Continuing the theme of mysterious abandoned developments, the identity of this one is better known than the desert lakes I featured in my previous two posts.
This is the remains of what would have been a flyover leading on to the Jebel Ali Palm Island, which, along with Deira Palm Island, is one of the two abandoned palm tree shaped offshore developments that didn’t get beyond the earthworks, but are still visible from space.
Mildly reminiscent of the Easter Island figures, or the many stone henges in the UK, these monoliths have become part of Dubai’s own archealogical heritage. When one considers the accelerated context in which each epoch of this city’s history has occurred, it’s not an unreasonable analogy.
Already there is talk here of a new property bubble developing. It just goes to show, where the hunger for easy money is concerned there’s no room for the old maxim ‘Once is a mistake. Twice is stupidity.’
Have a look here: 24°59’8.41″N 24°59’8.41″N
Note from the editor: this photograph is part of a series called “Consumption” that seeks to document consumerism’s impact on the environment. From resource extraction and commodity production all the way down the supply chain to retail stores and waste processing facilities, Richard artfully examines what nature has come to mean in a world that depends on buying stuff.
Author: Richard Allenby Pratt
Richard is a British photographer living and working in Dubai, UAE. His concerns about the sustainability of the way we live and our economic systems only really became urgent after the birth of his son in 2008. As a landscape photographer he found the obvious way to express these concerns was by making photographs of the places impacted on by human activity, and particularly those places that best display the terrifying scale of our consumption. His basic method is to study google earth and then visit the most intriguing and inexplicable places thereby discovered.
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