By 2010 the cities with the best infrastructure will be in the Middle East

Today the most impressive cities for physical infrastructure are places like Hong Kong and Singapore. But these are the relics of booms now past, while Doha and Dubai are the boom cities of our time, creating infrastructure that will be a legacy for future generations.

For its own physical infrastructure is one of the best investments a society can ever make! Take the Victorians in England whose monuments still serve visitors to London, or the roaring 20s and depressed 30s architecture of New York.

By 2010 the crown for best infrastructure will pass to Doha and Dubai. There will be magnificent, world-leading airports with fleets of A380s to cross the globe, assuming Airbus has got its act together by then.

There will be elegant highways and newly completed Metro systems to convey travelers into the cities. The Dubai Festival City will greet visitors by The Creek, the first of the series of new Dubai mega malls.

Dazzling Dubai

Newly completed office complexes will abound. The Dubai International Financial Centre with its 35,000 car parking spaces and world-class skyscrapers. The neighboring Dubai Downtown with the world's tallest building, the Burj Dubai. And the adjacent Business Bay with its dazzling office towers.

Up the multi-lane Sheikh Zayed highway the lights of the Dubai Marina and Dubai Tecom free zone will beckon. Here a forest of two hundred towers will mark the epicentre of New Dubai with villa compounds disappearing back into the desert and the massive new Dubailand theme park.

New hotels along the Jumeirah Beach will be home to many tourists. And stretching out into the calm Persian Gulf will be the two Palm islands - huge manmade islands alive with apartments, villas and massive hotels.

Dynamic Doha

In Doha the impression will be very similar: An architecturally distinguished airport, numerous new office and residential towers, the beautiful Pearl-Qatar manmade island development and top-quality shopping and hotel facilities.

This is what will remain from the oil boom of the previous decade: the infrastructure for the next ten, twenty and more years. Indeed, these will be the most modern cities in the world with the latest physical infrastructure to service the needs of business and commerce.

If the cost equation is right and the tax advantages remain, then it is a no-brainer to predict where business and finance will choose to locate in the Middle East. Indeed, there will be many more multinationals that choose to base their regional operations in these cities and possibly some global operations too.

Perhaps that is why the current residents of Doha and Dubai bare with the traffic chaos and daily inconvenience of the construction process. For by 2010 the cities with the best infrastructure in the world will be in the Middle East.