The weather makes it impossible to have the city walkable and enjoyable. If you want to see another city less walkable than Dubai, it is Qatar. There isn't even public transportation there (though a metro line is in the works).

Bahrain is the same.

I was stuck there for a few days for a job and wanted to do literally anything other than sitting in the hotel. There was literally nothing within a 30 minute walk (in brutal heat) so a taxi was required, but I didn't have any local currency, so I asked the hotel concierge where the closest ATM is. I then had to walk 30 minutes, just to find a broken ATM inside of a little structure with a broken A/C. At that point, I realized if I walked another 30 minutes, I would be at the mall. 2 of the 3 ATMs at the mall didn't work. After 20 minutes of realizing the mall was full of Gucci and other designer shops which I had no interest in, I took a taxi 15 minutes to the next nearest mall. Again, nothing but designer shops. Taking another taxi to visit yet another (unfinished) mall, which was worse than the last two, not to mention only 1/3rd of the shops were even open, but according to multiple people and the taxi driver, it was the "hot spot to go". The taxi driver refused to park inside because the line of cars was hundreds long and would have taken ~30 minutes. I ended up walking 15 minutes from the highway to the mall.

I dunno, Vegas and Montreal have pretty crappy weather and they are 10 times more walkable than Dubai.

Vegas? Most of it is sprawl and the Strip (where few people live) is enormous hotels that are actually pretty spread out.

I agree the Montreal core is fairly walkable. Cold is generally easier to deal with than heat. There's also a large connected Underground that people use when the weather is bad.

Vegas has wide pedestrian boulevards, escalators for elevated pedestrian crossings, throughways inside casinos, and even a pair of monorails. The Strip is mostly linear and there aren't long stretches with nothing there - food, lodging, entertainment, and (of course) gambling are never more than a few dozen feet away at any point.

But I have to say, Rochester, MN - the Mayo Clinic - has to be one of the more extraordinarily walkable places I've ever been: the whole city is not only interconnected underground between apartments, parking structures, and offices but there are plentiful underground facilities as well. It amazed me to have streets so empty when I first showed up: I had no idea where everyone was! The answer is: why on earth would you go outside? :)

But it's pretty much just tourist stuff: casinos, a mixture of crappy and mostly high-end restaurants, souvenir shops, bars. I'm not sure I can think of having seen a grocery store outside of rundown convenience stores. And the transit is fragmented because most of it only runs between hotels with the same owner.

So the Strip is walkable but mostly in the same sense that a big shopping mall with tower or two of apartments is walkable.

Toronto also has extensive interconnected underground walking space. Even though the weather isn't terrible it is often bad enough that you don't want to walk outside. You can still go many places downtown on foot without being exposed to the element. Walkable doesn't necessarily require good weather year-round although that makes it easier and certainly more pleasant.

Vegas isn’t really that bad compared to Phoenix, but especially compared to anything in the Emirates. It can get hot, but not incredibly so.

To be fair, for Rochester that's an exceedingly small city core zone of a few square blocks that is interconnected like that. You're driving from where you live to that zone for 99% of the people working there.

The rest of the city is basically giant soulless suburb. I've had friends who have lived there for close to a decade now.

Though interconnection isn't common there are a number of older small cities in the Northeast with walkable, revitalized downtowns. I worked in downtown Nashua NH for a number of years and there were plenty of little restaurants, places you could run various errands, and so forth.

But the nice area was really only a handful of blocks in each direction. And beyond that you are in mostly rundown post-industrial mill town and beyond that it is very spread out.

The monorail(s) might be more useful if they were accessibly priced and not so far from the strip. At least walking through the casinos is a fairly interesting and air-conditioned experience.

Maybe it's the weather conditions what produces a city like that. I live in a city that reaches 110F every summer, and walking is something I avoid as much as I can with that heat. (And I love walking)