Strip away the delivery and he was describing something real. The world's thinking on AI has split into two clean avenues: go fast, because otherwise you get left behind, or put the brakes on, because otherwise you risk losing everything. Washington has picked its avenue and is in no doubt about it.

And nowhere was that split clearer than on one single Wednesday earlier this month. On 2 September the Mayor of New York banned AI from every classroom in the city up to the age of 14 - nearly 600,000 kids - for a year while the effects are studied. On the very same day, the UAE made AI compulsory in every school in the country, public and private, from kindergarten up. One day, same question - completely opposite answers.

The safeguards exist. What's missing is anyone building them together.

I've been on both sides of this one. In my UK government days I was in the room for the conversations on AI and digital adoption policy, and I ran a city region whose whole mission was to digitally transform itself to work better and cost less (and I have the scars to prove it). I now live and work in Dubai, alongside a government that has decided AI isn't a policy area at all - it's the new operating system. So I'm seeing this first-hand, on a weekly basis. And I think both sides are missing the same thing. The President is right about the race. Where he's wrong, and where the Gulf comes in, is the assumption that how fast you run is the only way to "win" it.

Two very divergent paths

Western Europe has chosen caution: a very entrenched, very old-fashioned caution. The EU's AI Act is the perfect example, a rulebook so heavy that this summer Brussels had to delay its own flagship high-risk rules to 2027 and 2028, because nobody was ready for them. Europe wrote the rules before it built anything. Now it's delaying the rules and still not building anything.

America, the Middle East and, to be fair, China have gone the other way. Here the worry isn't what AI might do to people, it's being left behind. And the machinery of government runs accordingly. Since January the UAE's national AI system has sat as an advisory member of the Cabinet and of every federal board, and the target is agentic AI running 50% of government operations within two years. Nobody here is asking whether to adopt. They're embedding it deep into the Government and running as fast as the tech will allow.

The kids and the concrete

The physical manifestation of the digital rush tells the same story. In Abu Dhabi, the first 200MW phase of Stargate UAE - the foundation of the 5GW UAE-US AI campus - is well underway, barely 16 months after it was announced. In the UK meanwhile, data centres are queuing up to 15 years for a grid connection, and Whitehall's 'big ambition' is to cut planning consent from 18 months to 12. That sounds like progress until you remember that the Abu Dhabi campus went from announcement to poured foundations in less time than that. Forget enabling adoption; Britain can't even get the diggers in.

What that means in practice should worry any modern nation. Capital, talent and compute go where they're welcome and where they can actually be built. Western Europe is being left behind - on investment, on skills, on talent - because it's blocking every avenue.

Which brings me back to those two Wednesday decisions. As a parent with kids in a Dubai school, I know which one I'd want. Not because AI in a classroom is risk-free - it clearly isn't, and a 10-year-old with a chatbot doing their homework isn't learning anything - but because the UAE's approach is to educate kids for the world they actually live in, not the one we'd like them to live in. What AI is, how it gets things wrong, how to check it, and when not to use it at all. Banning it is putting our kids' heads in the sand. And if you don't expose them to something that's going to be a vital part of their lives, don't be surprised when it overtakes them rather than the other way round.

The bit nobody is doing

So do the fast movers have it right? On adoption, yes. But there's a bit missing, and it's missing everywhere. The safeguards exist. What's missing is anyone building them together.

It isn't that the Gulf is careless on safeguards - a lazy accusation from people who haven't looked. In June the UAE set up a new federal authority for AI and data, reporting straight to Cabinet, precisely to set the standards. It signed the Paris AI declaration when Washington wouldn't. The real point is different: every country, and every lab, is doing its safeguarding on its own. A model trained in one country, deployed in a second and used by a company in a third doesn't care whose rulebook it's under. Safeguards done in isolation aren't really safeguards, they're just gestures.

The reason we got here is a failure on both sides. The safety camp built its institutions - Bletchley, Seoul, the safety institutes - on the assumption that safety means slowing down. So the builders decided the whole thing was a brake and, at Paris, walked out of the room. We've ended up with a safety conversation with no builders in it, and a building race with no safety conversation in it.

If you want proof that the premise is still the problem, look at the last fortnight. Dario Amodei of Anthropic published an essay calling for the frontier labs to slow down together, and Sam Altman and Elon Musk both said he was right. Within two days the American President had dismissed the lot of it, and at the UN this week he made it official. The builders finally asked to do something together and, because the something was a brake, their own government said no.

So what?

It doesn't need to be a binary choice. Safeguards, yes. Getting left behind, no. The way to get both is a broad international coalition on safety, built from the start on the understanding that this isn't about clipping anyone's wings. The opposite of a scheme of control: unashamedly pro-adoption, with a remit that rules out telling any country or company how fast to go.

