Artists, designers, and performers with big goals are increasingly looking for places that will help them transform their ideas into thriving businesses. Dubai is growing as a new destination for creatives from all over the world seeking new pastures to realise the commercial potential of their great ideas. To assist creatives in fulfilling their ambitions, the city has put out the red carpet and cut through all red tape.
The emirate has created an entire architecture of support services, incentives, and business and legislative enablers under the framework of the Dubai Creative Economy Strategy to ease the journey of creatives across various stages of the creative value chain – from ideation to production, marketing, and distribution.
The Al Quoz Creative Zone is the launch pad for the Dubai Creative Economy Strategy, an integrated creative community being developed by the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority (Dubai Culture) in collaboration with various government entities in the emirate that seeks to transform the creative cluster that has been organically developing in the Al Quoz area over the past few years into a comprehensive industry ecosystem.
These efforts are helping to accelerate the Dubai Creative Economy Strategy’s goal of increasing the number of Dubai-based creative enterprises from 8,300 in 2020 to 15,000 by 2026, as well as increasing creative jobs in the emirate from 70,000 to 140,000 by 2026. Finally, the Strategy aims to increase the contribution of creative industries to Dubai’s GDP from 2.6 percent in 2020 to 5% by 2026, transforming the emirate into the global creative economy’s capital.
Additional measures implemented by Dubai Culture to encourage creative business include promoting the shift of land use from industrial to creative and facilitating quicker processes for acquiring licences and licencing. The Al Quoz Creative Zone has been included to the Dubai Land Department’s Rental Index, which enables businesses and professionals to compute rent hikes and average rent in the real estate market by entering data from the area.
Dubai Culture has also provided a slew of immigration enablers to assist creative companies and professionals in establishing a long-term presence in the UAE. Dubai Culture, the world’s first project of its type, grants multi-year cultural visas in order to portray the emirate as an incubator for innovation and a talent magnet.
The first-of-its-kind 10-year visa is part of the Dubai Creative Economy Strategy‘s larger goal of increasing the participation of innovators, writers, and artists in the emirate’s knowledge-based professions and elevating the importance of Dubai’s cultural and creative sectors in the development process. The cultural visa project is consistent with the UAE’s aim of attracting exceptional Arab and international talent to the country in order to achieve the critical mass required for exponential sector growth.
This month, Dubai also hosted World Art Dubai, which brought together over 4,000 contemporary artworks from over 300 famous galleries and solo artists from over 60 countries, offering collectors and lovers with a massive treasure trove of eclectic, inexpensive, and original art.
