Dubai had never had more than a small fraction of what Abu Dhabi had. It overlooks the Montgomerie, an 18-hole Championship Golf Course and has some truly amazing villas!Bear in mind that rental prices increase significantly depending on the view and location of the villa; if you're wanting a lake view with several bedrooms, be prepared to pay the price.Once desert, now one of the more popular areas for expats, Al Barsha starts behind the Mall of the Emirates and heads out towards Emirates Hills. "We're modern. That’s in part because of Dubai’s legacy of heedless expansion—it’s a sprawling, car-centered city built to be taken in at 75 miles per hour, Rostock says.Aviation has soared with the city’s growth, accounting for a third of its GDP and employing 30 percent of its workers. The structure itself is green, one of the city’s rising number of LEED-certified buildings.Since the economic crisis, Dubai has tightened its The city government is not just imposing rules on building owners, says the municipality’s director general, Hussain Nasser Lootah, an engineer by training. Al Jaz 4, Al Jaz, The Greens, Dubai, UAE And the international publicity the project received from the start helped break the resistance to green ideas throughout the UAE. And if it can happen here, they say, it can happen anywhere.Echoes of Old Dubai linger around the Creek, the harbor where the city was born. “We took a decision as a company that we could never go back to business as usual,” he says.Saeed’s new development, which will eventually include a school, hotel, an “innovation center,” and a riding stable, currently consists of 500 villas on a compact 114-acre site. The villas are beautiful and there is a real feeling of peace and serenity in this well planned gated community. Yet it rarely rains; Dubai gets less than four inches a year. “From the point of view of sustainability you probably wouldn’t have done it here,” says Ski Dubai is the Middle East’s only indoor ski park, and often viewed as an emblem of the city's resource footprint. The Marina Walk feels like one of Dubai's better planned developments, with lots of shops and restaurants around the man- made marina. Workers streamed in from South Asia to build new skyscrapers for the affluent. It’ll have to be imported, probably from Australia or Indonesia.

There are several community centres for shopping and health clubs available, as well as shared pools and recreation areas. Al Alka 1, Al Alka, The Greens, Dubai, UAE A shallow, almost closed sea, the Gulf is already 20 percent saltier than the ocean, and it’s getting saltier: In addition to the hypersaline brine pouring into it, dams in Turkey and Iraq are diverting fresh water and climate change is increasing evaporation. They already cover well over a square mile and produce 200 megawatts, two percent of DEWA’s total generating capacity, but there’s room for a lot more—a thousand megawatts will be here by 2020, 5,000 megawatts by 2030, DEWA says. In 2012 Mills wrote a report saying that solar power had become cost-competitive in the Middle East, at 12 U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour.

Real estate prices fell 50 percent, oil even more. All waste is recycled—the organic stuff is composted and used in a series of dome-shaped greenhouses that occupy a “farm” at the center of the development.