Masdar City will cost $22bn (£11.3bn), take eight years to build and be home to 50,000 people and 1,500 businesses.
The city will be mostly powered by solar energy and residents will move in travel pods running on magnetic tracks.
Abu Dhabi has one of the world's biggest per capita carbon footprints and sceptics fear Masdar may be just a fig leaf for the oil-rich Gulf emirate.
Others fear Masdar City - on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi City - may become a luxury development for the rich.
The project is supported by global conservation charity, the WWF.
Less power, less water
The city will make use of traditional Gulf architecture to create low-energy buildings, with natural air conditioning from wind towers.
Water will be provided through a solar-powered desalination plant, Masdar says. The city will need a quarter of the power required for a similar sized community, while its water needs will be 60% lower.
The city forms part of an ambitious plan to develop clean energy technologies.
In January, the government of Abu Dhabi announced a $15bn five-year initiative to develop clean energy technologies, calling it "the most ambitious sustainability project ever launched by a government".
As part of the plan, Abu Dhabi will become home to the world's largest hydrogen power plant.
The money is being channelled through the Masdar Initiative, a company established to develop and commercialise clean energy technologies, and Abu Dhabi hopes it will lead to international joint ventures involving much more money.
Abu Dhabi will invest $4bn of equity in the project and borrow some of the rest, Masdar said.
"We are creating an array of financial vehicles to finance the $22bn development," Masdar chief executive officer Sultan al-Jaber told Reuters news agency.
"We will monetise all carbon emission reductions... Such innovative financing has never been applied to the scale of an entire city."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/7237672.stm
Pretty odd (and also super cool) that a Gulf kingdom would be working on this. Maybe at least some of the oil-rich Middle East states are looking at the big picture and into a future where they know that oil reserves will evaporate leaving them destitute. Maybe not. But the UAE seems like a pretty progressive place...well, at least as the Middle East goes. But that is maybe like saying Southern Baptists are progressive as religious fundamentalists go. Any way, the point is that this just pretty cool. And look at the price tag. A steal at $22 billion. Why, the US could have built 15 or so of these bad boys (or maybe one city of about 1 million people) for what the Iraq war costs.
2 comments:
Yeah, I'm really curious to see how this turns out... Not to be too cynical, but building a city from butt scratch is like nature trying to shove a full blown human being out of a pool of primordial ooze.
Cities grow and evolve almost organically... Building a city out of nothing and expecting people to want to come and live there is a daunting challenge. There was a south american project a lot like this, back in the 80's I think? In Brazil? Don't remember exactly...
It was tauted as the city of the future! Where urban sprawl would not exist, the achitecture was uniform and spectacular, so on and so forth.
Well, the whole thing failed big time because it was so pristinely designed, so "perfect" I guess, that nobody wanted to actually live there.... go figure.
In any case, no matter how popular this city becomes, I think it'll be an interesting testbed for all kinds of new and efficient urban technologies. The science geek in me can't help but be intrigued. :)
I have as much faith in this as in any city planning that goes on, organic or forced.
Good luck to them though! I give 'em an A for effort!
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