Why Dubai's Man-Made Islands Are Still Empty

A city should never be built to look good from the sky. It should be built to look good from the perspective of the people walking through its streets.

Fun fact - a coral reef was buried underneath the sand in order for this abomination to be built.

Few years ago my company was doing a project for a client in Dubai. I spend a lot of time there and also learned a lot about the place. The people there are greedy, extremely greedy. And they seem not to plan too much in advance. The city itself is quite old because it was a port city. The most cosmopolitan in that part of the world. They used to have pearls there but they were so agressive in getting them that oysters went extinct in that area. They had oil. Exploited it so much that they have none now. They have no respect for the nature. They use it, use it and use it. They have this mindset that everything and everyone should serve them if they consider them inferior. There is no gratidute towards anything. People or environment. Everything is disposable. A building was on fire? Let's leave it and build a new one. Everything must look expensive but when you take a closer look it is very tacky. There is a huge waste of space (inside the buildngs, outside areas). They serve no purpose they are just meant to look "rich". But it is all the surface, everything is empty inside. Even if you go on top of Burj Kalifa you quickly realize that it isn't worth it because you won't see anything interesting (and it was around $50 at that time). The whole city is just a golden empty shell. No soul, no value.

Dubai is a perfect example of why consolidating wealth in the hands of a few can be devastating. Especially when those individuals are rich largely by virtue of what family they are born into. God damn we suck as a species sometimes.

Dubai kind of feels like an experiment in what happens when you give people too much money.

Living in Dubai as a child, the shells I collected on Jumeirah beach were all covered with tar while I saw the dredges at work out at The World. These projects are so damaging to the environment, and it was all in vain.

There’s just a thing about Dubai that makes it feel so robotic and dead. The city feels soulless

Ah, nothing sets the mood like sailing by multiple barren sandy lots on the way to your resort island surrounded by stagnant water.

Can you imagine what would happen if this money was spent on improving the planet and people's lives?

What's stupid is that it would only take a handful of marine and shoreline scientists to explain why this project wouldn't work out.

I'm reminded of a line from a movie I once saw. It's something like "Land is a good investment because it's the one thing they're not making anymore." You can't really create sustainable land. Mother nature will always have her way.

On another note, these island projects used so many dredging vessels, that it was difficult for Louisiana to find any to rebuild the coastline after Katrina.

The first problem was the fact they made things that look nice from above, it shows that they are more interested in things looking pretty instead of functional

“I live on the Netherlands” “Which city?” “Dubai”

As an American, I'm almost happy Dubai exists for no other reason than it means we don't have the worst-designed cities in the world.

Definitely my worst ever trip. I got recommended to go to Dubai by a Moroccan stewardess I met in Bali and I've never seen somewhere so fake, it's like spoilt brats trying to outdo each other in a boiling hot sand pit in the middle of nowhere

500 years from now: people say aliens built these islands

Mother Earth was like "I'm not into tattoos, thank youuu!"

I randomly found this on google maps years and years ago, I cannot even tell you how confused I was.

The sewer of the world's tallest building isn't even hooked up to city sewer. It has to be trucked off every day in tanker trucks.