Masdar City: ‘City of Possibilities’

As the global population continues to migrate to cities, new models for sustainable city design are being developed and tested. Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates is one such project. In 2006, the government of Abu Dhabi announced that it intended to spend $22 billion with the aim of becoming a leader in renewable energy; a key part of this plan was to build a new carbon-neutral, zero-waste city from the ground up to demonstrate state-of-the-art sustainable city design. As initially conceived, Masdar City was something of an experiment: a clean-technology incubator powered by renewable energy, which was intended to exhibit the highest levels of efficiency. Partly due to the global financial crisis of 2008 and partly due to experience gained from continued assessments of the original concept, Masdar has scaled back the initial ambitions for the city’s carbon and waste targets, as well as the development approach and time-line for the entire city. This, however, may ultimately prove to be the best outcome for Masdar City if it is truly to become a model for sustainable cities of the future