Green city rises from desert

The Sunday Times
February 1, 2009
Danny Fortson

About 10 miles along the motorway out of Abu Dhabi, Khaled Awad was trying his best to get visitors excited about a patch of scrubland. “This will be the city of the future,” he said, gesturing toward the shrubs and dirt. “Zero-carbon and run on totally renewable energy, it will be one of the first and biggest eco-clusters in the world.”
It takes some imagination. But Awad, head of development at Masdar City, insists that in a few years this plot of desert will be transformed into the most technologically advanced, environmentally friendly city in the world. Designed by the famed British architect Lord Foster, the 6.5 square kilometre “city of the future” will be suspended on stilts 20 ft above the ground, increasing air circulation and reducing the heat transferred from the hot desert floor.
It will be split into three decks that separate transport from residential and public spaces and cars won’t be allowed anywhere. “With the design, we wanted to shock the public, to get them thinking about the possibilities of what a city can be,” said Awad.
On the lower deck residents will be ferried round the city by thousands of Personal Rapid Transport Pods, which look like space-age buggies for four people. They are controlled by touch screens and guided by sensors in the ground.
About 20 ft above will be the main pedestrianised street level, where businesses, shops and homes will be located. It will be vehicle-free except for Segway personal transporters and bicycles. Overhead, a light railway will run through the heart of the town and connect to Abu Dhabi City.
Transport will be one of the biggest differences between this city and traditional ones. Gerard Evenden, senior partner at Foster + Partners, said: “The difficulty with driverless vehicles is the interface with humans. You can’t control humans. By layering the city, we can make the transport system super-efficient and the street level a much better experience. There will be no car pollution, it will be safer and have more open spaces. Nobody has attempted anything like this.”
Water will be drawn from dew and a solar-powered desalination plant. Most of the electricity for the 50,000 residents will be generated by solar panels on every roof and hung over the narrow alleys where they will double as sun shades to keep the temperature low and reduce the need for air conditioning.
Non-organic waste will be recycled. Organic waste will be converted into fuel for power plants. Dirty water will be processed and used to irrigate green spaces. Overall, Masdar City will need about a quarter of the energy of a normal city of comparable size. It will produce no waste, emit no carbon dioxide, and the project will be completed by 2016.
That’s the plan anyway. Today, all that can be seen from the viewing platform are a few tractors and a pair of cranes in the distance, working on the first component of the city, the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, a university that will specialise in renewable-energy technology.
In total, the city will cost $22 billion. Sultan Al Jaber, chief executive of Masdar, Abu Dhabi’s renewable-energy company, has called it the “heart” of the initiative he is leading to convert the emirate, one of the world’s most profligate energy-using petro states, into a model of green technology.
Of the $15 billion that Masdar, the company, has to invest, $4.5 billion has been set aside to get the city off the ground. Awad hopes to raise the rest from partners and future tenants of what he says will be a “living laboratory” for a non-fossil-fuel-based existence.
“The problem with the renewable-energy industry is that it is too fragmented,” said Al Jaber. “This is where the idea for Masdar City came from. We said, Let’s bring it all together within the same boundaries, like the Silicon Valley model.”

Making this a reality will be difficult. In the best of times coming up with the extra $18 billion for a science project of such monumental scale would not be easy. Trying to do it in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and a precipitous devaluation of Abu Dhabi’s primary resource will be even more challenging. The oil price has dropped about 70% since its peak last summer.
Al Jaber brushed off such concerns. “We are looking beyond the downturn,” he said. “Nothing has been delayed, nothing has been postponed. We are in this for the long term.”
Part of the city’s running costs will by covered by the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism, the controversial scheme under which companies can earn carbon credits by funding low-carbon schemes in the developing world. Awad expects collect up to 1m credits each year that he could sell on the open market. At today’s prices, that would mean an extra $15m a year.
The “eco-city” idea isn’t new. China has begun work on one in Tianjin. In Britain, up to 10 “eco-towns” have been proposed, but these are a universe away from the ambitions of Masdar. Al Jaber told a US congressional hearing last summer that, “the city will be the blueprint for the cities of the future”.
It is a central part of the pledge the emirate made last month to increase the energy it generates from renewable resources from virtually nothing today to 7% by 2020. Some big names have already taken the plunge. GE has signed up as the first tenant, and MIT is a sponsor of the university.
It won’t be as green as it seems. Food will have to be imported. The rail system to Abu Dhabi City will not be enough for the expected traffic, so Masdar City will be ringed by large car parks for those who want to drive there.
Development experts also point out that cities simply don’t appear but grow organically. What seems to work on the drawing board may fare less well in the real world. Indeed, not far from Abu Dhabi’s future is its present: a jumble of half-built skyscrapers, traffic jams and pollution.
Would it not be better to plough $22 billion into improving a city where people are already living and working?
“Cities over the past 50 years have been models for abusing technology. We want to change that,” said Awad. “If we make a success of the city, it won’t any longer be, ‘Why Masdar City?’. It will be: ‘Look at what Masdar City has done, now why not China? Why not India?”