Petit Fromage, while I am an interloper, since I actually live 150 km's south of Dubai, in that little town with no traffic jams called Abu Dhabi (
) , I can say that you can take a photo of any city and make it look bad. Take a photo of New York overlooking some of the dodgy suburbs out towards JFK airport and it won't look real nice. Dubai along the creek and out through Jumeirah I think is nice, and quality of life is pretty good from the majority of reports. (But still prefer to live in Abu Dhabi where you can still get a taxi anywhere on the island for 6 dirhams (albeit with an interesting odour)).