keeps building

One afternoon during our holiday, from the harbour, I counted around forty cranes in the immediate vicinity. Construction feels constant. New developments appear quickly and, just as quickly, people seem to fill them and the population numbers help explain why. Dubai’s resident population passed 4.2 million by the end of 2024, up sharply year on year. The city’s demographic structure matters too. Roughly nine out of ten residents are non-Emirati. Dubai is one of the most internationally mobile urban populations in the world.

That mobility is not accidental. In addition to attracting construction workers and hospitality staff, Dubai actively positions itself as a base for entrepreneurs, startups and remote workers. Visa frameworks, free zones and business districts are designed to make short and medium-term relocation attractive and viable. From a commercial property perspective, this creates demand for speed, flexibility and amenity, not just space.

This is where Dubai’s version of placemaking starts to look different.

Placemaking at macro scale

In most historic cities, placemaking tends to happen slowly and locally. A street improves. An old building finds a new use. A cluster of cafés or studios forms almost by accident. Over time, people become attached to places without quite knowing why.

Dubai’s placemaking often operates at a different scale. Entire districts are launched with a purpose, a sector focus, and a global audience in mind. Financial services at DIFC, technology and media clusters at Dubai Media City. Large international cultural and sporting events are used to project identity outward, not just inward. This macro approach works. It creates visibility. It attracts talent and capital. It gives people a reason to arrive.

What is less clear, and more interesting, is whether it creates long-term attachment.

Space for entrepreneurs and remote workers

There is real evidence that Dubai is not just talking about startups and remote work but building for them.
Much of the innovation is not about radical new building forms, but about how space, regulation and fit-out are combined. Flexible offices, serviced desks, short-term licences, sector-specific hubs, and heavily amenitised districts are designed to remove friction. For a small business or a remote worker, the city tries to behave like a plug-and-play system.

From an urban perspective, this is fascinating. Instead of neighbourhoods evolving organically, Dubai often curates conditions upfront at scale. It is Sim City logic brought into the real world. Identify a need, zone for it, build the infrastructure, attract users, then scale.

To paraphrase the voices in Kevin Costner’s head: “If you build it, they will come”.

However, the risk, as in the game, comes later.

The problem of ageing

Walking along Dubai’s famous waterfront, there is a clear visual distinction between buildings completed recently and those built around twenty years ago. The older stock is not obsolete, but it looks and feels different. Design language changes quickly in Dubai. Expectations change too.

In mature cities, ageing buildings are often a strength. Offices become apartments. Warehouses become studios. Use changes without the place losing its identity. In fast-growth cities, the test is whether early phases can adapt rather than simply be replaced. Refurbishment, repositioning and reinvention matter as much as the next headline tower.

This is where the Sim City analogy becomes useful again. In the game, cities rarely declined because they stopped growing. They declined because earlier areas stopped making sense. Infrastructure aged. Budgets strained. The system lost balance.
Dubai is still young in urban terms. Its real challenge is not attracting the next wave of entrepreneurs or remote workers but making sure yesterday’s districts still work for the next generation of occupiers.

What this means for real estate

For developers, investors and occupiers, the question is not whether Dubai can keep building. It clearly can. The question is whether longevity comes from constant novelty, or from adaptability. Is macro placemaking enough, or will sustainable growth come from the quieter, more complex process of letting places change use, character and meaning over time? In markets built at speed, the risk is not year one. It is year twenty or thirty.

Sim City made cities feel controllable from above. Real cities are messier. Dubai now sits somewhere between the two. It’s no longer a blank canvas, and not yet a mature, layered city.

How it manages that transition will be far more interesting than the next crane on the skyline.