Dubai Marina Walk

About this audio guide

This guide to Dubai Marina Walk starts with a simple question about what lay under this waterfront in the year two thousand — desert, dunes, and nothing else — before tracing how developer Emaar broke ground on October seventeenth of that year, inspired by Vancouver's False Creek, to channel the Gulf inland and build a marina from scratch. You'll hear about the engineering behind excavating the canal, the more than two hundred towers that rose along its banks, and how a neighborhood of some hundred and twenty thousand people appeared within two decades. It closes by weighing the sunset reflections against how recently, and deliberately, all of it was invented.