More on Masdar

Check out this new article on Masdar in the March/April edition of MIT Technology Review. After a couple years of expansive conceptual descriptions and media speculation, this article serves as a good status report on what the Masdar City program is hoping to accomplish, and how it's going about achieving it. Representative clip:

...many experts are optimistic that the city can become a test bed for new approaches to the engineering and architectural problems involved in creating environmentally sustainable cities. Although architects have already designed and builders constructed many small zero-emissions residences and commercial buildings, projects involving large, multi-use commercial buildings have fallen short of expectations, using too much energy or failing to generate enough.
Part of the problem is the growing complexity that comes with scale, says J. Michael McQuade, senior vice president of science and technology at United Technologies in Hartford, CT; today's design software hasn't been able to handle it. But Masdar City, itself developed with the help of extensive modeling, will be wired from the beginning to collect data that could prove valuable for developing better models. That information could make future zero-emissions cities cheaper and easier to build.

And the development is meant to make money, not just introduce new technology. "We want Masdar City to be profitable, not just a sunk cost," said Khaled Awad, the project's director of property development, at a huge real-estate exhibition in Dubai last fall. "If it is not profitable as a real-estate development, it is not sustainable." Yet if it is, it may be replicable.

. . .

much of what's learned from Masdar won't apply outside the incredibly hot and sunny coast of the Persian Gulf. A site in Germany, which wouldn't get as much sunlight, couldn't rely as heavily on solar energy. A site in San Francisco might not need air conditioning, making information about advanced cooling systems less relevant. But if the project reaches its environmental goals, it will at the very least show that such cities can be built. "People say, 'Gee, that would be great. That would be a good idea, but obviously it's not possible,'" Friend says. "Once you can point at something, it takes away a lot of those arguments."

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