Palm Island Dubai

6 Key excerpts on "Palm Island Dubai"

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  Planning Middle Eastern Cities

  An Urban Kaleidoscope

  • Yasser Elsheshtawy(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  figure 8.1 ). Its multi-cultural (hybrid) nature is evident from its unique population make up: a city of approximately 1 million residents, where locals form a minority (the number varies from 8 per cent to 20 per cent) while the majority are of Arab, Asian and Western nationalities. Given this unique population as well as its location at the tip of the Arabian peninsula, Dubai has become a border region in which one can detect a variety of ‘conflicts’: West/East, modernization/fundamentalism, Arab/Asian and so on. These conflicts are resolved spatially through a policy which on the face of it attempts to reconcile through co-existence, but a closer examination reveals an exclusionary direction through the development of clearly defined ‘borders’ i.e. zones or enclaves.

  This is evident in modern projects such as the luxurious Burj Al-Arab (Tower of the Arabs) Hotel and the more recent Palm Islands development in which authorities have created an instant, easily recognizable image of a city which is on the verge of joining the global community (figures 8.2 and 8.3 ). Burj Al-Arab has, as this chapter will show, become a symbol of Dubai; in its imagery it evokes the sail, thus ‘recognizing’ Dubai’s historical seafaring tradition. Located next to this tower is another mega project in which the city is embarking on a $1.5 billion development to create ‘the largest man-made island’ in the Arabian Gulf, a project which, it is claimed, is ‘visible from outer space’. Shaped like a palm tree (in its site plan) the island is appropriately known as ‘The Palm-Jumeirah’ and will contain exclusive residences, hotels and shopping/entertainment facilities. The palm was chosen because it is ‘one of Dubai’s most enduring symbols of life and abundance’ – another allusion to the past. Both of these projects are physically removed from the shore and are accessible via bridges, thus highlighting their exclusive nature. Their image – whether it is sails or palms – is directed towards the global media thus affirming what some have described as being ‘the most globalized of all Arab societies’.1

  Figure 8.1 . The skyline of a newly emerging Dubai in the midst of a vast desertscape.

  This chapter, in critically assessing these projects, will first place them within the current globalization discourse with its emphasis on the notions of hybridity and the inevitable outcome of ‘polarization’. This is followed by a brief historical background of the development of the city with a specific focus on the rapid growth witnessed within the last two decades, illustrating the dramatic urban transformations within the twentieth century while highlighting the city’s multi-cultural nature. The current ‘megaprojects’ undertaken by the city are then discussed, and this discussion is followed by the two case studies. They are presented to illustrate the extent to which, firstly, they represent a continuation of modernization efforts in Dubai which began early in the twentieth century and, secondly, are a natural response to the current globalization discourse.

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  The Rough Guide to Dubai

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  • Rough Guides

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  The Palm Jumeirah and Dubai Marina Nowhere is the scale of Dubai’s explosive growth as staggeringly obvious as in the far south of the city, home to the vast Palm Jumeirah artificial island and Dubai Marina development – evidence of the emirate’s magical ability to turn sand into skyscrapers and raise entire new city suburbs up out of the waves. Ten years ago the district was the largest building site on the planet – at one point it was estimated that Dubai was home to a quarter of the world’s total number of construction cranes. Now the building crews have gone, leaving a brand-new city and the world’s largest man-made island in their wake, with a forest of densely packed skyscrapers lined up around the glitzy marina itself and the fronds of the Palm spreading out into the waters beyond. ATLANTIS 87 7 THE PALM JUMEIRAH THE PALM JUMEIRAH AND DUBAI MARINA The Palm Jumeirah Access via the Palm Monorail (see below) Lying off the coast around 5km south of the Burj al Arab, the Palm Jumeirah is far and away the largest example of modern Dubai’s desire not just to master its unpromising natural environment but to transform it entirely. Built between 2001 and 2006 and stretching 4km out into the waters of the Arabian Gulf, the Palm is currently the world’s largest man-made island, and has doubled the length of the Dubai coastline at a total cost of over US$12 billion – although even this grandiose feat is only the first in a series of four artificial islands currently under development (see box, p.89). As its name suggests, the Palm Jumeirah is designed in the shape of a palm tree, with a central “trunk” and a series of sixteen radiating “fronds”, the whole enclosed in an 11km-long breakwater, or “crescent”, lined with a string of huge resorts.

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  Tourism Mobilities

  Places to Play, Places in Play

  • Mimi Sheller, John Urry(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Consequently it will be argued that the Palm is a landmark and a place corresponding to a society marked by relational and networked connections. The Palm is a place adapted for these circumstances. It can be described within a topology of interconnected spaces, rather than a Euclidean topology of geographically fixed places. From this point of view the Palm is a ‘landing mark’, marking a spot where flows can land, meet, and connect.

