Dubai Marina

Dubai Marina is an artificial waterway cut inland from the coast and lined on both sides by towers. The water is the organising idea: the walk follows it for its full length, the restaurants face it, and the buildings are arranged so that as many apartments as possible look down at it rather than at each other.

It is one of the few districts here that has had time to settle. The retail at ground level is occupied, the walk is busy in the evening, and the neighbourhood has the small practical things a place only accumulates with age, from clinics to grocery stores to the shortcut everyone knows.

The beach sits at the seaward end and the tram threads through the middle, which means a resident can live here without a car in a way that is genuinely uncommon in this city.

Stock is almost entirely apartments, and the spread is wide, from compact units in the older towers to reworked, better finished residences on the water. It suits a buyer who wants a neighbourhood that already works rather than one that is promised.