Kuwait plans £132bn 'Silk City'

[SunnyDub]

From today's Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jul/23/oilandgascompanies.architecture

Oil prices have so swollen Kuwait's national coffers that the petroleum-rich state is to invest $132bn (£66bn) on its ambitious "Silk City" at the head of the Gulf, it emerged yesterday.

The extraordinary scale of the metropolis - a 1,001-metre skyscraper, wildlife reserves, and homes for 700,000 people - is matched by a plan to also build an international rail network linking it to Damascus, Baghdad, Iran and China.

Inspired by Dubai's spectacular growth, the Madinat al-Hareer, or Silk City, is intended to create a trading future and a diversified economy in a city which would become a crossroads of the Arab world.

"We are not dreamers at all when we talk about investing $132bn," insisted Sami Alfaraj, president of the Kuwait Center for Strategic Studies and an adviser to the Gulf Cooperation Council, a group of six mostly oil-rich Gulf states.