BY Staff Reporter
For all its futuristic towers and rococo gilded luxury, Dubai is not exactly a pleasant city to live in. It’s an ocean of asphalt and cement that’s cooking in sand, with highs that reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer and don’t dip below 88 degrees for much of the year. This makes walking around uncomfortable, which means citizens opt for staying at home, hanging out in their gated communities, or shuttling around in their car’s AC bubble. This may radically change if the Dubai Green Spine succeeds.
The Green Spine is like New York City’s High Line on steroids. It will serve as Dubai’s sinuous version of Central Park. While there’s still no timeframe for its execution, the project is part of the Dubai 2040 Urban Master Plan, which anticipates the city’s growing to nearly eight million residents. The Green Spine aims to redefine this mirage of a metropolis by turning its main car traffic artery into a 40-mile-long sustainable corridor full of lush plants and one million trees.
Designed by UAE-based Urb—which calls itself a “highly experienced developer of Net Zero Sustainable Cities”—the Dubai Green Spine will transform the Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Road into an indispensable part of the city. A series of elevated and ground-level pathways full of greenery and multifunctional public spaces will fill the road. It will also integrate a large solar panel farm, which will power the new infrastructure and tens of thousands of homes around it.
The goal of the Green Spine is to get people to start using their feet and bikes to commute, shop, and chill. Urb believes that the project will significantly reduce the city’s carbon footprint, improve air quality, reduce urban heat, and offer residents and visitors safe and attractive routes for commuting and leisure. The company’s CEO, Baharash Bagherian, believes it isn’t just about transit but about transforming urban functionality, transitioning the city’s spirit from car-centric to human-centric. “It challenges conventional infrastructure norms, proving that our streets can do more than facilitate car traffic; they can significantly enhance quality of life,” Bagherian says.
The Green Spine feels like something that Dubai urgently needs. More importantly, it looks like a feasible project. Bagherian tells me via email that “Dubai is uniquely positioned to turn such visions into reality, given its strong commitment to enhancing livability and sustainability.”
In contrast, consider Saudi Arabia’s crazy Neom, a megalomaniac project that’s projected to span thousands of square miles along the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba. The $500 billion project is the stuff of pharaohs, encompassing various massive projects that have been publicized with ridiculous 3D designs and futuristic names like Epicon, Oxagon, Utamo, Trojena or Malagon.
The Line, the most well-known Neom project, is the antithesis of the Dubai Green Spine. Critics have slammed the proposed 105-mile-long horizontal skyscraper designed by Morphosis as the perfect example of what not to do in city planning, arguing that its linear design and colossal size will lead to significant mobility and habitability challenges.
The Line’s idea is so bad in fact, that Rafael Prieto-Curiel—a faculty member of the Complexity Science Hub—published a study in the prestigious scientific journal Npj Urban Sustainability titled “Arguments for building The Circle and not The Line in Saudi Arabia.” Prieto-Curiel argued that The Line’s layout will make efficient transportation and accessibility nearly impossible, with long travel distances and a dense population making daily life cumbersome. It’s no wonder that its size was finally downsized to 2.5 miles, in part pushed by Neom’s dismal financial prospects, which have also led to reports of various project cancellations, raising doubts about its completion.
The sheer scale and cost of Neom’s developments, coupled with the logistical challenges, environmental issues, and a total lack of ethics, make Neom the perfect example of futuristic dystopia.
Rather than trapping millions of people in a thin steel-and-glass canyon in the middle of the desert, the Dubai Green Spine is designed to join a city divided by a highway. It is a practical enhancement to an existing urban area.
