ZERO CARBON CITY- MASDAR CITY CRITICAL ANALYSIS

Climate has a direct impact on the performance of buildings and their energy consumption especially in hot arid areas. In these areas, the lack of water and energy sources forces people to build their houses with several strategies, based on minimum energy consumption as using the environment natural climatic strategies for coping with harsh conditions as vernacular architecture. In order to apply and achieve sustainable building in hot and humid climates, efforts must be put into understanding the local climate, and integrating appropriate building technologies into the architectural and urban designs. Today, the continuous progress in technologies offered new means towards achieving comfortable climatic conditions and efficiency in building. But these technologies result in high building costs, maintenance and depletion of renewable resources. The paper aim is to investigate the feasibility of using new technologies as nanotechnology beside other passive design strategies in desert zones .In addition to, assessing their adaption towards the extreme and harsh climatic conditions of the hot arid zones and their efficiency. The paper will illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of applying new technologies and materials to achieve sustainability in hot arid zones through analyzing Masdar City in United Arab of Emirates. The paper suggests that Masdar City still didn’t achieve its goals and failed to be a model of urban environmental sustainability, to be replicated in other countries