Just Burn the Money: Dubai’s Failed and Failing Megaprojects

today's video is sponsored by Ridge wallage you'll learn more about them in just a bit what would you do with a billion dollars buy an island design the private jet of your dreams own your favorite sports team cure cancer [Applause] and look a lot of rich people might tell you to use their billion dollars to make another billion dollars to make more billions and then other people will tell you to give a large part of it to charity but if you ask the people who run the city of Dubai they'd probably have some different answers for you and ones that might not make a whole lot of sense at first glass they might Advocate that you build a world record-breaking building that doesn't really need to exist or dredge up sound from the sea floor to make a train of islands in the shape of your peanut I mean your Cleopatra's Needle why well because that's what you do in Dubai look Dubai has got a truly stunning record of failed failing and otherwise useless Mega projects and today we're gonna dig right in [Music] thank you Dubai as a city-state has experienced rapid growth over the course of its history from a town of about 40 000 people in 1960 to a metropolis of over three and a half million people today as might make sense for a population increase in that size working with the benefit of a booming economy and lots of surrounding space Dubai's leaders have typically chosen to basically just build another little bit of City out of thinner whenever they need it and to the city's credit that effort is sometimes successful Dubai's Business Bay complete with 230 skyscrapers is getting its finishing touches and the Dubai marina built around an open saltwater Canal currently hosts about 55 000 people and a bunch of whales which is nice but at other times Dubai's plan City extensions have had spotty results and that's putting it rather generously take for example Jamira Garden City imagined as a nine square kilometer development at a price tag of way for it 95 billion US Dollars originally tomorrow Garden City was conceived as a way to bring sustainable eco-friendly housing at a high standard of living for about 250 000 people on what was at the time the fringes of the city according to the developers Jamira Garden City would be walkable air-conditioned landscaped in a way that reduces heat and make consider improvements on Dubai's usual standards for water use and reuse Energy Efficiency and Emissions it was also stated to open in 2015 and when you ask would a project slated for opening in 2015 be announced well that would be in 2007 just barely before the entire world was rocked by a financial crisis the bujjamari Garden City on an indefinite hole from which it still has not been restarted and Sir indefinite hold by the way is often a code word used by Dubai developers and officials which basically means look would rather not announce the world that this project is canceled birthday is it's canceled we canceled it because it's not going to work it's 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base of operations our Mac Doom wasn't just meant to be an airport either it was meant to form the heart of an entire Transportation City one that could provide Travelers with all the help and logistical support they could ever dream of and now we're going to put aside the fact that going to an entire city built as an extension of an airport terminal sounds like a literal Nightmare and instead focus on what's actually happening at our Mac tomb to be clear the airport is open and with an estimated completion date in the late 2020s and a price tag of 82 billion dollars it's got quite a bit of hype from Dubai officials looking to send air traffic in that direction it planned five runways and three passenger terminals make it an ideal International hub for the type of traffic Dubai is hoping to accommodate and there's certainly enough air travel in the region to keep our bactum busy except that Liberty really seems to want to go there the handful of Passenger Airlines have set up shop but each of them only sends air traffic to one or two airports around the world Flyers Saudi Arabia's low-cost Airline operates with three destinations from al-maktum but all three are also in Saudi Arabia reducing their role in Dubai to basically a shuttle service the UA's Flagship Airlines Emirates and Etihad Airways haven't yet touched the airport and fly Dubai offers just one flight to Bahrain five years after announcing the would become their new Harbor to pull 13 years after our mak2 first opened as for why this has happened it appears that no airline has been interested in moving their hub from Dubai International Airport to al-maktum yet another example of a world record-breaking project in Dubai that turns out to just be a white elephant that nobody actually wants its construction has continued to suffer delays with a concerning lack of meaningful updates and other than filling in for Dubai International Airport when the runways over there need to be maintained there just doesn't seem to be anyone with a desire to fly in or out of al-maktoum these days the airport mainly hosts Freight operations from a total of four Airlines and lo we couldn't do this part of the video without at least touching on Dubai land mellow we've already done a video on the entirety of Dubai Landover on our Mega projects channel so check that out if you'd like to take a deep dive but for now suffice to say that Dubai land was a planned 107 square mile Mega theme parks that would easily have become the world's largest with the price tag that was three times Dubai's GDP at the time it was conceived Dubai land would have integrated Western attractions like a Six Flags Universal Studios and Legoland as well as a Formula One race track and Parks themed around DreamWorks and Marvel Productions alongside a gigantic Ferris wheel and themed areas with names like Leisure and vacation World Sports and Outdoor World and eco-tourism world as Dubai saw it the park would be able to attract tens of millions of visitors every year as for why Dubai wanted this Behemoth it was conceived