Now That’s What I Call An Eco Town

You wouldn’t necessarily want to live next door to Dubai. Not if you were concerned about neighbourly one-upmanship.

Call that a garden shed? Look, my friend, our new garden shed is an 800 metre spinning tower built in the shape of a palm tree with an Alpine ski slope in the basement…

The latest in Dubai’s quest to be Bigger, Better, Faster … And Clearly Visible From the Moon! … is as staggeringly awesome and humongous as all the other staggeringly awesome and humongous stuff they’ve done (read all about it over on FindaProperty.com).

It’s a gigantic eco-friendly city in the form of a 2.3 sq km pyramid, and it’s designed to house a million people.  Yes, that’s right: a million people. Kinda puts our ten proposed eco towns in the shade.

Why, you might wonder, build in this pyramid shape? According to World Architecture News, it’s because cities like this “take up less than ten per cent of the original land surface,” so big eco kudos there. The Ziggurat will also be powered by steam, wind, and the sun, making it almost completely self-sufficient energy-wise.

All very impressive, but would you want to live in a vast futuristic megastructure like this? I mean, I don’t want to sound negative, but that’s an awful lot of neighbours… and what if the lift breaks down?

• What Would You Do With This? (2)