Walking the wadi

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Electric abras are set to cruise the canal.

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The wadi will have two small islands with water features.

Even by Dubai standards, Ilyas and Mustafa Galadari Group's multibillion dollar City of Arabia is a massive development project. Sprawling across 1.9 million m2 of land in the Downtown area of Dubailand, City of Arabia will have a 900,000 m² mall, as well as a 10km manmade canal, and 34 residential and commercial blocks.

The project, when completed, will provide accommodation for around 40,000 residents.

City of Arabia has several notable features: Mall of Arabia, set to be the region's largest shopping mall; Restless Planet, a dinosaur theme park; and Wadi Walk, the waterside area stretching the length of the canal.

"Wadi Walk is one of the key features of the City of Arabia project," James Abbott, director of P&T Architects and Engineers (Dubai), the master planners for the City of Arabia project, tells Commercial Outdoor Design. "It forms the spine for the area around it," he says. "Water is a valuable asset in this part of the world and is naturally quite rare. The idea of the Wadi Walk is that it is lowish rise but highish density to create a traditional urban grain. It's a continuous row of buildings either side of the canal connected by a colonnade which provides shade and allows you to stroll the whole length of the walk."

One of the main attractions of the walk is that it will be car free with parking for residents in the area provided beneath the apartment blocks. In a move to further eliminate noise, the abra boats cruising the canal will be electric, thus keeping sound to a minimum.

The concept behind the project is to create a European style city, Abbott explains. "We are trying to bring some kind of European flavour, a walkable city flavour and it is a green approach as well," he says.

Mona Rizk, project manager at Acla (Hyder), the landscape architect working on the project, takes the Mediterranean comparison a step further likening Wadi Walk to the Italian city of Venice. "The building architecture is Mediterranean with an Italian influence with a lot of colonnades to provide a shaded walkway," she says. "To cross the Wadi canal from one side to the other there are 13 pedestrian bridges all disabled accessible to provide interaction and simple circulation around the Wadi."

The idea of a walkable city in Dubai sounds fantastic, particularly for the eight months of the year when the climate is pleasant, but what about during the summer months when temperatures can rise to over 45 degrees? How will the area work then?

Acclimatising the area is in fact one of the main challenges of the project, according to Abbott. A colonnade lining the whole of the walk should go some way to maximising shade, he explains. On top of this, the plan is that the walk will benefit from air conditioning spillage from the shops lining its retail area. "The main thing is that you are out of the sun," he states.

The biggest challenge, however, will be the manmade canal. The problem is not merely the enormity of building a canal - the massive earthworks involved in excavating the canal have already been completed - but the subsequent maintenance of the water system afterwards - making sure it looks natural, keeps clean, and, one of the biggest considerations given that there can be as much as 70% evaporation of water in this region, making sure it stays put.

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