as a major way of diversifying the city-states revenue streams taking it from Port City dependent on the oil trade to an economy with parallel ventures in tourism giving it the ability to withstand say you know a financial crash that would the oil industry and as for why it failed well that would be a financial crash that crippled the oil industry specifically that nasty little one in 2007 that had also doomed the Jamira Garden City the interest Dubai land had secured from foreign back is mostly dried up basically overnight as Dubai was clotheslined in the face by the same economic bogeyman that it had been trying to escape like if you're a believer in this and thought that Dubai could thread the needle just try to make the byland work at the 2007 recession had never come then fair enough but it's worth noting that the entire concept of Dubai land was built on the same premise that doomed the other Mega projects that we've discussed and the ones that we're going to discuss later there's just not that much of a reason for it to exist but putting aside the fact that about half the world's population that is to say women would be well within their right to conclude that they were straight up unwelcome in Dubai there's also the prohibitive cost of actually getting to Dubai and the fact that aside from putting a bunch of big name parks in one place there's really not much of a reason to go not to mention the price becomes even more prohibitive uh when you consider that in order to actually benefit from all of these things being together you're now looking at a vacation measured in weeks rather than days but regardless it just doesn't matter because most of the project has been abandoned except for Legoland and a few other scattered parks and a Smurf Village for some reason all of what does exist is crammed into a little spot of desert measuring no more than a few square miles although the area is labeled on Google Maps in far greater detail than when we made our Dubai land video just a couple of months ago so maybe hello government of Dubai foreign speaking of taking photos of Dubai from space even a very brief glance of a satellite map of the city would make it difficult not to see the group of massive artificial Islands currently sitting just off the coast the ones that look like palm trees while those the Palm Islands the one looks like the world well as the World Islands creative we know so we've already established the government to Dubai excellent at naming things turns out what else they're excellent at is dredging up billions of cubic feet of sand in order to make these islands partially in an effort to dramatically increase the amount of available Coastline and beachfront property available in Dubai and partly in that same Drive of Tourism that we mentioned before now we'll start with the good news the Palm Jamira which first began being constructed in 2001 and despite a myriad of delays is actually completed it hosts long lines of tightly packed Villas on each of its fronds along with a whole bunch of hotels and resorts as well as the first monorail in the Middle East sounds about right but once you look past the Palm Jamira the situation gets a whole lot worse and pretty quickly Palm gedal alley which was planned to be about 50 larger than Palm Jamira has had its Breakwater constructed and well that's about it the island which was supposed to host a whole mass of theme parks and about 250 000 people by now is instead basically just an idea that's been blanketed with lawsuits from investors and people who were promised residency on the island according to Dubai the project might restart this year but given all the other stalled Island developments that we're about to cover we're not exactly holding our Breath Right now the Dubai islands a separate series of four artificial Islands were supposed to make up a third portion of the Palm Island a good amount of the sand needed for the project had been dredged up from the ocean by the start of 2007 and the financial crisis but like many other endeavors on this list the crisis put a stop to that construction it was initially planned to host a two kilometer long night market the biggest in the world and more which when measured by square footage would also have been the largest in the world along with that it would have hosted 80 hotels and up to 8 000 Villas but at this moment it's just uh some sand the coast of Dubai and then there's the World Islands yet another archipelago off the coast this collection of 300 islands is in the approximate shape of a map of the world split across a rough approximation of each of the world's countries the general concept for the project was that an interested buyer could own a villa on a given Island which they'd then have all to themselves a person could then say they owned an individual country and they owned China or Russia or the UK makes a ton of sense doesn't it now a lot of the islands have been claimed at this time with others having been given away to some famous people but the vast majority remain Untouched by developers as of now the island of Greenland has been turned into a Showbiz property under the ownership of the Sheikh of Dubai while another couple of islands host hotels but brace yourself because all these are the only ones that have at least had their construction work started now if you've kept up with the basic theme of today's video you already know that the next idea is going to be bigger than the last one in some way and what's bigger than the world well that would be the universe Islands which were expected to dredge about 3000 hectares of land in the shape of the solar system in the Milky Way tragically there's not much to say about this when it was announced in early 2008 later for completion around 2023 paused in 2009 and then quietly mothballed in 2015. and finally there's the Dubai Waterfront a combination archipelago and Canal that would have arched around the Palm Jebel alley the second of the three plowed Palm Islands in order to make a rough approximation of the Islamic symbol of the star and crescent this would have made a far large Breakwater for