Masdar Concepts

The Long History of the Future: Why Tomorrow's Technology Still Isn't Here

by Nicole Kobie · 3 Jul 2024 · 348pp · 119,358 words

city can spring from nothing and add citizens afterwards. As we’ll see, building a city from scratch rarely works. Just look at Songdo, Korea; Masdar City, UAE; and Google Sidewalk’s plans for the Waterfront district in Toronto, Canada. Each failed in a different way – the last one never even

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somewhere with people next. * * * Around the same time Songdo was emerging from the sea, the UAE unveiled in 2006 its own city in the desert: Masdar City. Set on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, the 6-square km (2.4-square miles) zone was designed in part by Foster + Partners to

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cool winds down into the inevitably hot streets, with walls around the city to block the desert winds and noise from the airport next door. Masdar City was a smart city with the emphasis on sustainability. As part of the city’s role as an urban lab for clean tech, an

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picked up several sustainability awards for the design. ‘We want to position ourselves as thinkers and progressives,’ Sultan Al Jaber, CEO of the company behind Masdar, told reporters at the time. ‘Years ago in the Middle East, we lived in a very sustainable environment. We are bringing that back by creating

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people don’t need to use a car.’ It all sounds fabulous. Plans often do. Originally scheduled to be completed within 10 years, by 2016 Masdar City was only 5 per cent built, with a new deadline set for 2030. The handful of buildings are nowhere near the carbon-free goal

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rows of parked cars, belying the truth of the environmental transport plans, and workers toiling to keep foliage green.11 The Google satellite view of Masdar City, using imagery from 2023, shows more space set aside for solar farms than buildings,12 greenery-lined roads running along empty desert, multiple large

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from space. What went wrong? Building a city is hard, even if it is really just a suburb between a city and its airport, as Masdar City is. And building it to be car-free in a car-loving country, carbon-free in an oil nation, cool and walkable in a

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desert, suggests the designers hadn’t really thought things through. As anthropologist Gökçe Günel described in her book Spaceship in the Desert, Masdar City was a ‘spaceship insulated from the rest of the world’, based on a vision ‘that the desert is an empty zone on which any

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kind of ideal can be projected’. And that simply isn’t true. No one called this a smart city, but alongside the autonomous pods, Masdar City promised ‘an image of the future drawn from science fiction,’ Günel writes, noting those working on the plans said it would be ‘smart’ with

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on large screens in public places as ‘uplifting news’ for residents. The autonomous pods were perhaps the most sci-fi, future-tech aspect of the Masdar City plans, so it’s no surprise that they’re the aspect that was first to fall by the wayside. The Personal Rapid Transit (PRT

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sound familiar from the driverless cars chapter; it’s an idea that finds new fans every decade – supposedly negating the need for traditional cars within Masdar. However, as one journalist reported in 2011, there was just one station, with a single stop 800m (half a mile) away: ‘I could have used

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’re building now, you need mass transit systems that exist now. So, the PRT was cancelled, but not before the single-stop route between the Masdar Institute and its car park was built, offering a free 2½-minute journey. Buses now operate throughout the parts of the rest of

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Masdar City that are built, and car parks abound – it’s hardly the vision of the future that Masdar City and Foster + Partners sold. But perhaps the PRT served its purpose. In the early days

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of the project, it was the PRT that was often trotted out to highlight the progressive, innovative nature of Masdar City, writes Günel: ‘The pod cars confirmed that humanity’s future would be one of technological complexity, just as in science fiction movies.’ And, just

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pods run on a track to ferry people to Terminal 5 from the car park – not wholly different from Masdar City’s eventual small-scale network at the Masdar Institute. Günel described using Masdar’s experience of the PRT pods: the slightly uneven concrete in the roads caused problems for the suspension, increasing

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someone else to come and open the doors, leaving them waiting 20 minutes in the heat. An expensive toy, she quotes one student as saying. Masdar City hasn’t met its carbon goals, has failed to fully develop automated personalised transport and remains largely unbuilt – Abu Dhabi’s leadership, which owns

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-covered skyscrapers of neighbouring Abu Dhabi, though reports suggest Emiratis aren’t yet keen on moving to the futuristic city. This isn’t the future Masdar City promised. Indeed, the head planner at Foster + Partners was unable to tell one researcher what the neighbourhood would look like if ever finished. We

