Showing posts with label United Arab Emirates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label United Arab Emirates. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Living on the water

Living on the water:
People all over the world like to live on the water. So they can have a boat in front of their house and have their own small "beach"in front . Urban planners have constructed whole cities and neighburhoods to fulfill this need. The most famous examples of such neighbourhoods are the manufactured palm islands in Dubai. In the pictures below you can see Palm Jumeirah:




All the houses here have their own "private" beach:


Al though it look's cool you need a lot of money to buy a house here because they coast 3 million dollars on average. And you don't have much privacy as you can see.

Another place where such "living on the water" neighbourhoods are very common is the State of Florida in the United States. This state attracts people from all over the U.S because of the sun and the water. So whole cities were build here to provide people the option to live on the water. The biggest of such a city in Florida with only this purpose is Cape Coral. Thousands of canals were created here so as many people as possible could have their house on the water and could have a boat in front of their house:



Also notice the many bay windows with the glas roofs in the picture below. Sun is what people brings to Cape Coral:




Cape coral might be the biggest of such a city in Florida the layout of the city itself is certainly no exception in Florida. These layouts are found everywhere along the coast of Florida (especially the West coast). Take for example the restricted community of Rotonda West. It has an diameter of 5km and is shaped like an incomplete wagon wheel. A closed, fresh-water canal system surrounds the outside of the "wheel" and travels inside each of the pie-shaped wedges forming the subdivisions of the development:




A protected wetland to the south prevents development of that area. Alligators, bald eagles, great blue herons, egrets, and many other birds and animals inhabit the area. So it is not very rare that you have an alligator in your swimmingpool here.

Other cool layouts like this in Florida are found here at Punta Gorda:


, here at Holiday:


And here at Marco island:


These city layouts are not always found at the coast but also further land inwards. Near Miami the layout you can see in the picture below can be found everywhere:



These city layouts can of course also be found in Europe and other places around the world but by far not in the scale as in Forida. Maybe only the canals of Amsterdam can be compared in size (now also visible in google street view). But these were more designed for commercial trade rather than to provide sun and water.

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Friday, March 27, 2009

Artificial islands

Artificial islands
What is a better symbolization of a manufactured landscape than an artificial islands? When you talk about artificial islands i guess that everybody would immediately think about the Palm island projects at Dubai. These are the biggest artifcial islands under construction in the world today. In total 4 big artificial island projects are going on here: The Palm Jumeirah island project (Check out the skyscrapercity thread ) ,the Palm Jebel Ali project (skyscrapercity thread ) , the Palm Deira project ( not visible in google maps yet ), and the amazing World Islands project.

(skyscrapercity thread). All these projects together can be seen in the picture below:



Similar to the Palm Islands in Dubai is the Al Bahrain artificial island project in Bahrain. The project consist of a series of 13 small man-made islands linked together to form 1 island. Totally it is covering an area of 20 million square meters:



In the northern part of Bahrein is another large artificial island. This is called Amwaj Island project. The Amwaj Islands was reclaimed from the relatively shallow seas to the northeast of Muharraq Island, which is the northernmost island in the Kingdom of Bahrain.The Islands contain residential, commercial (highrise) and hotel and retail buildings, as well as a 240 m diameter circular marina with over 140 berths:


When talking about the largest artificial island you have to be in the Netherlands. The Flevopolder, which was reclaimed on the Zuiderzee and was completed in 1968, is the biggest artificial island in the world:



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