What it does instead is three things. Agree how far is too far: the handful of genuine red lines that every serious player already accepts in principle and nobody has written down together. Agree how safety and security get embedded as AI goes into government, critical infrastructure and defence, before a power grid goes down and we find out what was missing. And broad policy alignment, so a business deploying AI across 20 countries isn't navigating 20 rulebooks and quietly picking the loosest. Not one regulator. A common floor, and above it, a race.

Who builds the track?

Who convenes it? Not Brussels, which nobody building anything currently trusts. Not Washington alone, which nobody else will accept. The obvious candidate is the one region the fast movers trust because it's one of them, that has shown it will sign up to international commitments, that is building the institutions to make them stick, and that is one of the very few places Washington and Beijing will both actually turn up.

The Gulf could host this. Given how quickly things get built here, it probably should. The countries that work out how to keep a keen eye on safety, together, without leaving the next generation behind on what is probably a bigger moment of change than the industrial revolution (on that, at least, the President and I agree) - they'll own the next 20 years.

Sources

Remarks by the US President to the UN General Assembly, 22 September 2026, as reported by Fox News and IBTimes. NYC Mayor's Office, statement on the one-year moratorium on student-facing generative AI, 2 September 2026. Khaleej Times, UAE Cabinet approves AI curriculum for all public and private schools, 3 September 2026. UAE Cabinet announcements on the National AI System joining Cabinet and federal boards (June 2025) and the Federal Authority for AI and Data (June 2026). European Commission, Digital Omnibus on AI, in force 27 July 2026. Paris AI Action Summit declaration and signatories, February 2025. Barbour ABI, UK data centre pipeline analysis, August 2026; Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, AI Growth Zones policy paper. G42 and OpenAI, Stargate UAE announcement, May 2025. Axios, 12 September 2026, and NPR, 13 September 2026, on the Amodei essay, the responses from Altman and Musk, and the President's remarks.

Fun fact: rare earth metals aren't rare. There's more of them in the Earth's crust than copper. The problem is that they're scattered rather than concentrated, and chemically they cling to each other, so pulling them apart is slow, dirty and expensive.

That's important because of rare earths' critical position in the world's economy, both now and in the future. Because they're in the magnets that make every electric motor, wind turbine and hard drive work (and most of the guided weapons in the world). There is simply no substitute at scale. You can design a motor to use less of them, but you can't design the physics away!

Beijing didn't happily stumble into this position. It got there by being the one country prepared to build the plants.

China mines well over half the world's supply, but refines over ninety percent of it and makes nearly all of the magnets. The refining is the bit that counts. The standard method is solvent extraction: hundreds of separation stages, vast quantities of acid, and a plant so capital-intensive that almost no one outside a state is willing to build one. Which is why, for most miners on most continents, it's actually cheaper to dig the ore up and ship it to China than to process it at home. Beijing didn't happily stumble into this position. It got there by being the one country prepared to build the plants, and the West has spent the last five years and several billion dollars trying to catch up the same way, one giant refinery at a time.

Making refining small

The research my friend was excited about takes a different route. Instead of building bigger plants, it asks whether refining can be made small. Two strands stand out. The first is biological: a protein called lanmodulin, which bacteria use to grab rare earths, binds them so selectively that in the lab it has separated neodymium from dysprosium at over ninety-eight percent purity in a single pass, with far gentler chemistry and no hundred-stage cascade. That's already leaving the lab. A Colorado company, Alta Resource Technologies, is testing its engineered-protein process on ore from one of North America's largest deposits, and its whole pitch is a modular, lower-capital refinery. The second strand is nanotechnology (perhaps concerningly for lovers of the incredible Apple TV series Silo!): magnetic particles coated to grab specific elements out of solution and then pulled out with a magnet, and layered oxides with channels that sort the elements by size. A Chicago team reported ninety-seven percent pure neodymium after two cycles this summer, with no organic solvents at all. The proteins are the nearer bet; the nano work is further out but more radical. But both do the same - strip back the laborious hundred-plus step refining process to a simple, portable model.

What it means for the Gulf

So what does this mean for the region I'm operating in? Quite a lot, I think. The Middle East is fast becoming a hotbed of exactly this kind of innovation, in minerals and energy above all. Saudi Arabia has already committed to the conventional route: Ma'aden and America's MP Materials, with US government money behind them, are building the region's first rare earth refinery in the Kingdom, on the strength of cheap energy, serious infrastructure and a location between the mines and the markets. Those are the same conditions that would favour the modular version, and there's a great deal of capital here looking for the next thing.

Because the prize is bigger than one plant. If either of these technologies can clear the hard bar of working on messy real-world ore rather than clean lab solutions, the refinery stops being a national monument and becomes something the size of a shipping container that you park next to the mine. Australia, Brazil, Vietnam, half of Africa: all shipping separated oxides rather than raw ore. That's important for the world, because the deposits are spread across it. But it's an even bigger prize for whoever nails the technology first, state or private company, because the leverage that currently sits in one place would move to them. Geopolitically, it has the added advantage in the eyes of many of eroding the leverage China currently has in monopolising this vital resource.

