Green Case Study: Masdar City as Ecological Urbanism
Can a sustainable, zero Carbon-emission community be built within the scope of a larger metropolis that never sleeps; a city based on daily consumption of food, natural resources and space and is rated per-capita to be one of the highest energy consumers in the world? Masdar City, UAE’s initiative to produce a healthy, pollution-free environment on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, is the imagined best answer to the energy problem of central Abu Dhabi, and to the UAE as a whole. Free of sky-scrapers and carbon-fuelled cars, Masdar is a city that comprises of scientific research institutes as well as facilitated urban context and residences for those who desire to live more sustainably. Alan Frost, Masdar City’s director, argues that the UAE’s initiative to establish such an environment is to be able to use Abu Dhabi’s oil and gas revenues to create a clean and sustainable environment in the hope of its occupants to be able to understand the value of the energy and other resources on which they base their lives.
Dr. Georgeta Vidican of Masdar Institute of Science and Technology affirms that the ‘Masdar City’ initiative is largely UAE’s desire to be a producer of technology. The institute, being currently the only fully established segment of the entire city, is viewed at the core of that transition process of the Emirates- from an oil-based economy to a knowledge-based one. Yet despite the lengths such a project goes to in order to produce a pollution-free and environmentally-aware environment, whether it is through the use of wind-towers or solar panels, one still questions the success of merging the urban-based on consumption- with the ecological- based on the environment and its relation to its organism without human intervention.
Ecological Urbanism:
In Mohsen Mostafavi’s book entitled “Ecological Urbanism”, the concept of a sustainable urban environment is analysed through a series of cases and examples to which the case of Masdar City could be applied. Mostafavi argues that imagining an urbanism, such as Madar City, that is different from the status quo, i.e. existing Abu Dhabi, requires a ‘new sensibility’- one that has the capacity to successfully integrate the various contradictory elements of both the ecology and the urban environment. Density is another challenge added to the concept that is ecological urbanism. To Mostafavi, understanding the rises and falls of a city’s population, allows us to control and plan the shape of the urban environment in relation to the level of its inhabitants. As of 2011, Masdar city has about 130 residents and 250 students; that is a small number for now but over the next ten years, Masdar is hoping to populate the city with about 90,000 people. Masdar is that ‘ecological urbanism’ Mostafavi talks about- it is excellently engineered to create a sustainable environment in which the modern-aesthetics based on traditional Arabian cities is merged with scientific research and technology in the hope of giving rise to an environmentally-aware Emirati community.