  The focus in the chapter is on the aesthetic dimension in relation to what makes mobile life at a distance possible (Urry 2000). Theorists often discuss the material transformations and then focus on the technological aspects of what constitutes global connectivity: telecommunication, fibre-optic cables, satellites, transport systems, credit cards, and so on. Of course the technical infrastructure is essential. As Harvey argues: ‘Spatial organization is necessary to overcome space’ (Harvey 1985: 145). By this he means that the compression of time and space is necessarily based on the spatial fixity of immobile systems, such as transport, communications, and institutions of law, education, and welfare. But apart from such technological approaches, and the systematic transmissions of flows discussed within these discourses, there are other aspects to consider that are exemplified by the development of the Palm.

  Dubai, a place of and for mobility

  In the wake of globalization, Dubai has been moulded to become a place adapted for conditions of high mobility and an extensively interconnected world. In a way, the city is an answer to the question: what would a society look like that was developed in the information age, with virtually all the funds needed to realize any vision?

  Traditional Dubai’s economy was based on fishing, pearling, camel breeding, and regional trade. In 1966 oil resources began to be exploited. At this point Dubai was still part of Trucial Oman, which was under British colonial influence. Not until 1971 did Dubai become one of the emirates of the independent federal nation of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The country’s oil resources took Dubai into a tremendous spiral of development: paved roads, telephone, water supply, and electricity. The massive restructuring of Dubai has been undertaken because its oil resources were comparatively small. This has provided the incentive to diversify its economy in order to become less dependent on oil. Thus the strategy has been systematically to reinvest the revenues from oil into society.

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  Dubai: Behind an Urban Spectacle

  • Yasser Elsheshtawy(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Located near the Burj Al-Arab Hotel, Palm Jumeirah is the only fully completed island in the series. The island is built in the shape of seventeen huge fronds surrounded by 12 km of protective barrier reef, extending 5 km into the sea south of Dubai city. It is accessible by 300-metre bridges from the mainland or by boat to two marinas, while the main causeway will also have a monorail system.

  When the project was first announced it was claimed that it was the biggest man-made island, and ‘… like the great wall of China it will be visible from the moon’. The original Palm was the brainchild of Dubai’s then crown prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, essentially responding to the expected increase in tourists. To cater for them additional shoreline was needed and the island, measuring 5 km by 5 km would give Dubai 120 km of new, sandy coastline.16 The date palm design was chosen because it is ‘… one of Dubai’s most enduring symbols of life and abundance’.17

  The project was managed by Dubai Palm Developers and dredging work was undertaken by a Dutch firm (Van Oord ACZ). Some of the statistics associated with this construction are quite impressive. Palm Jumeirah has been built using 95 million cubic metres of sand and rock. Rocks for the foundations were, according to official records, taken from quarries around the UAE. Special barges were used to dredge sand from the sea and, with the help of satellite GPS technology. The sand was then deposited to create the crescent shaped fronds (figures 6.6. and 6.7 ).

  6.6.

  The outer crescent of Palm Jumeirah as it appeared in 2004 while the island was still being reclaimed.

  6.7.

  Palm Jumeirah nearing completion. (Source: By courtesy of Nakheel)

  Legend has it that the project was based on a sketch by Sheikh Mohamed. Officially, however, it owes its conceptual origins to a New Zealand architect based in Australia, Warren Pickering. He was asked in 1995 to create a design for an island. His proposal for an island shaped like a palm was eventually adopted. During three years of planning the project ‘involved a total of forty-two consulting firms and more than fifty studies, all especially commissioned to include key aspects such as marine ecology, human population and the business development of the islands’.18 While the need for additional shoreline is understandable, the various implications of this project were not quite clear, specifically the ecological ones– even if claims to the contrary were (and are) made. In fact according to one official at the time, these were all details that would eventually be worked out, what mattered was the ‘right attitude’.19

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  The Church of Facebook

  How the Hyperconnected Are Redefining Community

  • Jesse Rice(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • David C Cook

    (Publisher)

  1 Construction also required a relatively firm surface on which to place all that sand so that the sand does not dissolve—in biblical fashion—under any structure built on top of it. And that means you also need a lot of rock—5.5 million cubic meters’ worth. But in the case of the Palm Jumeirah and its island cousins, the rock was to be built upon the sand—a time-tested design familiar to the Dutch engineers that were enlisted to assemble the pieces. Why Dutch engineers? Because the Dutch have managed to increase the coastline of their country by 35 percent. They are experts at manufacturing new earth. And luckily for the sheikh, the Persian Gulf is an ideal place to manufacture an island. It is shallow enough and narrow enough to keep out most large wave-generating storms. It’s also home to a lot of sand and rock.

  Island construction began on the Jumeirah by building a massive breakwater. The Palm Jumeirah’s breakwater reached out of the sea by three meters (around ten feet) and wrapped its eleven-kilometer-long arms (around seven miles) around the future “palm fronds” that would give it its distinctive palm tree appearance. The breakwater, in fact, was fashioned in the same way as the rest of the island. First, sand was dumped on the ocean floor to build up the island’s base. On top of that was dumped endless rubble that further built on the sand and eventually poked through the water’s surface. Finally, on top of the rubble were placed tons and tons of massive rocks.

