If the cookie-cutter housing tracts of the American suburbs fill you with dread, don’t think about visiting this one in the United Arab Emirates, photographed on Wednesday by Getty photographer David Ramos. It's a positive nightmare.
Ramos saw it while driving up Jebel Hafeet mountain near Al Ain, on the border with Oman. He intended to capture a bird’s eye view of the city ahead of the FIFA Club World Cup, but the structures eight miles south caught his eye. At first glance, they just looked like an array of pink and white shapes repeating across the desert. But then he began to make out what they really were: hundreds and hundreds of lookalike houses, stretching on ... and on ... and on. “It was just massive,” he says.
While Ramos didn’t take note of the housing complex’s name, it appears to be the recently constructed Jebel Hafeet Emirati Housing Project, a grid of 3,000 clone houses spread over 1,000 acres. It's one of more than a dozen such settlements planned to help house Al Ain's booming population of 650,000 people (up from just 51,000 in 1975).
And you thought American suburbs were bad.
