UAE island rises from sand
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Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (CNN) -- It's big, bold and oh so Abu Dhabi -- a city far from unfamiliar with ostentatious developments.
Rising up from the turquoise waters of the Persian Gulf, Saadiyat Island is arguably one of the grandest residential and cultural projects in the works anywhere in the world today.
The idyllic resort will
be home to three major museums, a performing arts center as well as hold
space for 150,000 residents when it is completed by 2020.
Construction on the Louvre Abu Dhabi
-- named as the Rain of Light by architect Jean Nouvel -- is going on
around the clock with the aim of being open by December 2015. The Guggenheim and the Zayed National Museum will soon follow.
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For the new residents of
Saadiyat, many of whom are from outside the UAE, this ambitious
development and its cultural accoutrements is like little they have
experienced before.
"It was so nice coming
from England where everything has been going backwards to be part of
something that was sort of up and coming and forward thinking," said
early resident, Sue Bell.
As to be expected, however, living amidst such refined institutions and luxurious facilities doesn't come cheap.
Saadiyat is being positioned by developers TDIC
as a luxury destination for those with deep pockets. A seven bedroom
property comes in at a cool $7.5 million while the entry point for a
villa is about $1.25 million.
The St Regis villas and apartments, part of a vast hotel complex, are already fully occupied.
TDIC says other
completed zones are at 90% capacity with most buyers choosing to take up
residence in their new accommodation rather than snapping up the
property as an investment and basing themselves elsewhere.
"The thing about the
people who buy in Saadiyat, or if you want to call them investors, I can
tell you that more than 80% of the people who bought on Saadiyat are
end users," said Carlos-Antonio Wakim chief development officer at TDIC.
To further entice families, TDIC is setting up a full range of educational options including offshoots of the renowned Cranleigh boarding school and a New York University campus.
The headmaster at
Cranleigh, Brendan Law, believes even though the island is a greenfield
project, it squares with the century and a half old history of the
English school.
"A motto was created for
Cranleigh called 'escuto rubu' which is Latin for from culture comes
strength," Law said. "We are standing on the edge of the cultural
district here in fact on the gateway of the cultural district. I don't
think a school and a district could be better suited for one another
than that."
But while every effort
has been made to make new arrivals in the neighborhood welcome, the
treatment of construction workers on the project has received unwanted
scrutiny.
Saadiyat remains on the
radar of human rights groups who contend there are still sizable gaps in
fair in labor practices at the estimated $27 billion project.
"We found that due to a
sequence of control mechanisms which include recruitment fees, passport
confiscation, and a kafala system of sponsorship based employment that
workers on the island were being subjected to very serious
exploitation," Nick McGeehan of Human Rights said.
TDIC however point to an independent report by Price Waterhouse Coopers which acknowledges some flaws by contractors, but cited progress at the same time.
"Wherever we can improve we will not be late in improving," said Wakim. "This is the TDIC's position."
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