Stunning news via The Associated Press. Undeterred by the stories of Dubai, the global financial apocalypse, a shaky national political system, the occasional war and sectarian violence, the Beirut-based developer Mohammed Saleh wants to develop “a 3.3-square-kilometre, artificial island shaped like a cedar tree as a major attraction off Lebanon's coast.”
This US$8 billion “paradise” would be aimed primarily at “Lebanese expatriates who have nostalgia for their country and would like to invest in it.” For reasons we can't yet process without experiencing cognitive failure, this marketing strategy will somehow insulate the project from the economic crisis.
In any case, if ever some reclusive billionaire who fantasizes about being the Rockefeller of archi-bloggers and then actually doles out patronage to these outsider spatialists, including us, we would like to use our grotesquely plump fellowship to create a sort of travel guide to the world's artificially terraformed coastlines. In the same illustrative vein as John Briscella's The Urban Gridded Notebook and Work AC's 49 Cities, we'll document with near encyclopedic breadth the fluctuating peripheries of Manhattan, Chicago, Singapore, Dubai, Tokyo and whatever cities that have undergone coastal expansion. San Francisco was once imagined with twin peninsular augments. What other cities were planned to be implanted with geological prosthesis? And what urban (hi)stories can one gleaned from these littoral recontouring?
It will be an antipode history to the future extractive history of sea level rise.
