His Book

Abu Dhabi—an obscure Middle Eastern principality that happens to be the richest city in the world. This book tells the story of Abu Dhabi’s ambitions to transform itself from a sleepy sheikhdom into a thriving international metropolis and a hub of business and leisure. It traces Abu Dhabi’s boom years from 2009 to 2011 from the perspective of a Westerner working for the Urban Planning Council, the government agency that planned and coordinated all of the massive development activity.Castles in the Sand explores the drastic changes in Abu Dhabi’s built environment, where entire islands are forested with skyscrapers and billions of dollars in infrastructure are spent on a whim—while recounting the disorienting experience of an outsider encountering a society in which foreigners outnumber locals nine to one and modernity clashes head-on with centuries of embedded tradition. General readers will find a broad introduction to Abu Dhabi, and architects and planners will gain a firsthand glimpse inside an unprecedented experiment in city-building

“A must-read! This book will be enjoyed by residents of Abu Dhabi (current, former, and future), visitors to the region, city planners, architects, and anyone else who enjoys a glimpse into urban life at a moment in time. Michael Dempsey’s writing captures his experiences in way that brought me into the story. Read this book. It’s worth it.”“Superb insight into how the UAE operates at this time. Great to have a westerner’s inside perspective. Also appreciated the clearly written background on the country’s history.”“It is a terrific piece of work. Of course, as I would get absorbed in it and chuckle a bit every page or two, I would recall who had written it and that there would be no more books. Mike had a discerning eye, sharp intellect, good heart and perfect pitch sense of humor. I have recommended the book to friends now in Abu Dhabi.”“I purchased the book and recently finished reading it. My original plan was to read a few chapters and then pass it on. That said, once I started reading it, I wanted to read it all. It is well-written, and I learned a great deal, not only about Michael’s experiences but also about the Middle East. Today when I read articles about Abu Dhabi, I feel so much better informed. He painted a clear picture of his time in Abu Dhabi and the historical perspectives he wove into the text show an good understanding of historical precedents elsewhere. It is a wonderful publication.”“I have been in and out of Abu Dhabi for 7 years. This book is one of the best and most interesting.”“I remember sitting in Abu Dhabi, me working on school work, and Mike working on his book. He’d periodically have me read some of his manuscript, and I remember remarking on what a gifted writer he was.”

