As I’ve written elsewhere, somewhat prophetically, an adverting campaign by a government-owned construction company, Nakheel Properties, pasted on billboards along Dubai’s Sheikh Zayed arterial road in the early 2000s, read something like: “Dubai puts ‘The World’ on the map; The World puts Dubai on the map.”
‘The World’ (Arabic: جزر العالم; Juzur al-Ālam) is an archipelago of artificial islands constructed in the shape of a world map, just off of the coast of the Emirate of Dubai.
The dredging works were undertaken by two Dutch joint-venture specialist companies, Van Oord and Boskalis. It was these companies who also created the now very much completed Palm Jumeirah (see below). These two companies began dredging works for The World project in 2003 but, works were halted for quite some time due to the 2008 global financial crisis.
