Dubai Most Cosmopolitan City? Reasons Why This Is True

Some big cities in the world consist largely of local populations while many are made up of people from diverse regions and backgrounds. Cities that are home to diverse people from different parts of the world tend to be more open, accepting and cosmopolitan and less insular. Dubai is just such a city. Residents of the city know it to be a vibrant and welcoming place for visitors from all over the world and a recent report seems to confirm this.

McKinsey report

About 83% of the population of Dubai city is of foreign born residents, says the globally respected management consulting firm McKinsey and Company. The report entitled Thriving Amid Turbulence: Imagining the cities of the future speaks about unprecedented urban expansion and predicts that by 2050, an additional 2.5 billion people will be living in cities. 55% of world population currently lives in cities; by 2050 that percentage will touch 68%.

Other cosmopolitan cities

The report speaks of other cosmopolitan cities or those which have significant expat populations of at least 25% of the total population. After Dubai, Brussels is the city with the highest percentage of expats living and working there. Other cities with more than 25% expat populations include Auckland, Toronto, Sydney, Los Angeles, Melbourne, New York, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Paris. Dubai is far and away the most diverse when it comes to the country of origin of its residents and it has been so for years now, as this chart demonstrates.

Factors that shape cities

According to the report, there are four major factors that shape cities: (a) the competition for talent, (b) an increasingly connected and mobile world, (c) the Anthropocene age, where there is an increasing pressure on resources, (d) and the ever expanding role of technology.

200 different countries

Practically all nations on earth find representation in Dubai, which is home to people from about 200 different counties. 83% of Dubai residents are born abroad but choose to come to the city for education, better work opportunities or a better standard of life.

2.6 million people from outside the UAE

The population of the country is currently 3.14 million people and out of that, about 2.6 million people are from abroad. So it’s a very mixed bag of races, nationalities, faiths and ethnicities that can be found in Dubai.

140 languages

About 140 different languages are spoken in Dubai. Apart from Arabic and English, which are the most commonly spoken languages in the city, significant number of Dubai residents also speak Hindi, Urdu, Persian, Bengali, Tagalog, Tamil, Malayalam, Chinese, German, Spanish and French among others.

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