the Palm Jebel alley a bay inside the crescent and 70 kilometers of Coastline with room according to Dubai to host another 1.5 million people as of now though construction has yet again been minimal and there's no indication that it'll pick up anytime soon as for why this particular series of Mega projects went down the dredging tubes well there's a lot of reasons firstly yet again the financial crisis of 2007 took a heavy toll but it also Bears repeating that even if some wealthy people around the world might be interested it filling up one or two Palm Islands there's just not that many rich people that desperate to move to Dubai even the first Palm Island is only about halfway full at present after that the massive environmental implications of dredging up this much of the sea floor and it's not exactly a good look but all this is still before we point out that Dubai is just surrounded by empty desert there's plenty of land to expand to it's just not the sort of land that technically gets to be sold as premium beachfront property then there's also the issues with dredging and creating Islands in this way in the example of the Palm Islands the necessary Breakwater formed around the island helps to prevent the tide from swelling up and over the entire thing but it also causes the sea water within the break to stagnate and oxygenate a couple of gaps in the Breakwater do help with this issue but they certainly don't fix it residents there complain of the smell the mosquitoes the algae blooms the bigger problems though are erosion and sinking all of the islands are prone to sinking into the ocean over a period of decades while the navigational channels between them begin to fill up with drifting sand basically just taking the whole thing back to the Sea after eroding artificial Islands after the Bonkers theme park in the airport that no Airline wanted we come to Dubai Creek Tower which are currently be rising about 1300 meters or 4 300 feet above Dubai right now vastly surpassing the Burj Khalifa and solidly one-upping Saudi Arabia's planned Kingdom Tower which would have stolen the record for the world's tallest skyscraper if it had been built unopposed yet another attempt by Dubai to secure the world's biggest something the Dubai Creek Tower would have been built as an observation deck for a price of about a billion US Dollars while emitting a beam of light into the sky at night a slender curvy design the Dubai Creek Tower would have been supported by a net of Steel cables days with an estimated opening date prior to Dubai's Expo in 2020 but you probably guessed by now Dubai Creek Tower does not exist after a groundbreaking in 2016 the project was officially delayed in 2020 due to the covid-19 pandemic which seems fair enough but That official statement conveniently left out was that there hadn't been any work done on the side for two years previous after a contractor finished up the foundation in May of 2018. since then a contract for construction hadn't even been awarded and the pandemic turned out just to be a happy accident to facilitator much longer delay of the project as of now the Dubai Creek tower has been indefinitely suspended although that might just be for the best after all Dubai's Burj Khalifa Still the tallest building at the world at the time of this writing has been mired in debt for years while dealing with a sewage system that has become famous for relying on a long line of poop trucks to Ferry out waste every day given that the Dubai Creek Tower would have been an even taller similarly expensive yet even less functional space perhaps it's best that the whole thing has gone up in a cloud of dust instead thank you in hindsight this video might have done well as a drinking game take a shot every time something in Dubai is supposed to be the world's biggest longest largest or otherwise record-breaking something or rather hello we've not even touched on monstrosities like the Dubai frame which yes we suppose is technically the world's largest picture frame this all appears to be the long-term strategy for Dubai produce a city-state that is unlike anything else in the world because by Dubai's logic sheer uniqueness is what will drive a booning tourist economy but in order for that strategy to work you've got to build the things and once you do they've got to work as advertised a tourist might come to Dubai to see a single developed Palm Island or visit Legoland but they surely aren't coming to stand on an empty lot where a crazy tall skyscraper might one day be and we didn't even get into all the other factors that might drive tourists especially a western ones away highly restrictive laws around gender sexuality and alcohol consumption a complete lack of support for foreigners who want to stay past a few weeks and a tendency to keep foreign workers trapped in the country by confiscating their passports but beyond that there's the simple stubborn insistence that no none of these projects are canceled and none have failed to live up to expectations they're awesome everything's going great I think it's a bit ironic after all if Dubai would just admit that these projects weren't going to happen we might not even be making this video after all rich people burning their money is certainly not a new phenomenon and the elites of Dubai are far from the only ones doing it but when you're laughing maniacally as you throw billions upon billions into the Flames well that's just a special kind of spectacle and one that's probably best watch from afar [Music] thank you

Channel: Sideprojects

Views: 955,601

Keywords: megaprojects, construction, engineering, projects, sideprojects, dubai mega projects, impossible mega projects, difficult construction projects, mega projects, dubai islands what went wrong, impossible construction projects, impossible projects, dubai islands, the line city, megaprojects in the world, dubai the tower, dubai creek tower, construction fails, building, dubai creek tower construction, mega construction, top luxury, difficult mega projects

Id: NEGuyJrB1Ho

Length: 18min 25sec (1105 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 28 2023