If, or perhaps when, this refining revolution is nailed, China's days as the only game in town for rare earths could be numbered. The question is who ends up holding the container.

Sources

International Energy Agency, Rare Earth Elements: Pathways to Secure and Diversified Supply Chains, revised May 2026. Mattocks et al., Enhanced rare-earth separation with a metal-sensitive lanmodulin dimer, Nature, 2023. Mont Royal Resources and Alta Resource Technologies joint study agreement, 31 August 2026. University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, layered manganese oxide separation, July 2026. Ma'aden and MP Materials binding term sheet, 19 November 2025.

I welcome this without reservation, and I say that as a Conservative who spent five years leading local and regional government nationally. There is more continuity here than either party cares to admit: Michael Gove's department did much of the spadework for this settlement, and the direction of travel has survived four Prime Ministers. After much talk, devolution is no longer a debate. It is happening.

Powers without capacity

Which is precisely why an uncomfortable truth needs stating now, before the white paper is written, and it is one the Prime Minister will recognise from his nine years in a Mayoralty. Having the power to decide is not the same as having the capacity to deliver. I have sat at the table with successive Secretaries of State wrestling with why housebuilding at scale so rarely happens. I have run a Council that owned billions of pounds of stalled regeneration sites, and I founded the delivery company built to unlock them. From all three seats, I reached the same conclusion: the new landscape has a missing layer, and unless it is filled deliberately, the powers now flowing to Mayors and regions will not turn into homes.

Handing Mayors sweeping powers without delivery machinery beneath them does not devolve responsibility; it devolves blame.

Delivery rarely fails for want of a 'power'. Governments of both colours have reached repeatedly for the same instruments - a new funding pot, a new target, a new promise to 'build, build, build' - and none of it has moved the dial, because the fundamental and binding constraint sits below the level at which those interventions operate. It sits on individual sites, where a specific drainage problem, a specific road junction, a specific viability gap or a specific stand-off between landowner and authority is holding back thousands of homes. The patient, site-by-site graft of establishing precisely what is stuck and why is the work almost nobody does, because it is slow, unglamorous and does not fit a press release. And above the site level sits a second tier of blockages that only make sense regionally: where the water comes from, where the grid capacity lies, how a dozen landholdings might be assembled into a place worth building. Tackled singly, these problems are often insurmountable. Tackled strategically, they usually are not.

Neither existing tier of the new system, the strategic mayoral authorities or the powerful slew of new unitary councils, is equipped for this work. The strategic authorities are lean by design: small teams, huge geographies. The new unitaries are consumed by the sheer effort of their own reorganisation. I have seen where that combination leads. Asked to review a combined authority in difficulty, I found a powerful Mayor with a clear direction of travel and, beneath him, constituent councils unconvinced and unwilling, with no neutral ground between them. The result was not delivery but the slow grind of disagreement, energy spent contesting authority rather than getting anything out of the ground. That was not a failure of individuals. Rather it was a structural prediction, and the new map simply multiplies the conditions for it.

A new layer to speed up delivery

So here is the proposal. Between the strategic authority and the unitaries, convene a new layer: call them Place Delivery Partnerships. Their purpose is narrow. Take the basket of significant sites in a region, establish - site by site - where each is stuck, and surface that diagnosis in a way decision-makers cannot ignore - then hold the ring while mayor and councils act on it.

Two design principles matter above all. The first is that these bodies must be expert-led and politically neutral: populated by people who have actually built things - master developers, housebuilders, engineers, land managers - alongside voices with deep local knowledge. Ironically, given my background, I would go further: elected politicians should be kept out of this layer entirely. A politician's proper role is to set direction and hold delivery to account, not to sit in the engine room. Keeping politics out of one layer is a healthy counterweight in a system where politics is, rightly, present nearly everywhere else - and at a moment when control of councils and mayoralties is fragmenting across parties, an apolitical delivery function is insulated from electoral swings in a way no politically owned body can be.

The second is the honest broker function. Because a Place Delivery Partnership sits between the mayor and the unitaries, trusted by neither more than the other, it can do what neither can do alone. When a mayor's strategy collides with a council's instincts, an independent, evidence-led body in the middle is the difference between resolution and judicial review.

What makes this unusually practical is that it requires no legislation, no quango, no Whitehall machinery exercise. The devolution settlement already gives mayors a statutory power to convene local partners, with a matching duty on those partners to respond. Any willing mayor could stand up a Place Delivery Partnership tomorrow, with a handful of priority sites and a small expert panel, at negligible cost, with results measurable within a year. The autumn white paper should go one better and build the function into the architecture as standard - a standing capability available to every region, not an occasional luxury commissioned by the most capable.

