NEWS FROM THE UAE
SOURCE : THE NATIONAL
Villa rule risks education of expatriate children
DUBAI - NOV 03: Dubai Municipality’s “one villa, one family” campaign banning families from sharing villas has left hundreds of low-income expatriate families without homes.
Unable to afford rents in flats, many men are sending their wives and children home.
Children seeking admissions back in India are having trouble finding places and risk losing an entire academic year. “People have started moving out and there will be an exodus of low and middle-income families from the UAE after the present academic year,” said KV Shamsudheen, chairman of Pravasi Bandhu Welfare Trust.
“They will all be looking for admissions and it is important that the government is prepared.”
Mr Shamsudheen has sent an appeal letter to the minister for overseas Indian affairs, Vayalar Ravi, requesting a special order to state governments to provide admissions for all children affected.
“If they do not get seats, the future of thousands of children would be uncertain,” he said.
Low-income expatriate families share villas in areas such as Al Rashidiya, Satwa, Bur Dubai, Jumeirah and others to beat the growing rents and cost of living. However, Dubai Municipality’s decision to evict families sharing villas has left hundreds of them with no place to go.
Dubai Municipality’s deadline for moving out of shared villas expired on Oct 24 and inspectors are cutting utilities and fining violators.
“I have spoken to several families and they are holding on until the end of the academic year. The families are now desperately looking for cheap homes in other emirates like Umm al Quwain and Ras al Khaimah,” Mr Shamsudheen said.
An Indian resident of Al Rashidiya, who did not wish to be identified, said: “Many of us are holding on only because of our children’s education. We are desperately looking for a temporary place to live until this academic year is complete.”
She added that many of her friends would have to borrow money to pay advance rents at apartments.
“We are taking loans to hold on because schools in India are not accepting our children in midsemester. It is very difficult to get them into a decent school and we don’t want to ruin their future,” said the mother of two young girls.
She added that her family was even prepared to stay without water and electricity. “It’s the future of our children that matters.”
Meanwhile, Omar Mohammed Abdul Rahman, the head of buildings inspection at Dubai Municipality said yesterday that offenders, villa owners as well as tenants, will be fined up to Dh50,000 if they are found violating the villa rule.
Water and electricity supplies have also been cut off to several villas. In Al Rashidiya area, water and electricity supply to dozens of villas were cut off, families in the area said yesterday.
ID card registration strain
UAE - NOV 03:The national ID card programme is straining to deal with half a million people trying to meet the Dec 31 deadline, its project manager said yesterday.
Thamer al Qasemi of the Emirates Identity Authority blamed government employees and Emiratis for creating crowds by not registering earlier on in the year. He said their inaction had led to problems for everyone.
“You say that Emirates ID cannot handle 600,000 people now; I agree. I agree totally, it’s not logical,” he said. “According to our plans that we put together and the timing of our announcements since late summer, we were capable if people respected the law.
“I feel it is not the fault of those who are coming now, but of the nationals who are not registered or those who work for government agencies. They are now creating crowds and taking the slot of somebody else in another category. We have been here since 2006 trying to register nationals, but it is not until somebody tells them they could be fined that they come.
“We have a complete strategic team to plan for this. It’s not just a game – it is not someone coming and just announcing that tomorrow we want to do this.
“There is a whole team working on this, taking it very seriously, trying to make it as easy as possible. Such announcements existed since the late summer and nobody showed up. We did understand the numbers, we had the capacity every month, we knew that we could handle this but people came in at the last minute. It’s their responsibility not ours.”
“We cannot hire thousands more people and pay them a salary because people are late,” Mr Qasemi said.
Emiratis, who have been able to register since 2006, face Dh1,000 fines if they do not obtain ID cards by Jan 1. Expatriate professionals, including most residents with university degrees, without cards will not be fined until 2010, but have been told that they will not be able to access most government services, including health care, after Dec 31 this year.
