DUBAI, 8 May 2003 — Dubai plans to build 200 artificial islands in the shape of the world map as part of a drive by the UAE emirate to become a regional tourism hub, local newspapers reported yesterday.
Dubai’s Nakheel Corp will build “The World”, modeled on the outline of the five continents, they said. The project will cover an area of 5.574 million sq meter about five km off Dubai’s Gulf coast. “It will be the most exclusive and private water retreat in Dubai,” the Gulf Today newspaper quoted Nakheel Executive Chairman Sultan Ahmed ibn Sulayem as saying.
The project’s first phase will start toward the end of 2003 and is expected to be completed in 2008. Nakheel Corp did not say how much the project was worth, but company officials said the initial phases alone would cost about $270 million.
“It will provide an intriguing and one-of-a-kind haven for investors looking for exclusive and world-class real estate opportunity.” Access will be entirely by sea. The first stages of construction will be land reclamation expected to commence late this year.
Sulayem heads the separate Palm Twin Island Resort project, which also involves building man-made islands off the Dubai coast. The cost of the first two phases of the project, which is already under construction, is estimated at around $3 billion.
Dubai, which boasts five million visitors a year for a population of one million, is targeting 10 million by 2007, and 40 million by 2015. Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed ibn Rashid Al-Maktoum, who takes credit for the upmarket development of Dubai as a tourist and leisure hub, is an amateur poet as well as a horse-racing magnate. “Take wisdom from the wise people. Not everyone who rides is a jockey,” one of his choice lines, is to be spelt out in Arabic calligraphy in a huge semi-circle around the main trunk and 17 fronds of The Palm, Jebel Ali.
The letters will be formed from 1,060 “water houses” built on stilts and visible from the air. The development will be 50 percent bigger than The Palm, Jumeirah, which has already risen above the waves 22 km up the coast and has sparked a frenzy of property buying.
Dubai-based developer EMAAR Properties unveiled plans in February to construct the world’s tallest habitable tower in the city state, starting this year. The same month Nakheel announced that another major architectural residential project built on a cluster of islands reclaimed from the sea was already under way.
Jumeirah Islands, covering 300 hectares of land reclaimed from the shallow waters off Dubai, are based around canals and include “cascading waterfalls, bountiful flower gardens, romantic promenades, luxury marinas and an exclusive resort.”
The costs are not revealed. Doubters who may wonder not only where the money is coming from but also how far Dubai will go, are referred to previous projects often mocked at conception as too far out, the pyramids of sheikhs who have lost the run of themselves.
The Godolphin horse racing stable Sheikh Mohammed based in the desert sands has become the world leader, the huge suite hotel in the form of a sail built on a man-made island and written off as a white elephant has become a worldwide symbol of the prestige of Dubai.
Dubai Inter City, dismissed as a high-price real estate scam in an age in which the Internet had made expensive locations redundant, overflows with hi-tech companies and has spawned an equally thriving Media City. Sheikh Mohammed himself warned last year that the world had only seen 10 percent of his ideas to put the emirate on the world map.
Also rising from the sands are: Dubai Marina, a $10 billion city to house 100,000 people, is already well under way. The waterway stretches 4.5 km inland and covers 53 hectares . Dubai Festival City launched last year, to develop a four-km stretch of inland waterfront at a cost of $1.6 billion. A $2.5 billion airport expansion under way to more than double annual capacity to 45 million passengers by 2015.
