Like the legacy of France’s first World Expo in 1889 was the Eiffel Tower, Dubai’s Expo 2020 was leaving the car obsessed commercial hub with its first 15-minute city, connected to the gird-locked city via Metro Link. Amid world’s perceptions of Dubai and challenges faced by a fully pregnant, UAE’s longest-serving female minister Reem Al-Hashimy and her team’s efforts for making a pitch for the UAE in Paris, and her turning the desert into a vibrant city-space teeming with people, national and thematic pavilions, restaurants and cafes, parks and playgrounds, and how the Expo brought the world to the desert. Eleven days later she delivered her first child. UAE’s bid to host the Expo in 2020 was a David vs Goliath story. If they were successful, they would be the smallest country to host it since Belgium more than 50 years earlier. She flew privately, with a doctor onboard for the seven-hour flight to deliver her speech without any incident. In the end UAE won the bid by a resounding margin. The incident, in a way, is not just record how they managed to win, but also displayed the incredible determination of the woman who behind her abayah and Shaylah, concealed a spine of steel. Reem was prepared to take risks, trusting the team she had carefully put together and paying attention the smallest detail. “In my office now hangs a framed print of the words ‘Hope is not a method’ given to me by my team partly to tease me for how often I repeated this mantra to them, but also, in all seriousness, as a principle that kept us on track. You have to be sure as a leader that the information you are being given is credible, and not simply wishful thinking in the middle of a crisis” she writes in When Ground Shifts, which tells a detailed story of the Dubai Expo.

The biggest challenge was the Covid pandemic, which almost put the project on life support. She overcomes the challenge with fortitude and faith, going on the offensive with initiatives like Expo Live, a $100 million initiative to support innovative social projects connected to the Expo 2020 themes. She ensured the welfare of the 2, 50, 000 Expo workers by establishing a hotline through which any worker could report problem or ask for help, it received over 800 calls.

The book details the life of a woman in the Middle East, the prejudices she faced and the opportunities she got the role of the enlightened leaders who turned the UAE into the future-oriented, modern country it is today, and her vision of the Expo’s model of inclusion being a blueprint for the world.

Reem was responsible for the transformational result simply delivering the six-month gathering of 192 nations during the coronavirus era. In October 2021, she achieved 24 million visits before the Expo’s close in March 2022 – the month UK lifted the last of its travel restrictions. Dubai’s successful handling of Covid-19 from one of the world’s strictest lockdowns to a rapid opening and speedy vaccine roll-out, supercharged its growth from regional hub to global metropolis, making Dubai a go-to destination for billionaires, fuelling record high-property prices. The Conservative Muslim state was unpicked anachronistic legislation to make foreigners more comfortable, such as decriminalising alcohol, and rolled out a long-term residency programme to persuade newcomers to put down roots.

A new generation of expatriates joined the oil workers, and financiers who had long alighted on the emirate as a launch pad into the wealthy region. Influencers like hedge fund managers and crypto-billionaires fled global lockdowns to party through Dubai’s Covid winter.

In the early 2000s, Dubai’s ruler, Shiekh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, parachuted her into the embassy in Washington DC, where a crisis erupted when the US blocked a deal involving Dubai’s ports operator, citing terrorism fears. 

The complicated diplomacy of welcoming Israeli and Palestinian pavilions reflected what she described as the “UAE’s difficult choices” in promoting dialogue. In 2020, UAE had become the first Gulf state to agree diplomatic normalisation with Israel. The neutrality continued through Russia’s full-scale invasions of Ukraine in 2022, When the UAE refused to heed western calls to take sides. Dubai has reaped financial reward as a comfortable outpost for Russians escaping war and sanctions, and the COP28 climate summit held at the Expo site in 2023 elevated UAE’s tax free status further.

When Ground Shifts: The Story of Dubai Expo: Creating Hope in Times of Upheaval by Reem Al-Hashimy, Profile £25, 208 pages.