Aladdin City

Aladdin City – Between Heritage and Future.

Aladdin City stands for Dubai, a mix of millenary history around the city, and symbol of everything that the future can promise, like that of living in a fairy tale. To this end, as part of the Expo Urban development the municipality has sponsored a 111,000 square meters new district just 450 meters from Creek Harbor, on Dubai Creek Wharfage. As the name explains it, Aladdin City will be built to remind of the adventure of Sindbad and Aladdin and will include houses, offices, hotels and shopping malls. The construction started in 2016 and should be completed by the end of 2018 for a total value of 500 millions of dollars.

Aladdin City will feature three towers, designed to resemble Aladdin’s magic lamp, a sort of onion shaped structures cladded in gold. The three towers, that will reach the height of 33, 24 and 25 floors, will be connected via air-conditioned bridges with moving floor and walkways. The bridges will also connect the towers, driveways and parking lots – for a total of 900 parking spots. Moreover, the shape of the bridges that will link the buildings represents the form of exotic marine life such as dragon and snakes.

Indeed, Aladdin City will be an addition to the seafront alike the archipelago of palms across Dubai. Where now we can find the harbor piers, the idea for the Expo 2020 is to have three towers shining and raising above the water as floating stilt houses.

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Daria Ricchi

Daria Ricchi is an architectural historian and writer. She is currently visiting fellow at Oxford University, UK.
She has a Ph.D. in history and theory of architecture from Princeton University. She has taught at Princeton University, Yale University, and Parson. The New School, New York.
She published widely in scholarly and non-scholarly magazines (area, casamica- il corriere della sera, Low-Res, Pidgin, Threshold, AA Files).