Aida Al Busaidy on shaping Dubai’s vision and sense of belonging

Lifestyle

Aida Al Busaidy, the Vice President of Social and Consumer Advocacy at Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism, likes to return to a story about the Burj Khalifa when she talks about how the city thinks about progress. “He was asked in an interview how much of his vision he had achieved, and he gave a percentage south of twenty,” she says, paraphrasing His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai. “The same interviewer asked him again a couple of years later, and the percentage had gone down, even though so much more had been built in between, because the more he did, the more he saw was still possible.”

Al Busaidy’s own vision for the city, she admits, was seeded somewhere far more literal if you go back far enough. She grew up watching The Jetsons, the cartoon that imagined a future full of flying cars, and she laughs recalling it now. “They were talking about the city of the future, and they said there’d be flying cars,” she says. “We actually do have a flying taxi that’s coming.” It’s a small detail, but it captures how she frames DET’s whole mandate, aimed at building steadily toward a version of the city that once only existed in cartoons, rather than simply reacting to whatever tourism numbers demand this quarter.

She credits that same instinct for how the city moved through the past year, pointing to two frameworks that guide almost everything DET does, the Dubai Economic Agenda D33 and the UAE Centennial 2071 strategy. “We are not fixated on issues, we are fixated on solutions,” she says. Where Centennial 2071 plots the horizon decades out, D33 functions as what she calls the north star for the years directly ahead, shaping decisions that run from infrastructure and policymaking to Emiratisation, SME growth and the everyday experience of the consumer. “Our mandate isn’t just visit,” she says. “It’s also live and work,” a distinction she returns to more than once, framing Dubai’s growth less as a tally of tourist numbers and more as a measure of how many people choose to build their actual lives inside it.

That philosophy now has a name, ‘Dubai-it’, the initiative His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum launched on the seventeenth of June this year through a video posted on X, built around a promise Al Busaidy says the city had been keeping long before anyone put a phrase to it, that it says what it does and does what it says. It is an approach built to turn ambition into something delivered rather than just promised, and delivered fast. Al Busaidy remembers watching that idea get put into words rather than just lived. “If Google can do it, we can do it,” she says, only half joking, about a philosophy she insists Dubai had been practicing all along without ever naming it.

What she comes back to most, though, is the idea that the city does not ask newcomers to leave themselves behind to belong. “Whether it’s COVID or Expo, it’s the people who speak,” she says. “The person who came and has stayed here for two years, versus the person who’s a Dubai kid, versus an Emirati, we’re all saying the same thing.” Home now to close to two hundred nationalities, Dubai’s story, as she tells it, belongs equally to all of them. “The city doesn’t change you,” she adds. “You move with the city.”

For Aida, that connection carries a deeper sense of pride and commitment rooted in being Emirati, a feeling that goes beyond her role at DET to a personal responsibility to help shape the city she calls home, and to take pride in delivering the exceptional projects and programmes that become part of Dubai’s story.

She speaks about growing up surrounded by that diversity as simply normal, a fact of daily life rather than a talking point, and there is a moment where her voice catches slightly describing what it means to spend a career representing a place she still calls, without qualification, home.

If there is a single idea she wants to leave behind, it has nothing to do with headline numbers. “Consistency builds resilience,” she says, likening it to a fitness routine, a prayer practice, anything sustained over time rather than chased in bursts. It is a philosophy she applies as readily to her own sense of legacy as to the city’s, describing a hope that her grandchildren will one day ask what role she played in the chapters of Dubai’s growth that are unfolding right now. “It’s one chapter,” she says, “but hopefully the book continues, and people keep adding to it.”