Alabbar is a towering Dubai figure

Even after almost seven years of overseeing the US$1.5 billion (Dh5.51bn) construction of the world’s tallest man-made structure, the Emaar Properties chairman Mohamed Alabbar still finds himself sneaking peeks at the finished product.

“I’m like a child,” he said, looking out from his office near the foot of the Burj Dubai. Visitors to the tower, he said, might even spot him standing among the crowds, looking upwards and marvelling. “I say, ‘Oh my God. I can’t believe we did this.’”

The Burj Dubai’s scheduled opening today marks not only a record-setting triumph of engineering but a watershed in Dubai’s whirlwind economic development. The building culminates an explosive, debt-fuelled tear of growth that was derailed by the global financial crisis, but not before establishing a once-sleepy port town as the pulsing, cosmopolitan centre of an increasingly dynamic region.