Arabian Canal
About Arabian Canal
The Arabian Canal, upon completion, will be a 75 km man-made canal. The excavation of the Arabian Canal has begin near the Dubai Marina area and will go round the Al Maktoum International Airport and enter the sea again at the outer end of Palm jebel Ali. Dubai Waterfront forms the first phase of the larger Arabian Canal. Limitless is the developer of Arabian canal.
The canal, which is expected to be completed in 2012, will require the excavation of 1.1 billion cubic meters of soil. The canal itself will cost $11 billion, which will snake from Dubai Waterfront in Jebel Ali and pass to the east of the Dubai World Central development before turning back towards the Palm Jumeirah. $50 billion will be spent to construct a new “city” within the city, which will take 20,000 hectares of land in the south bank of the channel. The Arabian canal will be 150 metres wide and six metres deep, enough to accommodate yachts up to 40 metres long.
Calthorpe Associates, an urban design firm in California, is designing and overseeing the canal plan. Calthorpe is collaborating with the landscape architecture firm SWA Group, and the engineering firms Moffatt & Nichol, Parsons International, and Mott MacDonald.
The Arabian Canal will be the largest infrastructure project in the world. Planned as a 75 kilometer waterway, the Canal will provide a special amenity for inland inhabitants. Flanked on both sides by a broad corridor of mixed development, Arabian Canal brings water inland from the Arabian Gulf into the deserts of Dubai. A hierarchy of places drapes the landscape, from high-density urban centers along the Grand Canal to smaller towns and villages in the areas beyond.
A system of secondary canals radiates away from the main waterway, yielding a more temperate microclimate to surrounding neighborhoods. Large architectural canopies shade the streets from the hot desert sun, enhancing the plan’s pedestrian environment.
The canal will function as a navigable sea level waterway, providing a new arena for tourism and recreational boating. A tightly-woven network of roadways and transit will link a diverse range of communities and open spaces, with parks and public plazas, wetlands, wadi trails, and riparian corridors. Energy, water and waste systems will be integrated and mutually beneficial, with typically wasted resources transformed into valuable inputs for re-use. Sustainability practices include solar photovoltaics, cogeneration, solar heating, and distributed wastewater treatment, with particular focus on water demand reduction.
