Eco global survival electric lights
Unauthorized use is prohibited.Īnd yet a sustainable city is precisely what Dubai’s government says it aims to create. “From the point of view of sustainability you probably wouldn’t have done it here,” says Janus Rostock, a prominent architect transplanted from Copenhagen. Then oil and a wild real estate boom transformed it into a city that sports the world’s tallest building, one of its densest collections of skyscrapers, and its third busiest airport. What kind of human settlement makes sense in such a place? For centuries Dubai was a fishing village and trading port, small and poor. There is next to no soil suitable for growing crops. Yet it rarely rains Dubai gets less than four inches a year. The humidity is stifling then, because of the proximity of the sea. It didn’t feel quite as cold as minus eight (14☏) on the slope, but the temperature outside can get close to 50 (122☏) in summer. The souvenir T-shirt I bought bears a cartoon of a Celsius thermometer. You begin to marvel then at what air-conditioning can do, when pushed to its limits.
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Passing a mural of the Alps, you zip up your parka, pull on your gloves.
Inside, you can window-shop at Prada, Dior, and Alexander McQueen before pushing through the glass doors of Ski Dubai. Smack in the middle of the flat city, the slope looks like a silver spaceship impaled in the ground floor of the Mall of the Emirates. To plunge headlong into the audacity of Dubai-the sprawling efflorescence of concrete, glass, and steel that has sprung up over the past three decades on the scorched sands of Arabia-you could start by going skiing.