A clear mandate

The Treasury's first question will be what this costs. The honest answer is that a delivery layer designed properly should reduce calls on the public purse, not add to them. To ensure this however, its mandate should be optimistic and clear: find the cheapest credible route to unlocking each site, treating central subsidy as the last resort. Where a long-term interest in a place is retained rather than built out and sold on, patient capital funds infrastructure over longer horizons and certainty itself drives the value uplift that closes viability gaps. That is a proposition a Chancellor can say yes to, and it is entirely of a piece with a governing philosophy that rejects both leaving everything to the market and reaching first for the chequebook.

The Prime Minister has more riding on this than anyone. A premiership built on the proposition that places can deliver where Whitehall cannot will be judged, funnily enough, on whether the places deliver. Every stalled site in a mayoral region is now, politically, his stalled site. Handing Mayors sweeping powers without delivery machinery beneath them does not devolve responsibility; it devolves blame. Place Delivery Partnerships are the insurance policy on the whole project - and because they are apolitical by design, they can be offered to Conservative, Reform and Liberal Democrat mayors without a flicker of embarrassment.

The powers are already on the statute book. The money is starting, finally, to move. The task now, this autumn, is to make sure there is something underneath strong enough to bear the weight. Fill the missing layer, keep it expert, point it at the sites that matter, and instruct it to unlock them cleverly rather than expensively. Do that, and this government has a chance of building not just more homes, but better places that last. That, after all, is the point.

I did this alongside running one of the UK's fastest growing city regions, again balancing city-wide crisis management with "bounce back" initiatives. Later, leading a major public/private urban regeneration company with a multi-billion pound pipeline, I saw the same story from the corporate side: how businesses that read the recovery early, and positioned themselves for the wave of government activity, came out of it far stronger than those who waited for certainty that never quite arrived.

I now find myself watching the same film for a second time, except this time from Dubai, where I run my own business and where my current work alongside the Dubai government gives me a fairly close view of how this city's leadership is thinking. My conclusion is simple, and it is the reason I wanted to write this piece: the conflict earlier this year was Dubai's pandemic 2.0 moment, and Dubai is responding to it exactly as it responded last time - at pace, at scale, and with a level of conviction that most governments can only dream of mustering.

Most governments facing a regional crisis would quietly shelve a project like that. Dubai brought it forward and told the world about it.

Consider what has already happened, much of it while parts of the Western press were still busy writing the region off with their now familiar DDS (Dubai Derangement Syndrome!). Within days of the conflict reaching the UAE, the Crown Prince personally gathered hundreds of business leaders and asked three refreshingly direct questions: what will bring tourists back, what will bring investors back, and how can we support your business? What followed was not a consultation paper but a rolling programme of action - a 1 billion AED support package by the end of March, then a second 1.5 billion AED package in May, with 33 separate initiatives spanning tourism, trade and logistics, real estate, construction, education and culture. Government fees were deferred, customs deadlines extended, Central Bank measures rolled out to keep credit flowing, and the minimum property threshold for the two-year investor visa scrapped altogether.

Then, in the middle of all this, came the announcement that told me everything I needed to know about where this city's head is really at. In late April, barely six weeks into the conflict, Dubai unveiled the Metro Gold Line - the largest transport project in its history. Forty-two kilometres, fully underground, 34 billion AED, with tenders going out this year and delivery targeted at 30 per cent faster than the Blue Line before it. Most governments facing a regional crisis would quietly shelve a project like that. Dubai brought it forward and told the world about it. Having sat inside a government during a crisis, I can tell you that is not an accident of timing - it is a statement of intent. "Dubai it!"

So here is my take, having worked through moments like this on both the government and corporate side, and now experiencing this one on the ground alongside many other BCCD members. What we have seen since March is not the response - it is the warm-up. Governments in recovery mode do not slow down once the immediate pressure eases; they accelerate, because recovery is when the argument for the future is won or lost. Dubai is determined not simply to repair the damage but to use this period to reaffirm, emphatically and visibly, that this is the best place in the world to do business. The pace of policy announcements, regulatory changes and investment of recent months is, in my view, the operating rhythm for the next two or three years.

For our members, that cuts two ways. A government moving this fast, across this many sectors, creates openings constantly, and in difficult times businesses here will genuinely feel that government has their back - something few businesses elsewhere can say right now. The challenge is that when the rules, incentives and frameworks are shifting this quickly, staying current becomes more important than ever. Miss a change by a month and you may well have missed the window.

