It’s gone quite on the artificial islands of The World, at the normally booming building fairs and in the offices of the men in suits with their not-to-be-missed ‘investment opportunities’. The foreign construction workers have abandoned their kampongs, the hotels were empty anyway, the shopping malls were vacant, and the construction of many developments in Dubai had already stalled. Nonetheless, at the height of the financial crisis Dubai announced it was business as usual in the city. No that long ago Nakheel, the development wing of state investor Dubai World, now in moratorium, revealed plans for an even bigger tower than the tallest folly of the 21st century: the 820metre-tall Burj Dubai. The plan was to officially open the Burj Dubai in early January when His Highness Sheik Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum stepped down.

 ‘Officials insisted that Dubai knows how to take advantage of the misfortunes of others. We live in a violent and unstable environment, they would say, but that makes us a magnet for people and money fleeing other volatile spots. This is the Dubai model. This is the Dubai miracle.’ That was the general view according to The Financial Times a while ago in relation to the financial crisis. But not any more. For now the city state, and thus the sheik himself, has had to apply for a moratorium. The impossible turns out to be very possible indeed. The Dubai Miracle turns out to be an unworldly fata morgana, and many development plans are in reality as insubstantial as castles of sand.

Neighbouring state Abu Dhabi will no doubt spring to the rescue again, perhaps not as enthusiastically as in the past, but it’s always handy to have a tax haven like Dubai nearby. Moreover, Abu Dhabi is one of the biggest investors and possesses so much oil that it can afford to miss a barrel or two. Dubai doesn’t have to collapse fully. As long as the tax rate remains at 0.0% it will remain a haven for the super-rich. But the gloss has faded for the moment. Hold onto that villa on Palm Island, but don’t tell your friends just yet.

Meanwhile the architecture world can go stand in the corner in shame and ask itself why it didn’t dismiss the madness in Dubai as immoral and untenable from the outset. Architects are of course the numskulls of the property world, and they’re the last ones to grasp what’s going on economically and socially, blinded as they are by all that shininess and splendour of even bigger building commissions. But still, it’s astounding that Rem Koolhaas, although even he said the architecture of Dubai was ‘clearly unsustainable’, saw in Dubai an almost euphoric ‘end of the city and architecture as we know them, and the start of a new architecture and a new city’. ‘Clearly unsustainable’: the master had a point there, though he might have said ‘economically unsustainable’ to be more precise. In Al Manakh, the guide to the Gulf States published in 2007, Koolhaas predicted that ‘sustainability will be the regime that will impose radical change and revision on a brand-new model of urban life’. He is apparently oblivious to the very idea that sustainable cities in the middle of the desert, built with oil revenue, intended for the super-rich, is anything but sustainable. Indeed, it’s a perverse reversal of the very notion of sustainability – just as insane as the race to build even taller towers, an even hipper starchitect, or an even shinier icon. The ‘sustainable city’ that OMA designed for Nakheel in Dubai will go back on the shelf for the time being.

‘The winner will be the one who walks away from this battle first,’ wrote Koolhaas in Al Manakh about the race for even more architectural bling bling extravaganza in the region. A little more awareness of genuine sustainability, both economic and ecological, would have made him realise back then that it was high time to get out. Not even for moral reasons, but simply because Dubai was ‘economically clearly unsustainable’.

Now that the towers of Dubai are tottering, it’s time to consider the position that architecture can and should adopt in relation to such excesses of autocratic states of every kind. Dubai will get back on its feet again some time, or the other Gulf States will, because there’s still enough oil there. And if it’s not in the Gulf region, then we’ll see the emergence of not-to-be-missed ‘investment opportunities’ and more new ‘ends of the city as we know it’ in other unexpected places — in Africa, in Asia. It will be interesting to see who will then possess the economic acumen and moral courage to walk away first from the battlefield.