Seems reasonable. Maasvlakte is a comparable project: an artificial island (20 km2 while this island is "only" 2.8km2) outside Rotterdam harbor and it was built over 25 years (1974-1997)
My most favorite fact about Strandeiland is how it looks on google maps plan view. Apparently google already extracted streets from the satellite imagery, but didn’t yet updated the shape of island itself. So you see streets on IJ surface.
https://goo.gl/maps/wrL42MHhBvPf1Ben9
Oh and of course in this country cycling paths are built before any houses.
Some countries export streets, addresses and buildings in a machine readable format. So it could be based on a periodic import, not on image recognition.
Might sustainability and geological context play a role? I thought the the Chinese islands were build on coral reefs and existing small islands. I also wonder about differences in currents and even requirements based on future use. A small military base to extend your empire probably needs to be less stable than a place you want to build a city on that should last forever.
Comparison to the Palm and World islands in Dubai strikes me though.
Projects like this usually have multiple goals, not least of which is to guarantee a baseline number of jobs with a desirable skill set within the country. Out of the tens of thousands of people that will work on this project, most likely fewer than 100 will work on it from the start of their career to the end. For the rest, it will be a year or two of their entire career.
I used to work with Dutch people who like to tell that “God made the world, the Dutch made the Netherlands.” I corrected them, saying they made a lot more than that: I grew up on an island in France that was under the control of Dutch merchants in the XVIIth century; they built a levy to double the amount of dry land. There’s polders like that everywhere.
The levy has been fine for the last four centuries, but local engineers were thinking of raising it. For that, they might need someone to help them translate the original blueprint. I once joked about deciphering it when talking to another Dutch friend on mine. She’s close to the Royal family and I was curious possibly needing asking Historian for help.
She didn’t seem surprised at all. Apparently a lot of Dutch diplomacy, to this day, is sharing that expertise and that unique, century-long, perspective. The King is a hydrological engineer (and a commercial pilot) and has lead international projects.
The techniques and examples are pretty much ideas tested centuries ago, with the occasional minor adjustment like: windmills with Archimedes screw can be marginally improved if you use wind power and electric pumps. I’m sure someone on one of those projects has had to joke “Grand-grand-papa wasn’t a big believer in ballast. It was a new idea then. But we can try this time.”
> they built a levy to double the amount of dry land
In English, the word you are trying to use is levee. As a French, you might recognize where that came from ;)
Actually though, at least in the US we call those things the Dutch built “dikes”, which is, not surprisingly, just the anglicized version of what the Dutch call them.
Oh and of course in this country cycling paths are built before any houses.