That, to my mind, is where the Chamber must excel. What this means in practice is a few things. First, the BCCD should become the fastest route from government announcement to member understanding - rapid briefings within days of each significant policy change, sector-specific workshops where the detail matters, and updates that reach members first. The Chamber already does much of this well; the coming period demands it becomes the thing we are known for. Second, and more ambitiously, the Chamber should formalise the flow of insight travelling the other way. British business is deeply respected here, our members are dealing with these changes on the ground every day, and I see firsthand that the Dubai government genuinely wants informed input as it shapes what comes next. The Chamber, with the standing it has built alongside the Consulate and the Dubai authorities, should be gathering that member experience systematically and feeding it directly into the machine. We should not simply be briefed on the next chapter of this city's story - we should be helping to write it.

I would hesitate, in truth, even to call what is coming a 'bounce back', because Dubai never really stopped: investment continued, people kept arriving, and the fundamentals held throughout. Last time around, Dubai emerged from a global crisis faster and stronger than almost anywhere on earth. Everything I have seen, both in my career and out of my window, tells me the sequel will be bigger - and that this Chamber and its members should be right at the centre of it.

I drove past one last week on the way back to Arabian Ranches and it finally bothered me enough to find out what was going on.

The answer is one of those things that seems obvious once you know it - but nobody ever explains it, and it tells you something genuinely interesting about where Dubai is heading next.

The corridors aren't wasted land. They're Dubai's next great public realm opportunity. Someone just needs to draw the map.

The short version

Those corridors are DEWA power transmission easements. High-voltage lines - mostly 400kV and 132kV - running across the emirate carrying electricity from the generation sources out in Jebel Ali and the Mohammed bin Rashid Solar Park to the substations feeding every community in the city.

Safety regulations require significant buffer zones on either side. You can't build residential or commercial structures underneath or adjacent to high-voltage transmission lines. Electromagnetic field limits, maintenance access, safety clearances etc etc - all sensible stuff. This is standard practice globally.

But here's what makes it striking in Dubai. The city expanded so rapidly over the last two decades that these transmission corridors now cut directly through some of the most valuable real estate on the planet. They were laid when the land around them was empty desert. Now they're surrounded by billion-dirham developments, and the corridors sit there like scars - undeveloped, underused, and increasingly hard to justify in a city where every square metre matters.

The numbers are significant. DEWA's transmission network includes over 4,300 kilometres of transmission lines across Dubai. A meaningful proportion of those are still overhead, particularly the 400kV backbone that runs out to the newer communities in the south and east. Each corridor is typically 50 to 100 metres wide. Do the maths on even a fraction of that and you're talking about thousands of acres of effectively sterilised land!

Why haven't they just put them underground?

This is the obvious question, and the answer is mostly money and physics.

Dubai has actually been progressively undergrounding its network for years. EDF completed a 19-kilometre 400kV underground ventilated tunnel bringing over 3,000MW into the heart of the city - described at the time as a world reference project. The newer, premium communities - Downtown, Marina, Palm - are all served by underground cables. By the end of 2022, DEWA had over 37,500 kilometres of underground distribution cables versus only 713 kilometres of overhead distribution lines.

So the distribution network is largely underground already. The problem is the transmission backbone.

Putting 400kV lines underground costs roughly 10 to 15 times more than overhead. In a desert climate, heat dissipation becomes a serious engineering challenge - underground cables generate heat that needs somewhere to go, and the ground temperature in Dubai isn't exactly helping. The ventilated tunnel approach works but requires massive civil engineering. DEWA is still building 130 kilometres of new 400kV overhead transmission lines for completion by 2028, alongside 226 kilometres of new 132kV underground cables. So the pattern is clear: underground where you can at the lower voltages, overhead where you have to at the highest.

But that leaves the corridors sitting there. Unused. As someone whose professional background is property and real estate... it really irks me! And as the city densifies, the pressure to do something with them is only going to intensify.

What's actually happening

This is where it gets interesting - because Dubai, being Dubai, isn't just leaving the problem for someone else to solve.

The Dubai 2040 Urban Master Plan has a specific commitment to increase green and recreational areas by 105%. Nature reserves and rural natural areas will constitute 60% of the emirate's total area. And critically, the plan calls for "several green corridors to link service areas, residential areas and workplaces, facilitating the movement of pedestrians, bicycles, and sustainable mobility means across the city."

Read that carefully. Green corridors linking communities. That language maps almost perfectly onto the transmission easement corridors that already exist.

The most ambitious expression of this thinking is the Dubai Green Spine - a proposal by URB to transform the entire 64-kilometre Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Road (E311) corridor into a sustainable urban corridor with pedestrian paths, cycling tracks, urban farms, a million trees, and solar-powered electric trams. It's been designed to align with the 2040 Master Plan and support a projected population of nearly 8 million.

Then there's The Loop - a separate 93-kilometre climate-controlled cycling and walking highway concept designed to connect over 3 million residents to key services by foot or bike.

These are big, headline-grabbing visions. But the really telling signal is what's happening at the development level.

