Masdar City: Life Beyond Petroleum

Masdar City: Life beyond Petroleum

The United Arab Emirates is a hot and dry country where petroleum has generated fabulous wealth for residents. Using proceeds from this one-time extraction of oil deposits as financial capital, Abu Dhabi, one of seven emirates, envisions a transformation of its role, from a world leader in petroleum production into a world leader in energy in a world without petroleum. As part of this vision Masdar City—a mixed-use, compact, zero-waste, zero-carbon, car-free city powered by renewable energy—is rising from the desert (Foster + Partners 2007). The driver that has made financing of this city possible, petroleum, is being replaced by a new generation of energy sources.

Working with the World Wildlife Fund, the government of Abu Dhabi has developed the Masdar Initiative to align with One Planet Living sustainability standards. The One Planet Living principles, all ten integrated into Masdar City, include zero carbon, zero waste, sustainable transport, sustainable materials, sustainable food, sustainable water, habitats, and wildlife, culture and heritage, equity and fair trade, and health and happiness (World Wildlife Fund 2008).

If any place on Earth seems appropriate for staying indoors within sealed, air-conditioned buildings, it is here, in an extremely hot desert climate where average summertime temperatures hover above 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the day. But the planners and designers have chosen to go a different direction, bringing together limited air conditioning with passive cooling strategies that require no additional water or energy.

Buildings, streets, and urban spaces are carefully oriented and configured to maximize cooling and minimize energy use. Solar exposure of paving is minimized, as are reflective walls on buildings that might magnify the solar radiation reaching streets below. The orientation of buildings and streets blocks hot winds during the day but allows cooling breezes to enter at night. Some buildings are set as close at 10 feet apart, with ground floors stepped back under colonnades along short streets. This traditional Middle Eastern form shields spaces from sunlight and helps to accelerate air movement, reducing the demand for air conditioning. When air conditioning is needed, it is powered by renewable energy generated within the city.

Buildings use night flushing and stack ventilation to pull air through interior spaces. At night, cool air is drawn in; during the day, thermal mass helps keep temperatures stable. Wind towers or wind catchers, vertical shafts with vent openings on top which pull cooling air through the space below, are a traditional cooling strategy in the Middle East. They are used to cool Masdar City’s public spaces; water mist is sprayed from the top of the tower, where evaporative cooling and moving air help lower perceived temperature for people at the tower’s base. Buildings provide foyers as thermal transition zones, so that residents do not feel a thermal shock when moving between indoors and outdoors; rather they acclimate gradually, allowing them to feel relatively comfortable at indoor temperatures around 86 degrees Fahrenheit (Taylor 2008).

Outdoors, designers placed parks and public spaces three levels below the streets. These “urban wadis,” protected from the sun by building overhangs and canopies of native desert trees, become reservoirs for cool air. Cool seawater from 40 to 46 feet below the water’s surface runs through what designers call cool-water flush canals. In addition, very slight temperature differences between deep, cool seawater nearby and the air at street level are used to drive heat exchangers. Open spaces are woven throughout the city to provide coolness, cleaning of air, and connection to nature. Surfaces are used with care. Horizontal non-walking surfaces, including roofs, are covered with native green plants which can be irrigated with brackish well water mixed with graywater. Cold plates embedded in public walkways provide radiant cooling underfoot, while cool mist stations provide evaporative cooling from above.

Masdar City does not have viable freshwater sources, and all water supply brought in uses desalination (Novotny, Ahern, and Brown 2010, 571). In Masdar City, 80 percent of the water used is recycled (ibid., 568). Stormwater, graywater including cooling-tower condensate, and even blackwater are treated and then used for irrigation, toilet flushing, district cooling, and other uses. Dashboard panels inside buildings allow inhabitants to track how much water they use, along with other characteristics including carbon footprint.

Ninety-nine percent of the city’s waste is recycled or recovered (Bellini and Daglio 2008, 296). The city turns organic waste into compost to build soils, recovers or recycles nonorganic waste, and has plans to use the remainder to produce power in a waste-to-energy plant.

Masdar City is car-free, with no petroleum-powered cars allowed inside. Every dwelling is located within a short walking distance of a transportation hub. An innovative public transportation system known as Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) uses small, driverless vehicles powered by electricity and guided by magnets. Electric-power light rail lines cross the city and connect it with nearby regions.

Solar photovoltaic panels are used throughout the city, and a photovoltaic solar farm outside the city generates 10 megawatts of power while avoiding carbon dioxide emissions (Masdar Clean Energy 2012). A utility-scale, parabolic-trough concentrating solar power plant also located outside the city generates 100 megawatts of power (Novotny, Ahern, and Brown 2010, 570). The Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, a cooperative program between Abu Dhabi and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a graduate and postgraduate teaching and research facility which is part of Abu Dhabi’s vision to become a world leader in post–fossil fuel energy.

The technologies in Masdar City are not new. Solar panels, waste-to-energy plants, graywater reuse, passive cooling, electrified public transit, and other strategies are all used already in other parts of the world. What is innovative about Masdar City, however, is that not just some but all of these strategies are brought together in an integrated, cohesive urban system.

Sources

Arup. “Masdar City.” http://www.arup.com/Projects/Masdar_City.aspx

Bellini, Oscar E. and Laura Daglio. New Frontiers in Architecture. Vercelli, Italy: White Star, 2008.

BioRegional. “One Planet Living: United Arab Emirates Endorsed Community—Masdar City.” 2008. http://www.bioregional.com/oneplanetliving/uae/masdar

CH2M HILL. “Water Portfolio Management: Understanding Challenges Around the World.” CH2M HILL, 2008.

Crampsie, Siân. “City of Dreams: Abu Dhabi Is Pinning Its Economic Future on Innovative, Renewable and Low-Carbon Energy Technologies.” Engineering and Technology, vol. 3
no. 15 (September 2008): 50–55.

Foster + Partners. “Foster + Partners Create the World’s First Zero Carbon, Zero Waste City in Abu Dhabi.” Press release, London, 2007.

Hartman, M., M.B. Knell, and J.W. Witherspoon. “Masdar City’s Integrated Approach to Sustainability.” In Proceedings, Cities of the Future 2010 conference, March 7–10, 2010, 104–17. Cambridge, MA.

Madichie, Nnamdi O. “Irena Masdar City (UAE) Exemplars of Innovation into Emerging Markets.” Foresight, vol. 13 no. 6 (2011): 34–47.

Masdar City. http://masdarcity.ae/en/

Masdar Clean Energy. 2012. http://www.masdar.ae/en/energy/

Nambiar, Sona and Joann Gonchar. “Masdar Institute.” Architectural Record, vol. 199 no. 5 (May 2011): 130.

Novotny, Vladimir, Jack Ahern, and Paul Brown. Water Centric Sustainable Communities: Planning, Retrofitting, and Building the Next Urban Environment, 566–73. New York: John Wiley, 2010.

Taylor, Bill. “Landscape on the Edge: A Cooler and Greener Middle East.” Landscape Magazine—Middle East, issue 14, August 2008.

Vidal, John. “Masdar City—A Glimpse of the Future in the Desert.” Guardian, April 26, 2011.

World Wildlife Fund. “WWF, Abu Dhabi Unveil Plans for Sustainable City.” 2008. http://www.panda.org/index.cfm?uNewsID=121361

WSP. Masdar City Case Study. London: WSP Group, 2009.

© 2014 Margaret Robertson