Dubai’s forest of cranes grows thin

Image by Elvis John Ferrao via Flickr

The last crane at the top of the Burj Dubai will come down soon, and that’s really the story of Dubai’s fast-disappearing crane culture. As existing projects are completed and the economic slowdown takes its toll on new construction, the city’s forest of cranes is thinning out and its skyline is noticeably changing.

At the peak of the building boom in 2006, the apocryphal statistic that Dubai had between 15 and 25 per cent of the world’s tower cranes was widely reported.

Some said there could be as many as one tower crane for every 44 residents. But industry experts say that while such “facts” made good headlines, they were unlikely to have ever been true.