Can a Sustainable City Rise in the Middle Eastern Desert?

SUSTAINABLE DESIGN?: The new city of Masdar in Abu Dhabi aims to showcase sustainable design for cities. Image: Courtesy of Masdar

Oil money has conjured up a pricey experiment in sustainability in a patch of desert between downtown Abu Dhabi and its airport. There, the city of Masdar ("the source") is rising. It is meant to signal a shift away from fossil fuels by hosting a variety of ecofriendly approaches, such as a system of subterranean electric cars?Personalized Rapid Transit?that whisk visitors and residents from point to point. Yet despite its ambitious goals, innovative planning and best intentions, Masdar may likely be only a mirage for other cities hoping to mimic its approaches to sustainability.

The brainchild of ruling Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan as funded by Mubadala Development Co. and envisioned by architect Norman Foster, nascent Masdar is certainly a city to behold. The sun's power is harvested via concentrating mirrors or the photovoltaic panels in a 10-megawatt array just outside the city walls. Wells may be drilled to tap Earth's heat, and the entire city will be built in a perfect square raised some seven meters into the air to help capture desert breezes. A 43-meter-tall wind tower that looks like a grated oil-rig funnels these breezes to street level, and those avenues are shaded by their orientation to the sun. The buildings range from undulating red sandstone curves with an Arabic flair that are student apartments to a squat armadillo shell that shelters Masdar's anchor tenant?the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology (M.I.S.T.), a joint venture of higher learning between M.I.T. and the Abu Dhabi government.

M.I.S.T. is now graduating its first crop of scholarship students specializing in renewable energy. For example, in conjunction with aircraft-maker Boeing and Des Plaines, Ill.?based refiner UOP, LLC, M.I.S.T. researchers are studying the potential for salt-tolerant plants to serve as an energy crop for biofuels for jets?and Masdar hosts one of the first sewage sludge?to-power demonstration projects in the world. It also is the future home of the International Renewable Energy Agency.

"Masdar should receive a lot of credit for being explicit about the integration of energy into the planning of urban environments," says Uwe Brandes, vice president of initiatives at the Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit research and education think tank.

Sustainable elements
But is Masdar truly sustainable? That word has economic, social and environmental implications: the city must help its inhabitants generate wealth; it must make them, at least in their view, healthier and happier; and it must be able to continue to secure the resources?natural and otherwise?to continue. Cities can and do collapse?whether it be the ur-city, Ur, in Mesopotamia or the decline and fall of Rome from a million-inhabitant imperial capital two millennia ago to a village of shepherd's flocks and a miserable 10,000 peasants over the span of 10 centuries (although it has rebounded to be a global metropolis as modern Italy's capital).

"When we talk about sustainability, we're really talking about balance," ULI's Brandes notes. "We're not talking about an end state but a process."

The modern world highlights a slightly different focus for the term sustainable, which the United Nations Brundtland Commission defined in 1987 as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." That is further elaborated for cities by a set of 10 guidelines?known as the Melbourne Principles adopted in 2002 and ranging from long-term vision to enabling good governance?to determine a city's relative sustainability.

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=ddf56ea44ccba9b94be6d0f860d16633

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