Mr Qasemi said there was no plan to extend the deadline, but said it might be reviewed closer to the time. “We are not at all in a panic situation. We are going forward and we will see the facts towards the end of the year. For now we are sticking to the deadline and we will see how many we have registered and how many are left.”
The deadline for Emiratis has been in place for some time. However, it became common knowledge only last month that expatriate professionals would be denied access to services if they missed the same deadline.
Mr Qasemi said some Arabic media outlets had been told of the change towards the end of the summer, but the EIDA was under no obligation to make announcements in other languages and that it was the responsibility of every resident to be aware of the country’s laws.
“We live in the United Arab Emirates. We are going to stand by the directions of the President that this is the year of nationalism for this country and our main language is Arabic.”
Cities need to leave space for residents
UAE - NOV 03: If more people are destined to live in towering high-rise apartments, greater importance must be placed on the spaces in between, architects say.
Families living in blocks of flats rather than villas or townhouses have limited access to outdoor space, so the alleyways, parks, squares, patios and pavements that surround them – what planners refer to as the public realm – take on a more significant role that should help to create a sense of community.
George Katodrytis, associate professor of architecture at the American University of Sharjah, says too much emphasis has been placed on what buildings look like, on their façades. As a result, the public realm has been neglected.
The effect this has on a city, he says, is that people are able only to live in the city, not to truly inhabit it. Streets and pavements become a means to an end, never destinations in themselves.
“You need to be able to experience casual activity in a public landscape,” he says. “If planners don’t… see the city as a dynamic field of interaction, the city won’t work entirely as a social space.”
Comparing rapidly expanding cities such as Abu Dhabi and Dubai with established places such as Paris may not be fair, but vibrant streets like the Champs-Elysées are destinations for pedestrians, not just for shoppers.
The street’s wide pavements, the old trees that line it, the numerous benches, cafes with patios and shops amount to it being more than a way to move through the city. The Champs-Elysées has become a place – not just a street – where people want to be. Mr Katodrytis says the UAE needs to do more to create urban spaces like that.
Richard Wagner, an architect with Dubai-based DXB-Lab and vice president of the Architectural Association of the UAE, says all hope should not be lost. Both Abu Dhabi and Dubai are still early enough in their modernisation to develop vibrant public realms.
“As a pedestrian, you can only move so far. Once distances become too great you require other means of transportation,” he says. “One solution would be to give the city a chance to grow on a pedestrian scale.”
The way to accomplish that was to employ infill programmes – a means of reinvigorating underused urban space, usually by creating small businesses and outdoor recreation centres and rehabilitating historic buildings for new uses.
Such change, Mr Wagner says, must come from the authorities and large-scale developers.
How pedestrians interact with the urban landscape is predictable. People will naturally seek a short cut when walking. That happens organically, though the built environment has to be conducive to it.
“There needs to be an understanding that even though rigid planning may seem to be the key …. It can easily backfire and kill the basic idea of a city by being too limiting.”
Mr Katodrytis says that while the authorities have a responsibility to direct development, architects are largely to blame for seeing their projects in a vacuum.
“There is a tendency among architects to see their buildings as a self-preferential expression of themselves, without a wider context,” he says. “There needs to be a collective awareness that makes the city relate to what happens on the ground. Many of Dubai’s skyscrapers relate more to the sky than to the street.”
Jean Philippe Coulaud, a spokesman for the Abu Dhabi Urban Planning Council, says that under the Abu Dhabi Plan 2030, communal space is given as much priority as individual buildings, with additional park space and gardens included in the plans.
Mr Katodrytis says part of the trouble with top-down creation of communal space is that it does not allow for the organic evolution of an area to meet the needs of the people who use it. He says the alleys behind Dubai’s gold souq are the city’s most successful area.
“It’s not beautiful; it’s dirty, unpredictable, messy, but it’s interesting,” he says. “The area has been allowed the time to change with the spontaneous will of the people. It feels like a real culture. When you’re there, you feel like you are participating in real public space.”