Urban experiment

Work under way at the Masdar site: The developers are looking at teh entire supply chain.
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Masdar City is an experiment. Launched in 2006, it has the grand aim of being the world’s first carbon neutral city.

The Abu Dhabi government has been a prime mover in the plan to bring Masdar to fruition. As a partnership between the government and the private sector, the city is being developed in line with the emirate’s attempts to diversify into not just an industrial economy, but a knowledge-based one as well.

Part of that investment is already paying off through the opening of the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology (MIST), which accepted its first intake of students last September.

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The process of building a carbon neutral city starts with the master plan, where the design team can have an impact on how people use the city.

“I would say it’s a question of how you lay out the city,” says Jürgen Häpp, an associate partner at Foster + Partners, and part of the master planning team. “How people live in the city depends on how you see it and lay it out. Lay out, plus the public transport clustered around hubs, are things which influence the later result.”

“One fundamental thing about designing a sustainable city is having a flexible master plan: providing a framework that can be adapted to the needs, which are unknown at the beginning of the planning process.”

Central to making the city carbon neutral was not having urban spaces dictated by the dimensions of the car. The aim is to build spaces that encourage people to walk and use public transport.

“We went back and tried to learn from history,” says Häpp. “We looked at old cities and their dimensions. These cities are much more successful for people to walk in; buildings are close together and shade each other.”

In these older cities, such as Aleppo in Syria, shading and the local microclimate make for a better walking environment. In Masdar’s case, the plan calls for narrow streets, with structures of different heights placed close together, combining to manufacture areas where breezes will flow.

Road to zero
Banishing cars to the outskirts of the city makes for a good headline. If the implausible sounding PRT system (personal rapid transit – public transport pods that go where you want, via 85 planned stations) turns out to be more than a Disneyesque ride and people do walk, it will make a significant contribution to keeping carbon emissions, within the city, down.

But, if aiming to be zero carbon is to be a practical achievement, attention to detail is paramount, all along the supply chain.

This attention to detail has in effect changed the way that some technology providers have been doing business. A partnership with the city project is now starting to be seen as the ‘green’ seal of approval, simply due to exacting nature of Masdar’s demands.