‘The machine doesn’t stop’: Abu Dhabi’s wartime plan for keeping its cultural ambition alive - Semafor

“We have plan A’s all the way to plan Z’s, from our best-case scenarios to our worst-case scenarios,” Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak says, when asked how the culture, tourism, and property groups he leads are preparing for what might happen next in the conflict that has shaken the Middle East.

Many of those plans are contingent on the US-Israeli conflict with Iran ending, but “if this conflict gets worse, we also have a very clear route,” says the chairman of the Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi. 

The manga-loving 44-year-old member of Abu Dhabi’s Executive Council, whose other interests include sneakers, rap music, and basketball, has spent more than a decade at the heart of the city’s strategy to diversify its economy using museums, UFC fights, and theme parks. Last year alone, the city opened five museums and welcomed a record 26.6 million visitors.

Culture and tourism are “the building blocks of our future,” he says. But the conflict has forced him to craft a response that combines a strategic pivot, reassurance to local staff and foreign partners, and continued commitment to his city’s long-term aims.

When the Iran war started in February, flights and events were canceled and the number of Western tourists to the Gulf plunged, emptying local hotels. “We had to basically rethink how we’re…promoting ourselves,” Al Mubarak says. But, he adds, “We always understood that, no matter what happens… the machine doesn’t stop.”

Before the conflict, Abu Dhabi was working toward a goal of attracting 39.3 million visitors a year by 2030, up from 24 million in 2023. It projected that those tourists would contribute AED 90 billion a year to the city’s economy.

Al Mubarak is still sticking to his 2030 goals, but he says the assumptions underlying them have changed. He now expects a 10-15% drop in visitors from the US and Europe compared to its original estimates, for example, with growth from other parts of the globe making up the difference.

So he has changed the focus of Abu Dhabi’s marketing, looking to pull in far more visitors from its own region, and from Eastern Europe, India and the rest of Southeast Asia, and Africa. The city is already seeing 5-8% growth in visitors from “some of our Eastern geographies,” he says, and much larger numbers from around the Gulf.

On Yas Island this summer, he says, “Some days I felt I was in Saudi, some days I felt I was in Qatar, some days I felt I was in Moscow.” He recalls talking to two tourists as they watched the smoke from a drone attack on a French navy base in the first week of the conflict: when he asked if they were alright, they replied: “We’re Russians, so this is nothing.”

Abu Dhabi has been a magnet for wealthy Westerners, with its Formula 1 track and outpost of the Louvre. But Al Mubarak wants to use the current crisis to broaden its appeal to other parts of the world whose populations’ economic power is growing.

Under his worst-case scenarios for the war’s outcome, his plans would focus Abu Dhabi’s culture and tourism strategy much more on its immediate region and the Global South. That grouping of poorer countries comprises more than 70% of the world’s population, he notes, and its people want “to experience a lot more than they have.”

Westerners have been more put off by news coverage that he says exaggerates the security threat, but he has not stopped marketing to them, too.

“We haven’t stopped acknowledging that they are a traveler and they are a future potential traveler,” he says. “We’ve kept [at the] front of their mind that the UAE is here and Abu Dhabi is here, and it’s going to continue to develop, it’s going to continue to grow. So when the time is right for you as a traveler, our doors are wide open.”

Three-quarters of Abu Dhabi’s hotel rooms were full again by August, Al Mubarak notes. At Aldar Properties, the commercial real estate developer he also chairs, new sales dropped 34% in the first nine months of this year, but at AED 18.9 billion were still higher than for the same period in 2024. Overseas buyers — from China, the UK, Russia, and elsewhere — made up 28% of the total. After the first day of Iranian attacks, he maintains, “business has really been as usual.”

Informed by its experience during the pandemic, Abu Dhabi kept cultural institutions open throughout the conflict to give residents places to connect and “a sense of comfort,” Al Mubarak says.

To reassure his own teams, he set up daily management group meetings, and a stream of video conferences, emails, and helplines for employees. What mattered most was to show that leaders were listening rather than just talking, he says.

“Small things like that make a difference,” he notes, adding that his strategy starts with Abu Dhabi’s own residents. The city wants to be a “home away from home” for the world’s culture-lovers, he says, but “we did not develop our cultural strategy and our cultural infrastructure for people to come [to Abu Dhabi]. We developed it for people that are here.”

But Al Mubarak is equally keen to project a sense of normality for potential visitors who are contemplating Abu Dhabi from afar.

“Imagine yourself in Abu Dhabi today,” he says. The weather’s good this time of year, so “you’d wake up in the morning and you’d sink your feet in beautiful white sand,” then maybe go for a swim, he suggests. Then a tourist could go for an AI-personalized museum tour, a round of golf, some shopping, a concert at the Sphere (a $1.7 billion entertainment venue opening in 2029), or a comedy show.

It’s “an imaginary story,” he says, but one “that could be a reality” for a visitor. The next step in realizing that vision will come on Dec. 11, when a branch of New York’s Guggenheim Museum opens on Saadiyat Island. Some of Abu Dhabi’s partners have expressed fears about the region’s suitability as a home for their artwork in a period of conflict — “our French partners raised concerns on some of the loans that they’ve had at the Louvre,” Al Mubarak acknowledges — but he was able to reassure them that its buildings are “built to withstand things of this sort of nature.”

The opening of the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim will be a symbolic and emotional moment for Abu Dhabi, he says, but also one that “highlights our aspirations.”

What outsiders looking at Abu Dhabi’s transformation often miss is what has powered its economic growth, Al Mubarak says. “What they don’t see is that just three generations ago — my grandfather and my great-grandfather — they lived a very, very difficult life. They went days where they couldn’t find food.”

The city’s ambition “comes from hunger and it comes from struggle,” he says. Even as it builds ever more glittering projects, he adds, “That struggle I’m talking about, we feel it. That taste is still in our mouth.” Abu Dhabi is still “the new kid on the block,” he says — an underdog that must prove itself by being more agile and less bureaucratic than London or New York.

His own drive comes from unexpected sources. Al Mubarak discovered Japanese comic books and animation as a child, and remembers his sense of wonder about the “unbelievable-looking city” portrayed in the 1989 anime film Akira. “The world-building exercises that these amazing authors and artists were creating was unbelievable because their imaginations were so vast,” he recalls. “Today, when we look at our developments, it’s with that same mentality.”

Now that Al Mubarak is helping steer another futuristic metropolis, he sketches out his ideas for new projects on “mood boards,” drawing on “everything from Mozart to Napoleon, [and from] Luffy from One Piece, to the Joker.”

He tries to stay attuned to the “inner voice” he had as a child, he explains. “We’re taught from a very early age, unfortunately, that imagination is something that you grow out of,” he says. “On the contrary, we should tell our kids, keep imagining, make your imagination as big as you can.”