Worlds Half-Built - Vol. 1 Ed. 36
Mar 24, 2021 12:30 am
World Builders' Guild Newsletter
$13 billion moves a lot of sand.
It's also not enough to keep the global economy from halting your world-building project in its tracks leaving an Earth-shaped cluster of islets to bake in the Persian Gulf.
In the early 2000s, wide-eyed real estate developers decided to spend some of the UAE's boomtime petrolbucks on a one-of-a-kind luxury destination: reclaimed islands fit for exclusive property ownership and private resorts that would jut into the sea off the diminutive coastline of Dubai.
They envisioned an enclave of opulence. Palm-lined streets give way to gated properties and villas, each done up in a different motif.
Not pictured: uninhabited desert islands. (Christoph Schulz on Unsplash)
Far East foraged, African-modern, Sultan-chic.
The moguls did not, however, foresee the economic downturn of 2008.
Those with an appetite and the means to move earth and sea are rarely the same to let a little thing like an economic crisis get in the way of their vision.
The few inhabited islands represent a sliver of the original dream among hectares of naked sand swimming in opalescent shallows. The premises are nearly self-sufficient with desalinization facilities and material reuse policies. They recycle the gas thrown off the compost heaps for the cooking ovens.
While the grand vision is yet to come to life, these literal world-builders continue to find ways to make the best of a dismal and eerily futile situation.
When the world you've built comes crashing down before the walls go up, how will you preserve the spark that started it all?
To future worlds,
Matt Ventre
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