Diamond Developers, the company behind the $354 million The Sustainable City in Dubailand, is planning to launch two “sustainable” apartment towers in Arjan, next to Miracle Gardens, by end-December.

“We are working on unveiling two seven-storey buildings with 190 apartments by year-end,” chief executive officer Faris Saeed told Arabian Business.

The buildings will produce most of the energy needed to run the common areas using solar panels on the roofs and grey water will be recycled to be used for cleaning purposes. It will have a waste sorting system, an energy-efficient chilled water system, a shuttle bus service to the nearest Dubai metro station, and a small urban farm that will be used by tenants for education purposes.

While apartment prices will be equivalent to prices in the neighbourhood, the developer claims the cost of the running the buildings will far less than conventional ones.

“The maintenance fee will be bare minimum… AED3 to AED4 per square foot. It cannot be zero as we don’t have any retail component,” Saeed said.

The first phase of The Sustainable City includes 500 residential villas, 11 biodome greenhouses running the length of the central green spine, 3,000 square metres of urban farming and a 15,000 square metre mixed-use area.

Work on the second phase will commence in the first quarter 2017, with the new phase including Hotel Indigo, the first net-zero energy hotel in the Middle East, an environmentally-friendly school, and an innovation centre, first negative lifecycle building.

“The first phase is ready while we expect the entire city to be operational by end-2018,” Saeed revealed.

Currently, there are 250 families living in the city, with the occupancy levels expected to touch 80 to 90 percent by end.