Jumeirah Golf Estates shows the way

Wasl - one of Dubai's largest government-backed developers - announced "The Next Chapter" at Jumeirah Golf Estates in May 2025. This is a 4.68 million square metre expansion adding 12,345 new homes across six themed districts. The scale alone is impressive. As JGE is my home club, I've been keeping a close eye on the plans. But what caught my attention was the design.

The six districts - Central Park, Village, Town Centre, Golf Course North and South, and Equestrian Village - are explicitly linked by green corridors and recreational trails. There's a 131,850 square metre Central Park, 15 kilometres of horse riding paths, cycling lanes, and shaded walkways connecting everything together. An equestrian village with show-jumping facilities and dedicated riding trails.

If you know the area, you'll recognise that the JGE expansion sits alongside major utility corridors. What Wasl has done - rather cleverly - is design the master plan so that the land that can't be built on becomes the connective tissue of the community. The green corridors aren't a concession to the power lines. They're a feature. The equestrian trails, the cycling paths, the parkland - these are the things that turn a housing development into a lifestyle destination commanding premium prices.

That's smart planning. And it's a template for what could happen across Dubai wherever these corridors exist.

Why this matters beyond aesthetics

I spent 15 years in UK government and chaired one of the UK's largest urban regeneration companies. We dealt with this exact problem - legacy infrastructure cutting through communities, sterilising land, depressing values. The UK's answer was usually to argue about it for a decade, commission three studies, and then do nothing(!).

Dubai, fortunately, doesn't tend to operate that way.

The 2040 Master Plan commits to having 55% of the population living within 800 metres of a public transport station. The 20-minute city concept aims for residents to access 80% of their daily needs within a 20-minute walk or cycle. Both targets require exactly the kind of connected green infrastructure that power line corridors could provide.

Globally, there's strong precedent. In the United States, over 400 multi-use trails coexist within electric utility corridor rights-of-way. Around 17% of rail-trails are at least partially shared with utility corridors. The principle is established: you keep the power lines, but you activate the ground beneath them for cycling paths, running trails, community gardens, urban farms, and linear parks.

For Dubai, the application is obvious. These corridors already connect communities. They run from established areas through to the newer developments in the south and east. They could become the green spine - literally - that links the city together in a way that roads and metro lines can't.

And from an investment perspective, properties adjacent to activated green corridors consistently command premiums. The transformation of derelict rail lines into urban parks has been one of the most reliable property value catalysts in cities worldwide over the last 20 years. Dubai is sitting on the same opportunity, but with utility corridors instead of railways.

The bottom line

Dubai has a habit of looking at problems and seeing opportunities. An overhead power line corridor through empty desert is a problem. A shaded cycling trail with equestrian paths connecting your villa community to a metro station and a Mandarin Oriental resort is a lifestyle amenity worth paying for.

The infrastructure is already there. The corridors already exist. The 2040 Master Plan already calls for green corridors connecting communities. The developers - Wasl at JGE being the most visible example - are already designing around it.

What nobody has done yet is connect all of this thinking into a coherent, city-wide strategy for activating transmission corridor land. The kind of joined-up infrastructure planning that turns dead space into connected communities.

That's a governance and master-planning challenge. And having spent years turning disused industrial corridors and brownfield sites into thriving communities in the UK, I can tell you - the opportunity here is genuinely exciting. Dubai has better weather, faster execution, and a government that actually follows through on its plans.

The corridors aren't wasted land. They're Dubai's next great public realm opportunity. Someone just needs to draw the map.

It was a 15-minute procedure.

Dr Zahid Khan from Danat Al Emarat Hospital for Women & Children in Abu Dhabi described how clinicians are now harvesting ovarian tissue from women in a short laparoscopic procedure, cryopreserving it, and reimplanting it years later near menopause - delaying the onset by 10 to 15 years. A Yale study published last year modelled the outcomes: for a woman in her mid-twenties, the delay could be even longer. Potentially decades. And they're doing this right now!

When a treatment pathway changes, that's a clinical matter. When an entire treatment category disappears, that's a governance matter.

This isn't treatment. It's elimination.

And here's what I noticed in the room: some of the other panellists - whose entire businesses are built around the ongoing management of menopause - looked uncomfortable. Because if you can delay or prevent the condition altogether, what happens to the industry built around treating it?

This wasn't a one-off. Across WHX, the same pattern kept emerging. Innovation isn't just improving patient outcomes… it's threatening to make entire treatment categories redundant. From gene therapies that fix conditions at source to diagnostic tools that catch disease before symptoms even appear. We're not just getting better at treating illness. In certain areas, we're moving beyond it.

And that is where it gets interesting for people like me.

