Dubai Has Thousands of Acres of Empty Land. Nobody Knows What To Do With Them.

If you've driven anywhere in Dubai outside the Marina or Downtown, you've seen them. Vast corridors of empty, scrubby desert cutting through otherwise developed communities. No buildings. No parks. No explanation. Just pylons, overhead cables, and a strange 'no-man's land' that seems completely at odds with a city that will build anything, anywhere, at any speed.

I drove past one last week on the way back to Arabian Ranches and it finally bothered me enough to find out what was going on.

The answer is one of those things that seems obvious once you know it - but nobody ever explains it, and it tells you something genuinely interesting about where Dubai is heading next.

The corridors aren't wasted land. They're Dubai's next great public realm opportunity. Someone just needs to draw the map.

The short version

Those corridors are DEWA power transmission easements. High-voltage lines - mostly 400kV and 132kV - running across the emirate carrying electricity from the generation sources out in Jebel Ali and the Mohammed bin Rashid Solar Park to the substations feeding every community in the city.

Safety regulations require significant buffer zones on either side. You can't build residential or commercial structures underneath or adjacent to high-voltage transmission lines. Electromagnetic field limits, maintenance access, safety clearances etc etc - all sensible stuff. This is standard practice globally.

But here's what makes it striking in Dubai. The city expanded so rapidly over the last two decades that these transmission corridors now cut directly through some of the most valuable real estate on the planet. They were laid when the land around them was empty desert. Now they're surrounded by billion-dirham developments, and the corridors sit there like scars - undeveloped, underused, and increasingly hard to justify in a city where every square metre matters.

The numbers are significant. DEWA's transmission network includes over 4,300 kilometres of transmission lines across Dubai. A meaningful proportion of those are still overhead, particularly the 400kV backbone that runs out to the newer communities in the south and east. Each corridor is typically 50 to 100 metres wide. Do the maths on even a fraction of that and you're talking about thousands of acres of effectively sterilised land!

Why haven't they just put them underground?

This is the obvious question, and the answer is mostly money and physics.

Dubai has actually been progressively undergrounding its network for years. EDF completed a 19-kilometre 400kV underground ventilated tunnel bringing over 3,000MW into the heart of the city - described at the time as a world reference project. The newer, premium communities - Downtown, Marina, Palm - are all served by underground cables. By the end of 2022, DEWA had over 37,500 kilometres of underground distribution cables versus only 713 kilometres of overhead distribution lines.

So the distribution network is largely underground already. The problem is the transmission backbone.

Putting 400kV lines underground costs roughly 10 to 15 times more than overhead. In a desert climate, heat dissipation becomes a serious engineering challenge - underground cables generate heat that needs somewhere to go, and the ground temperature in Dubai isn't exactly helping. The ventilated tunnel approach works but requires massive civil engineering. DEWA is still building 130 kilometres of new 400kV overhead transmission lines for completion by 2028, alongside 226 kilometres of new 132kV underground cables. So the pattern is clear: underground where you can at the lower voltages, overhead where you have to at the highest.

But that leaves the corridors sitting there. Unused. As someone whose professional background is property and real estate... it really irks me! And as the city densifies, the pressure to do something with them is only going to intensify.

What's actually happening

This is where it gets interesting - because Dubai, being Dubai, isn't just leaving the problem for someone else to solve.

The Dubai 2040 Urban Master Plan has a specific commitment to increase green and recreational areas by 105%. Nature reserves and rural natural areas will constitute 60% of the emirate's total area. And critically, the plan calls for "several green corridors to link service areas, residential areas and workplaces, facilitating the movement of pedestrians, bicycles, and sustainable mobility means across the city."

Read that carefully. Green corridors linking communities. That language maps almost perfectly onto the transmission easement corridors that already exist.

The most ambitious expression of this thinking is the Dubai Green Spine - a proposal by URB to transform the entire 64-kilometre Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Road (E311) corridor into a sustainable urban corridor with pedestrian paths, cycling tracks, urban farms, a million trees, and solar-powered electric trams. It's been designed to align with the 2040 Master Plan and support a projected population of nearly 8 million.

Then there's The Loop - a separate 93-kilometre climate-controlled cycling and walking highway concept designed to connect over 3 million residents to key services by foot or bike.

These are big, headline-grabbing visions. But the really telling signal is what's happening at the development level.

Jumeirah Golf Estates shows the way

Wasl - one of Dubai's largest government-backed developers - announced "The Next Chapter" at Jumeirah Golf Estates in May 2025. This is a 4.68 million square metre expansion adding 12,345 new homes across six themed districts. The scale alone is impressive. As JGE is my home club, I've been keeping a close eye on the plans. But what caught my attention was the design.

The six districts - Central Park, Village, Town Centre, Golf Course North and South, and Equestrian Village - are explicitly linked by green corridors and recreational trails. There's a 131,850 square metre Central Park, 15 kilometres of horse riding paths, cycling lanes, and shaded walkways connecting everything together. An equestrian village with show-jumping facilities and dedicated riding trails.

If you know the area, you'll recognise that the JGE expansion sits alongside major utility corridors. What Wasl has done - rather cleverly - is design the master plan so that the land that can't be built on becomes the connective tissue of the community. The green corridors aren't a concession to the power lines. They're a feature. The equestrian trails, the cycling paths, the parkland - these are the things that turn a housing development into a lifestyle destination commanding premium prices.

That's smart planning. And it's a template for what could happen across Dubai wherever these corridors exist.

Why this matters beyond aesthetics

I spent 15 years in UK government and chaired one of the UK's largest urban regeneration companies. We dealt with this exact problem - legacy infrastructure cutting through communities, sterilising land, depressing values. The UK's answer was usually to argue about it for a decade, commission three studies, and then do nothing(!).

Dubai, fortunately, doesn't tend to operate that way.

The 2040 Master Plan commits to having 55% of the population living within 800 metres of a public transport station. The 20-minute city concept aims for residents to access 80% of their daily needs within a 20-minute walk or cycle. Both targets require exactly the kind of connected green infrastructure that power line corridors could provide.

Globally, there's strong precedent. In the United States, over 400 multi-use trails coexist within electric utility corridor rights-of-way. Around 17% of rail-trails are at least partially shared with utility corridors. The principle is established: you keep the power lines, but you activate the ground beneath them for cycling paths, running trails, community gardens, urban farms, and linear parks.

For Dubai, the application is obvious. These corridors already connect communities. They run from established areas through to the newer developments in the south and east. They could become the green spine - literally - that links the city together in a way that roads and metro lines can't.

And from an investment perspective, properties adjacent to activated green corridors consistently command premiums. The transformation of derelict rail lines into urban parks has been one of the most reliable property value catalysts in cities worldwide over the last 20 years. Dubai is sitting on the same opportunity, but with utility corridors instead of railways.

The bottom line

Dubai has a habit of looking at problems and seeing opportunities. An overhead power line corridor through empty desert is a problem. A shaded cycling trail with equestrian paths connecting your villa community to a metro station and a Mandarin Oriental resort is a lifestyle amenity worth paying for.

The infrastructure is already there. The corridors already exist. The 2040 Master Plan already calls for green corridors connecting communities. The developers - Wasl at JGE being the most visible example - are already designing around it.

What nobody has done yet is connect all of this thinking into a coherent, city-wide strategy for activating transmission corridor land. The kind of joined-up infrastructure planning that turns dead space into connected communities.

That's a governance and master-planning challenge. And having spent years turning disused industrial corridors and brownfield sites into thriving communities in the UK, I can tell you - the opportunity here is genuinely exciting. Dubai has better weather, faster execution, and a government that actually follows through on its plans.