Masdar: The Sustainable City

By Lenka Kollar

Vote for my essay on Sustainable Urbanization in the Masdar Engage blogging contest here!

I had the chance to tour a unique development while visiting Abu Dhabi with INSEAD. As I wrote in my earlier posts, Wealth Before Development and Beyond the Oil Era, Abu Dhabi is investing in diversifying its economy from oil. One of these initiatives, sponsored by Mubadala, is Masdar City. This development is completely sustainable and carbon-neutral and currently houses the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, in partnership with MIT. The following are some pictures and things I learned from the tour.

The entrance into Masdar City, you can already see the unique building structures and solar panels.

Many of the structures in the city are based on how previous generations kept their settlements cool before development. The artistic panels on the student dormitories provide privacy and shield the sun. The wind tower directs the cooler upper-level winds into the square below.

Looking out from Masdar City, you can see the 10 MW solar power plant (above) that feeds the grid. Because the plant produces more electricity during the day than the city needs, it does not directly power it. The first company to move into the city is Siemens, with its regional headquarters sustainable building shown below.

One of the original ideas was to have personal self-driving vehicles (shown below) to transport people around the city. However, the system ended up being to expensive and only a few vehicles were made to transport people from one end of the city to the other. They use magnets to keep the cars in line, but I bet that Google's GPS self-driving technology would be more effective.

Once completely constructed, Masdar City will be 6 sq. km and host 50,000 people for working and living. The model (shown above) includes sections for offices, living, education, and leisure. The research institute is already developing technologies revolved around sustainability and renewable energy. The UAE is actually the only OPEC national currently exporting both hydrocarbon and renewable energy. 

While Masdar could serve as a model for other sustainable cities, the types of buildings and processes needed drastically vary by climate. The sunny, dry heat of the desert of the desert in Abu Dhabi presents completely different challenges for saving electricity than the bitter cold winters in Chicago, for example. Because most of the growth in urbanization will happen in existing cities, Masdar should also research how to retrofit urban areas to make them more sustainable.