Because the moment healthcare shifts from treatment to cure - or from management to prevention - it doesn't just disrupt clinical practice. It disrupts everything around it. Insurance models built on chronic condition management. Workforce planning designed around long-term patient pathways. Pharmaceutical pipelines predicated on repeat prescription. Regulatory frameworks that assume ongoing treatment as the default. Hospital capacity planning. Procurement cycles. Public health budgets.

I've spent 15 years sitting at exactly this intersection. As the UK's elected Leader of Local and Regional Government, I worked hand in hand with Government on health policy and regulation. In one of my other roles as Leader of a major UK City Region, I chaired health oversight boards for half a million residents and oversaw healthcare commissioning - making decisions about hospital capacity, service provision, and public health strategy while balancing them against education, housing, transport, and regeneration. All competing for the same budget. All politically sensitive. All with real consequences.

When a treatment pathway changes, that's a clinical matter. When an entire treatment category disappears, that's a governance matter. It affects workforce, infrastructure, budgets, and political commitments. The clinical breakthrough is the easy part. The system response is where most governments and health systems get stuck.

And this is precisely where the GCC has an advantage.

The UAE and Saudi are building health systems, cities, and infrastructure simultaneously. They're not retrofitting innovation into legacy systems designed 70 years ago. They can design regulatory frameworks, insurance models, and workforce plans around where healthcare is going - not where it's been. Ashraf Mallak, MD of MSD Pharmaceutical Manufacturing, made this point powerfully on a panel at WHX: the GCC is leading the world in how it structures public-private partnerships in healthcare. The speed and pragmatism here is something I wish I'd seen more of in the UK.

But speed alone isn't enough. The risk is real too. If regulation and policy don't keep pace with the innovation - not just in timescale but in application - they become the bottleneck. Session after session at WHX came back to this tension. Get it right and you accelerate everything. Get it wrong and you hold back an entire industry while the rest of the world moves on.

The governments and health systems that will thrive aren't the ones with the best technology. They're the ones with the governance structures, the regulatory agility, and the board-level experience to translate clinical breakthroughs into system-wide change - fast, and without breaking everything in the process.

That's the conversation that isn't happening enough… and it's the one I'm most interested in!

Healthcare - not just treatment, but increasingly prevention and disease elimination - is moving more rapidly than ever before. And the system has to keep up.

"We have no ego - absolutely no ego. If we announce something and we need to adjust it, accelerate it, defer or cancel it, we will without blinking."

He was explaining why NEOM's "The Line" had been scaled from 170 kilometers to 2.4 kilometers. Why Red Sea hotels were opening sequentially instead of waiting for the full master plan. Why the 2034 World Cup was getting priority over open-ended developments.

Stop trying to get everyone to agree on what success looks like. Start making decisions that can't be unmade.

Saudi Arabia has learned what I watched the UK struggle with for years: momentum beats metrics.

Having worked on countless major regeneration projects and advised on transformation across government and corporate sectors, I've sat through an untold number of sessions where we got trapped in the same loop:

"What does success look like?".

Everyone adds their metric. The developer wants ROI. The Council wants affordable housing. The community wants green space. The Treasury wants jobs. The environmental groups want net zero.

Suddenly you're not building anything; you're building a performance framework.

I learned the hard way - working with the ever pragmatic Michael Gove at MHCLG - that the only question that matters is this:

"What's the next irreversible decision?".

Not the end state. Not the vision everyone agrees on. The next door you can't walk back through.

Should we acquire this land?

Should we sign this anchor tenant?

Should we break ground on Phase 1?

Make that decision. See what breaks. Adjust.

The GCC has systematised this in ways the UK never managed.

When Red Sea Global opened Six Senses Southern Dunes in November 2023, the first paying guests at any Saudi giga-project, they didn't wait for consensus on what the full resort destination would look like.

They made one irreversible decision: open the first hotel.

That created momentum for the next decision: open St. Regis in January 2024.

Then Nujuma Ritz-Carlton in May 2024 ($3,431/night - Middle East's most expensive hotel).

Then Shebara in November 2024.

By September 2025, they'd opened nine hotels and secured a $3.76 billion green loan - because investors don't fund visions, they fund momentum.

Six Flags Qiddiya opened December 31, 2025. (My family is very excited about this and we're off there in a few months!) It's three years late and slightly scaled back from original plans, but it opened. With paying customers. Operating roller coasters - including the fastest and longest in the world. And generating revenue.

Compare that to the UK approach I witnessed repeatedly: we'd spend 18 months getting stakeholder consensus on "what success looks like" for a regeneration project, only to find that by the time we had agreement, the market had shifted, the funding model had changed, or political priorities had moved on.

The breakthrough I saw at MHCLG was when we stopped asking "what's the perfect plan?" and started asking "what can we deliver in the next 12 months?".

Not "how do we solve housing nationally" - that creates analysis paralysis.

Instead: "Can we get planning permission for this specific site by Q2?"