Journal of the American Planning Association, Winter 2016, Vol. 82, No. 1Reviewed by Lesli Hoey and Margaret Dewar, University of MichiganMichael Dempsey’s Castles in the Sand is an unusual book. Practicing urban planners rarely have the time and inclination to write books about their work. Even rarer is the practitioner who writes about urban planning internationally. Dempsey offers an engaging narrative of work and life in Abu Dhabi, drawing on his own experiences as well as news articles, historical accounts, data, and novels about the Middle East. Throughout he sees the humor and irony in everyday life, even as he communicates his discomfort with the many contradictions he witnesses. In achieving this, Dempsey contributes a valuable resource as increasing numbers of planners work outside the United States. The book would be useful in a range of urban planning courses as educators aim to introduce more international materials to the curriculum. Planners aiming to work abroad or in firms with contracts in rapidly growing world regions could learn much from Dempsey’s account.After working in Detroit and Iraq, Dempsey took a job with the Urban Planning Council (UPC) in Abu Dhabi from 2009 through 2011, a time of hyper-development. Dempsey admits that he found himself on the UPC’s transport team without having taken a single class on transportation. He and his equally ill-prepared colleagues took charge of creating and linking the city’s new subway system to existing tram lines and bus lanes, managing the expanding network of new roads and highways, and designing a national railway that would run from Saudi Arabia to Oman. Even when staff worked in their area of expertise, they were overextended; one colleague needed to manage plans covering an “area the size of Switzerland” (p. 49). As one supervisor explained, “Abu Dhabi has a way of turning experts into fools….We’re all novices here” (p. 23).Dempsey learned other realities that his planning classes never taught, quickly realizing that a 30-year plan meant nothing in a boomtown. The fast pace of change meant that the UPC made many decisions with little information about the scale of developments already under way. Knowing who to plan for was also complicated: Only one-quarter of the 1.6 million residents were nationals. Abu Dhabi, Dempsey came to realize, relies on outsiders to build and make the city function, especially Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi laborers working in construction, waste collection, and services. Other migrants serve as accountants, engineers, doctors, and even planners. Living in Abu Dhabi also taught Dempsey about the daily effects of boomtown growth, as he comically describes a haircut experience, finding a place to live, driving around the city, and other mishaps that are a function of new cultures and fast changing places.The book will have its critics. Social scientists may question the outsider perspective Dempsey offers on cultural norms and changing practices. He describes what he saw as a public health crisis, the breakdown of the family, and the erosion of traditional customs as Emirati embraced modernity. He sees a governance system that rests on the whims of oil-rich sheikhs who own most of the city’s companies. He reacts to the aesthetics, functionality, and safety of the precarious, frenetic construction and questions the management of public space and destruction of ecosystems. Throughout he observes the depth of inequality, contrasting the support network that seemed to hand Emirati nearly everything they needed, even as immigrant laborers were forced into exploitive working and living conditions. He is critical as well, however, of his and his colleagues’ changing personal ethics and opulent lifestyles, tempted by remarkable pay, benefits, and access to similar opulence as the elites they critiqued.While Dempsey incorporates some data and historical references throughout the book to contextualize his observations, many will likely want more evidence. Cultural anthropologists who know the Middle East and Abu Dhabi well might point out misinterpretations. To his credit, the cultural commentary that runs throughout the book also shows how personal and honest Dempsey is willing to be. We hear too rarely the inner thought processes of planners that give rise to knee-jerk decisions or problematic interactions with clients and colleagues. Dempsey tells the reader when he realized he was wrong, acknowledging that he could not explain many cultural practices. In his epilogue, he also draws insightful parallels between how Westerners like him might view Abu Dhabi and how Europeans might have viewed periods of frenzied expansion in the United States, including in his hometown of Detroit.Dempsey left Abu Dhabi as the city’s housing market began to crash in 2011, moving on to employment with the U.S. Agency for International Development in Afghanistan. Sadly, Dempsey died in Michigan in August of 2013. We wish he could have continued to share what he saw in some of the most frenetic and understudied planning contexts in the world. Castles in the Sand is a testament to the types of personal, readable, and thought-provoking books that can enrich our understanding of planning practice.

Michael’s book is, in my mind, similar to Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, with Abu Dhabi instead of Madrid, bulldozers instead of bulls, and workaholism instead of alcoholism. Indeed, at the heading of its epilogue, he quotes the same Bible book that gave the title to Hemingway’s novel, to describe the same theme: vanity.The book will not make you fall in love with Abu Dhabi, but is a must-read for those who are already in love with the UAE’s capital. The title continues to be misleading, between literalness and irony, until the very end, as only one example of its suspensefulness: whether the Arab oil boomtown is a standing miracle that has stemmed from its own land, or whether it’s a civilization that does not belong to it—a civilization that, like the peace in Baghdad, needs to be continuously funded and is not expected to be established, is for the reader to speculate. Michael had hope that I do not share, even after he chose to leave the UAE and go to Afghanistan, but his hope did not compromise his professional vision and suggestions.

I do not know, as I’m sitting locked in my hotel room in Grants Pass, OR, waiting for a tornado alert to pass, what tempted me to read the book, in one sitting, to the very end. I worked as an engineer for eight years, and I have read numerous engineering studies on urban planning, but hardly any of them had the linguistic beauty that matched, for example, Riis’s How the Other Half Lives on New York City, and Michael’s book is only another proof that the rich vocabulary, the search for the soul of the site, the personal touch, and the heart for the career and the cause, can make such a study a literary reading. – Wissam Al-Ithawi

To purchase Castles in the Sand, please visit the McFarland website by clicking the link here: Purchase*** Note: Author proceeds directly support the Fund.