Work started in 2011 and, when complete, it will have homes for 40,000 residents, as well as cinemas, shopping malls, schools, landscaped walkways, office blocks, a conference centre, restaurants and cafes. Today, Rawabi вЂ“ the first Israeli city built for Palestinians вЂ“ has a similar problem. Shortly after completion, however, Akbar abandoned Fatehpur вЂ¦ in part because of inadequate water supplies. Over the next 15 years, he and his lackeys built royal palaces, harems, courts, mosques and private quarters, all from locally available red sandstone. The Mughal emperor Akbar commenced the construction of this walled city in 1569, to serve as the Mughal capital. This may sound elementary, but consider what happened to the city of Fatehpur Sikri.

In the early 1960s, Buckminster Fuller dreamed up a giant floating pyramid in Tokyo Bay which would have housed 1 million people вЂ“ in part as a response to the problem of acquiring building land in Japan. Songdo, the new city near Seoul in South Korea, is built on land reclaimed from the Yellow Sea. If you donвЂ™t have a desert or uninhabited island to hand, build one. Crystal Island was to be built on a river island near Moscow. Meanwhile, President Teodoro Obiang is currently overseeing the creation of Oyala as his new capital deep in the jungle of Equatorial Guinea, remote from the seaborne assaults that have menaced the dictator and his government in the existing capital. EgyptвЂ™s new capital, too, is going to be built on sand вЂ“ to the east of Cairo, its functionally inadequate predecessor. When complete, it will have 19 residential districts, 50 schools, 40 sports centres, shopping centres and bazaars вЂ“ and, my favourite design feature, 7,000 hectares (17,290 acres) of orchards blooming in the former desert.

TajikistanвЂ™s president, Emomali Rahmon, recently laid the foundation stone for Saihoon, a new city for 250,000 people on a 14,000-hectare (34,580-acre) desert site. Plus, very few camels attend planning meetings, still less are they capable of forming coherent objections to your masterplan for a desert metropolis. Deserts, undeveloped jungles and uninhabited islands are popular: you donвЂ™t want to sink your budget into detoxifying brownfield sites, bulldozing slums or fighting legal battles over ancestral land rights. Part 1: steps one to five Step 1: Choose a locationД«efore you begin, you need a spot.

Designer city building