That's an irreversible decision. You either get it or you don't. Then you make the next decision.

What I'm watching in the GCC now is this approach at scale.

Dubai's Palm Jebel Ali: awarded road infrastructure contracts in May 2024, marine works in August 2024, villa construction in October 2024. Each contract is irreversible. Each one unlocks the next phase.

They're not waiting for consensus on what the full Palm will be in 2040. They're building Frond 1. I'm watching it day by day and the momentum is palpable.

The Saudi "recalibration" - scaling The Line from 170km to 2.4km - isn't failure. It's pragmatism.

They made an irreversible decision: lock in the 2034 World Cup. That created a hard deadline. Now every other project gets prioritised or deferred based on "does this support 2034?".

That's how you escape planning mode.

For anyone leading transformation - in government, property, or corporate restructuring:

Stop trying to get everyone to agree on what success looks like.

Start making decisions that can't be unmade.

Acquire the land. Sign the anchor tenant. Award the first construction contract. Open the first phase.

Each irreversible decision teaches you something the business case never could.

Momentum beats metrics. Every time.

Having worked on £3bn+ of UK regeneration, including founding and chairing one of the UK's largest Urban Regeneration Companies, I've seen every approach to naming major developments. Dubai's literal naming strategy initially seemed almost too simple.

It's actually a masterclass in strategic clarity.

Sometimes the smartest brand strategy is no brand strategy. Just radical honesty about what you're building and who it's for.

Western regeneration typically does this:

Launch "Ocean Village" or "Royal Quays" - aspirational names that promise a lifestyle before laying a single brick. Can create false hope or even opposition because the vision is being sold before it's earned. Spend years in consultation because nobody knows what's actually being delivered.

I've sat through countless branding workshops where decision makers agonised over finding the "perfect" name that would capture a future we hadn't yet built.

Dubai does this:

Call it exactly what it is. "Production City" tells you it's for manufacturing and logistics. "Academic City" signals education clusters. "Internet City" attracted tech companies because the name itself was the pitch.

The function becomes the brand. The brand attracts the right investment. The investment delivers the function. It's a virtuous circle.

What makes this approach work

1. Transparency beats aspiration

When a developer announces "Umm Suqeim Beach Project," everyone knows exactly what's being built, where, and why. No mystery. No overpromising. Just clear intent.

2. Names can drive zoning

By calling something "Media City" or "Healthcare City," Dubai isn't just describing it - they're programming it. The name tells businesses "this is for you" and tells others "probably not for you." It's urban planning through nomenclature.

3. Literal names scale

When you have dozens of major developments running simultaneously, "Sports City" and "Motor City" are easier to track, fund, and regulate than a portfolio of poetic names that all blur together.

Looking back at the UK projects that actually worked

King's Cross - Kept the historical name, delivered the infrastructure, let the place identity emerge organically (Coal Drops Yard, Granary Square).

Canary Wharf - Geographic descriptor, nothing aspirational. The finance district reputation came from what was built, not what was promised.

Salford Quays - Literal location name. Became MediaCityUK only after the BBC actually arrived.

Stratford - Olympic development kept the area's existing name. Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park emerged later, after delivery.

The pattern is clear. During my time leading major regeneration programs across the UK, the developments that quietly delivered infrastructure first and let identity follow consistently outlasted the ones that led with aspirational branding.

Dubai has systematized what UK regeneration discovered through trial and error. Instead of accidentally stumbling into honest naming after expensive rebrands, they start with radical clarity about function and let success speak for itself.

There's a lesson here for anyone working in transformation: sometimes the smartest brand strategy is no brand strategy. Just radical honesty about what you're building and who it's for.

The UK tried something similar in 2010 with the "Behavioural Insights Team" (Nudge Unit). Brilliant concept, but it was spun out too quickly into a social enterprise, losing the direct pipeline to Number 10.

What the GCC is getting right

Embedding, not extracting. These units sit inside government, with direct access to decision-makers. No procurement delays, no consultant reports gathering dust.

Government innovation needs three things the UK gradually lost: proximity to power, permission to fail fast, and humility to steal good ideas from anywhere.

Speed over perfection. A 90-day prototype cycle vs the UK's typical 18-month policy development. When you can test a digital service or regulatory change in a contained environment, you learn faster.

Cross-border learning without ego. I've seen UAE teams openly studying Estonian digital government, Singaporean urban planning, and yes, UK devolution models (if you can believe it!) - then adapting ruthlessly to local context rather than copying wholesale.

The lesson isn't "GCC does it better." It's that government innovation needs three things the UK gradually lost: proximity to power, permission to fail fast, and humility to steal good ideas from anywhere.

Having worked closely at the top of Government departments in the UK, I can tell you how much they suffered by eroding those three musts - and others have learned from their continued mistakes.

For anyone working at the intersection of government and transformation, this is the playbook to watch.