With its soaring skyscrapers, ever-green golf courses and even a ski resort, the desert city of Dubai is testament to a determined battle between man and nature. Yet with the global downturn and mounting debts threatening its future, it is not hard to imagine this sun-seared metropolis being swallowed back up by the surrounding sands as a financial meltdown prompts its wealthy sponsors to leave, followed by the 2million mainly foreign workers depending on them. That is the post-apocalyptic nightmare scenario realised in eerie images created by the award-winning British photographer and artist Richard Allenby-Pratt. With the streets and resorts devoid of human life and all building work halted, all that remain are the animals who are left to roam the crumbling remains of the former urban paradise and pearl of the United Arab Emirates, a gulf state that was until 30 years ago dominated by nomads. Bizarrely, among the dogs and gazelles that you might expect in such an environment, there are also some stranger more exotic beasts enjoying their freedom.They include a lion surveying the city from a platform high up the empty shell of a derelict apartment block and a zebra wandering along a multi-lane highway in the middle of the desert city as it is imagined sometime after 2017.Also making appearances are a kangaroo hopping by skyscrapers, a puma in an abandoned resort, a hyena at a vacant housing development, a rhino at a dormant building site, a crocodile in the harbour and a giraffe stalking the outskirts with the world tallest tower, the Burgh Al Arab, clearly rising above the distant skyline.Despite seeming distinctly unrealistic, such beasts do live in Dubai thanks to wealthy residents who see keeping wild creatures as status symbols and others are kept in its zoo.In showing what life would be like if animals did indeed inherit the earth, Mr Allenby-Pratt was attempting to show how exposed Dubai may be to a potential collapse.He told Mail Online: 'These scenes are imagined as being shortly after the departure of the majority of people from Dubai and the subsequent collapse of the city's infrastructure. 'My main intention in this project is to highlight how vulnerable the Dubai economic and social model could be. Primarily because of it's reliance on an ex-pat labour force who have no ability to earn nationality. 'So 90 per cent of the population can never call the place home; which means, of course, conflict or economic unviability would result in a mass exodus and a consequent collapse of basic infrastructure.'I introduced animals to the scenes to suggest that natural systems may ultimately prove to be more robust. The suggested scenario is that these are released zoo animals.‘I hope to highlight the fragility of our economic systems and the desperate need for us to live in harmony with the other occupants of our world.’He also hoped to highlight the plight of such creatures whose own habitats we have plundered.He explains: ‘This project imagines a future without people, where the relics of our unrealised ambitions are populated by some of the species we have, in the present day, come so close to exterminating.
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