Skyscrapers were invented on Manhattan Island in New York City because of limited ground space and the pressure of population growth forcing the need for more office space. As buildings grew taller and taller, they also became status symbols ... witness the "whose tallest" competition between the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building in the 1930s.
So was born skyscraper envy to the point where people and countries with more money than brains build skyscrapers where they are not necessary. Witness Dubai, which has well over a thousand square miles of open desert on which buildings could be erected, but instead chooses to spend its copious oil money on ostentatious skyscrapers crowded into a small section of its emirate ... see the above picture.
How very silly and wasteful of them. When their oil money runs out these skyscrapers may well form a very impressive ghost town.
Afterward: See: World's Tallest Tower.
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