Masdar City: Sustainability's Model City... and Ghost Town

[XLFD]

An article by Julien Eymeri, the CEO of Quartier Libre, an innovation and strategy consultancy based in Paris, France starts with asking a question: 

"What happens when you spend billions to build a renewable-energy powered, entrepreneur-fueled city in the middle of the Arabian desert?"

The Opening Soon City

He then answers it by saying that you can build it, but no one comes. 

Writing an article for Fast Company, a magazine that covers business and entrepreneurial innovations, Eymeri cites a several year look at the City of Masdar in Abu Dhabi, the aforementioned city which has been years in the making, promising to be a utopic model of sustainability and resilience-- a city of the future, able to weather the whims of climate change and survive without using the abundant fossil fuels of the Middle Eastern area it is part of. 

But in its infancy, it appears to have some problems with sustaining interest of individuals and businesses into moving there.  Can its resiliency allow it to bounce back from this early diagnosis?  Is this large expenditure of funds without sensible returns what is in store for the Ludington area if our local governments decide to pursue a vigorous planning and zoning course designed strictly with such concepts in mind?  

Is a planned city truly ideal and perfect if nobody wants to live there, not even the planners?

The article starts off by acknowledging Fast Company's long-term interest in the project, and offers links for the reader's consultation, before it lays the introduction to a short video showing a sterile city with few inhabitants or signs of occupation:

Masdar City—Abu Dhabi’s $18 billion experiment in high-tech, low-resource living—was designed to be the world’s first large-scale carbon-neutral development. In 2012, we wrote: "So far, there are a number of finished buildings, including restaurants, a library, retail outlets, and a handful of structures at the onsite Masdar Institute, a graduate institute focused on sustainability, science, and alternative energy. This is only the start." Julien Eymeri went recently, and found a much different story. Read his account and see his eerie video of an empty city.

Located in the heart of the United Arab Emirates, about six miles from the historic district of Abu Dhabi and close to the international airport, Masdar City is the embodiment of an economic dream, an ambition on the scale of a planned investment close to $18 billion: a zero-carbon city—a challenge for a country with the third-largest global ecological footprint per capita—supposed to attract more than 50,000 people and almost as many commuters, employees of large international companies and young high-tech startups.

Once on the four-square-mile site, the area of the future city is large. Having a look around, one sees an interminable white building fence, punctuated every kilometer by a sign saying "Masdar City, the city of possibilities." But I discovered that what constitutes the city is almost exactly what we saw two years earlier: Masdar City is the "Opening Soon City." Walking around, there are some seemingly deserted buildings (it's a disturbing experience to enter an empty hall, take an elevator, and discover that each floor is also abandoned), alleyways used by security guards (to protect the abandoned buildings?), or cleaning sites (it is true that the dust from the desert gets everywhere and causes damages to photovoltaic panels on the roofs of the buildings). The loud drone of natural air conditioning, a huge wind tower, is omnipresent, even oppressive. Some students—there are barely a hundred, the only inhabitants in the city—seem lost even though the surface area is small.

Ironically, a travel agency, one of the few shops open near the international supermarket selling organic products, albeit overpriced and with certainly a very high carbon footprint, seems to invite them to buy a one-way ticket somewhere to escape their isolation. Unlike Songdo, another planned city in South Korea, whose developers bid on public facilities at the beginning of the project (schools, cultural centers, sports fields), Masdar City has bet exclusively on business. A hundred startups out of 1,500 announced are still in the development stage, while Siemens has offices there and General Electric a showroom. The result is that life is simply impossible: one must drive many miles to do basic shopping.

An advertising fence surrounds the city and promises a bright future. On the other side, the dizzying empty spaces are surprising: no cranes on the horizon, a striking contrast to the rest of the region. Is Masdar City a city out of order? Asked about the future of the project, a representative remains cautious, asking for patience—a surprising statement in a state which makes a claim on all street corners to be the fastest and first—and finally admits that it is—politically—unthinkable to abandon such a project.

The Masdar City model seems difficult to reproduce: too isolated, too expensive, too empty. The embryo town appears rather as a symptom of the obsession of a state with regard to its future. What will become of this territory, once the hydrocarbon reserves underneath its soil are depleted? In response, the frenzied builders attempt to inscribe life in a permanent fashion on a land that seems hostile to human existence. It is about facing the fear of death by building quickly (an "instant city"), to help transition to an Emirates that is a techno-ecological leader. Masdar City is meant to be the laboratory. Opening soon . . . one day.

[Willy]

Thanks for posting this X. I've never heard of Masdar so I looked up some information about it and to my surprise there is a lot to learn about this City. It won't be completed until 2025. It will be getting most of it's energy from solar. I found a web site for the city and it's full of information, http://www.masdar.ae/en/#city. If they can afford it, I think it's worth a try to see if being energy independent from petroleum is possible.

[XLFD]

It's definitely a fascinating concept at least from the energy angle, and so thanks a lot for the supplementary link, Willy.  The grand experiment I see in Masdar is how well will it play on the societal angle, and whether such cities will actually work outside of a petri dish. 

To wit, one would think it may become utopic if we populate it with students, business folks, and other learned folks who will be so absorbed in their technology and industry to entertain them, but what happens when they introduce general society into it?  

[Willy]

While thinking this concept over a bit more I have come to the conclusion that this is not the way to go. I agree with finding affordable alternative energy sources as long as they don't have a negative impact on the populations. In order to achieve the type of lifestyle that is being created at Masdar, people will be required to relinquish many of their personal freedoms and thus enters the ever popular Agenda 21. That's all this project represents is the implementation of U.N. Agenda 21 which will require squeezing  people into tightly congested cities, remove their cars and tell them what products they are allowed to use [for the purpose of recycling], how much energy they are allowed to use along with many other aspects of control in their lives. Masdar represents a huge pile of Progressive/liberal/communist sh_t wrapped up in a pretty package.

[XLFD]

Sage reasoning on your part, Willy.  Such cities can only exist with central planning and central control primary characteristics of socialism and communism at its extreme.  The Utopia of communism looks good on paper too until you look at how well those systems did in the 20th century and whenever it's been tried before. 

I would become a mountain man myself before I would live in one of these sheep pens.