  In my mind this process seems backward. But I am neither Dutch nor an engineer. Either way, this terra-forming process was repeated constantly for three years until, lo and behold, the clear shape of a giant palm tree emerged from the sea. Once completed, the artificial palm fronds were covered with row after row of ultraluxurious homes, condos, and hotels that now stand as a testimony to human ingenuity, relentless hard work, and the power of doodling ideas on napkins. Two more islands—the Palm Jebel Ali and the Palm Deira—were well under way by the time the Jumeirah took shape (although the Palm Deira is not expected to see completion until 2015), but The Palm Islands were only the beginning. The relentless team at Nakheel Properties, the same development company that pioneered The Palm Islands, saw the potential for something even bigger on the horizon.

  As though Dubai real estate were not outlandish enough, Nakheel unveiled plans in 2003 for a new development called The World. You’ve likely seen pictures or YouTube video capturing images of The World. The development is essentially an archipelago of three hundred man-made islands that are patterned after the Earth’s own continents and countries. From a few thousand feet above the water’s surface, an observer can make out the clear outlines of a “North America,” an “Africa,” even an “Antarctica.” The entire planet’s shape has been reproduced and miniaturized in sand and rock, four kilometers off the coast of Dubai.

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  Under Construction: Logics of Urbanism in the Gulf Region

  • Steffen Wippel, Katrin Bromber, Birgit Krawietz(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Dubai is certainly at the forefront of a movement that attempts to construct an entire place image based on iconic mega-projects, ‘distinguished by superlatives – the tallest, the biggest, etc.’ (Elsheshtawy 2010: 134). The Burj Al Arab in Dubai is likely to be the most well-known example of a hyperreal iconic building in the Middle East, built primarily for place branding and marketing reasons. It markets itself as the first seven-star and tallest hotel in the world. Its shape is designed to remind the spectator of the sail of a traditional Dhau. As a sign, it points to a signified object that is unrelated to the purpose of the object as a hotel, but aims to provide Dubai with a globally recognized destination image and identity, which does nevertheless relate somehow to its socio-cultural environment. This is exemplified in a statement by its managing director in a personal communication in 2004: ‘[I]f you speak to His Highness, he always says that he built Burj Al Arab for Dubai as an Icon. [He] had the idea from the very beginning. … That this was going to be the “Sydney Opera House” of Dubai. And I think it has achieved this kind of status.’ As the example of the Burj Al Arab demonstrates, the development of destination images is strongly influenced by icons as symbols of the place. In this regard, the new jewel in the crown of the emirate is the recently finished Burj Khalifa, the tallest skyscraper in the world. The base geometry of the tower feigns some type of local embeddedness by referring to the six petal Hymenocallis desert flower. The attempt to place the new building at the core of Dubai’s place image becomes obvious in the discourse accompanying its construction. The marketing slogan ‘history rising’ was meant to indicate the dawn of a new era for Dubai (Elsheshtawy 2010: 160) and to contribute to the effort of the city to gain regional hegemony. ‘By claiming that its developments are derived from local and regional influences, the city is obviously looking beyond its borders to become a source of influence’ (Elsheshtawy 2010: 163).

  2.5 Iconic Skyscrapers: Burj Al Arab and Burj Khalifa, Dubai

  Photos: Christian Steiner 2004, 2010.

  However, urban spaces are not only branded by iconic buildings, but also by large-scale waterfront development projects such as The Palm and The World islands (Dubai), The Pearl (Qatar), Two Seas Islands (Bahrain) or The Wave (Oman). Beyond semiotically transforming the landscape of the region, they also create new spaces and geographies. Concurrently, their attractiveness is ironically reduced to a mediatized perspective as their shape is only recognizable from air or space (Junemo 2004: 182). However, Elsheshtawy emphasizes that the extraordinary shape of The Palm and The World islands solely serve to create an instantly recognizable symbol for Dubai and to propagate the brand Dubai. By doing so, ‘they direct attention to the various projects that are being carried out and thus increase sales and profits’ (Elsheshtawy 2010: 151). Furthermore, The Palm Islands are a good example of a generic place whose symbolism does not relate to a specific localized culture as date palms are grown all over the Arab world (Junemo 2004: 188). Thus, The Palm Islands as well as The World archipelagos are archetypes of hyperrealities, perfect examples of symbols that became objects. The state-owned Dubai developer Nakheel revealed this hyperreal character of its projects with his marketing slogan ‘The Palm puts Dubai on the map – The World puts the map on Dubai’. In this regard, The World is a materialization of Baudrillard’s claim that in hyperrealities the map ‘precedes the territory’ (Baudrillard 2007: 1). It seems that the initial idea of building large, iconically designed land reclamation waterfront projects and to use them for place branding has been quite convincing and inspired other countries and emirates in the region to copy the Dubai example (Elsheshtawy 2006: 248).

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