Dubai Marina

This guide to Dubai Marina traces how Emaar Properties set out in the late 1990s to dig an entire canal city from a stretch of desert shoreline, borrowing the idea from Vancouver's Concord Pacific Place. It follows the construction that began in 2003, the dredging of the seabed and the Gulf-fed canal, and the building boom that made Dubai briefly home to a quarter of the world's construction cranes. Walk the loop along the water and look up at the towers that rose around it.