|~||~||~|The invite I received to the opening of the Taj Mahal this week, got me thinking.
And it wasn’t to wonder why it had taken 363 years to arrive in the post.
The invite was for the US $10 million recently-completed Dubai Taj Mahal at Global Village — a hugely impressive replica of the original, that was put together in just a few months by hundreds of highly skilled artisans specially flown in from India.
The thing that got me thinking was that the masterplan of the nearby Falcon City of Wonders also included another replica Taj Mahal.
I assumed that they were in fact one and the same project, but as the saying goes, to assume makes an ass of you and me.
A quick call to the developer’s PR confirmed that they were in fact not one and the same, and that another Taj Mahal was indeed planned for a site a couple of kilometres down the road.
I got the impression that this was the first time this annoying little planning oversight had been pointed out.
Now call me Mr Fussy, but won’t two Taj Mahals built within spitting distance of each other and not in India, look funny?
I’ll answer that one myself. ‘Yes’. Damn funny I should think.
Almost as funny as two Big Bens — but that’s another story.
This could be the greatest urban planning disaster since Atlantis County Council declined to grant outline consent for that expensive new sea wall project and built a local community heritage centre instead.
And it is exactly why the decision to yank the reins on the runaway Dubailand wagon is a very wise one. Dubailand was in danger of becoming a dumping ground for every half-baked tinsel-wrapped proposal in town, instead of the bold and exciting leisure destination that it was originally intended to be.
The move to call a halt to any more contracts until the dust settles will give confidence to investors.
It will also provide a measure of calm that the market desperately wants to see, specifically removing some of the variables involved in predicting the medium term supply of new residential units.
Still, it just goes to show. You wait millennia for one Taj Mahal to arrive and then two of them come at once.
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