Projects

One thing that interests me is large scale urban development. Yeah, I hear the yawns... but I'm talking huge, monstrous projects with unfathomable budgets.

One of them is the four man made island "communities" off the coast of Dubai, UAE.
Take a look using Google Earth @ 25° 9'57.82"N 55°11'53.47"E. Pretty crazy!

Now, supposedly, the rings around these sets of islands are for security. People must be cleared to enter… talk about privacy! Some of the islands host resorts, others can be purchased or rented. I think the whole project cost somewhere in the area of 6 bajillion dollars! I could be wrong though.

Another similar project is being started in Saudi Arabia. It's called “King Abdullah city”.I think you can see the start of it @ 21°56'36.99"N 38°57'20.17"E. Either that or someone is building a golf course in the middle of nowhere.

The final project that we’ve all heard about, but probably haven’t been following lately is the Lower Manhatten Redevelopment project - The world trade center plot.

The final 5 concepts were pretty amazing, but they’ve made the final selection and constuction is underway. The original design looks great, but let's see if they cheap out during construction. Here is a webcam view of the site as well as the planned memorial site.

We'll see if it ever gets built, or if it stalls like the Toronto Waterfront redevelopment has, causing everyone to lose interest. So far though, Toronto's plans look pretty nice (Warning - this link is to a .PDF that is 77 Meg in size, so it will take a year or so to download).