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of everyone’s time. Nothing got built. No tech was developed or tested. Some ideas were sketched out, but nothing beyond planning proposals. Songdo and Masdar are failures as smart cities, but they do actually exist: there are roads and buildings and a one-stop automated pod network, even if that

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everything out of wood (this would involve a new sawmill elsewhere in the province), underground tunnels for autonomous mail delivery carts (a delightful mashup of Masdar’s PRT and London’s 100-year-old LPDR), driverless cars (whenever they’re developed) and heated paving slabs. Other ideas included robot trash collectors

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project: it was Silicon Valley corporates clashing with democracy. * * * Building an entire smart city from the ground up is nigh-on impossible, as Songdo and Masdar show. Regenerating a district amid municipal bureaucracy and the pesky rules that comes with it is no walk in the carefully planned park, either. So

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is ticking the sustainability box with BioDiverCity, set on artificial islands and using autonomous mass transport instead of cars; Foster + Partners is following up its Masdar City work with a plan for a city in India to be called Amaravati; and Chengdu Future City in China is also car-free, using

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‘make life easier’. I feel like it’s boring to predict it won’t be ever fully built and certainly never as promised; Songdo and Masdar sound positively reasonable in comparison. What’s intriguing about The Line is that, as with many of the most intensely future-focused ideas in this

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practised ‘urban innovation’ – and city authorities seem all too aware of its waning ability to put a progressive sheen on mayors. And, with Songdo and Masdar City in mind, smart cities never seem to ever get built. Greenfield notes that delays and just-around-the-corner technologies are inherent to these

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, 2010. ‘About Forest City.’ Forest City. https://biturl.top/ryyUFb Accessed October 18, 2023. Forrester, Jay W. Urban Dynamics. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1969. ‘Projects: Masdar City.’ Foster + Partners. https://biturl.top/2aqAr2 Accessed August 23, 2023. Frey, Christopher. ‘World Cup 2014: inside Rio’s Bond-villain mission control.’ Guardian, May

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Emergence as a Smart City.’ Journal of Urban Technology, volume 25, 2018: pp. 47–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/10630732.2015.1102423 Goldenberg, Suzanne. ‘Masdar’s zero-carbon dream could become world’s first green ghost town.’ Guardian, February 16, 2016. https://biturl.top/Q7ZRj2 Greenfield, Pamela Licalzi. ‘Korea’s

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in a city 170km long; will the world ever be ready for a linear metropolis?’ Guardian, September 8, 2022. https://biturl.top/U7byE3 Walsh, Bryan. ‘Masdar City: The World’s Greenest City?’ Time, January 25, 2011. https://biturl.top/bMvQJv Outro Kobie, Nicole. ‘Monzo has a cunning plan to stop you

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here Magic Leap here maglev technology here Mahan, Steve here Maisonnier, Bruno here Malapert, Etienne here Manchester Mark here Markoff, John here Marsh, Burton here Masdar City, UAE here Maslow, Abraham here Mattel here Mattern, Shannon here, here Mauchly, John here McCarthy, John here, here, here, here, here, here, here McClelland

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data collection and analysis here, here, here, here Forest City, Malaysia here IBM here Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia here Los Angeles Community Analysis Bureau (CAB) here Masdar City, UAE here Medellín, Colombia here monitoring pollution here, here NEOM and The Line, Saudi Arabia here New York City fires 1970s here privacy issues

The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World Is Costing the Earth

by Guillaume Pitron · 14 Jun 2023 · 271pp · 79,355 words

CITY OF ABU DHABI IN THE UNITED ARAB Emirates it is a half-hour drive to Masdar City. Built over 640 hectares of burning desert sand, running alongside the Persian Gulf highway to Saudi Arabia, Masdar City is an inward-facing fortress of aluminium, glass, and red-tinted concrete. Silhouettes wearing dishdasha

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city out of the space age so fascinating are the technologically ambitious plans in store for its development.1 The Emirati government plans to make Masdar — the Arabic word for ‘source’ — the world’s most sustainable eco-city, using the most modern digital technologies ever designed.2 By 2030, and with

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17 billion euros in investments, Masdar promises to be the regional if not global model of smart urban design.3 One promotional video boasts that the city’s 50,000 future

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inhabitants will enjoy ‘the highest quality of life with the lowest possible environmental impact’.4 Masdar City is already a dream coming true, and that is to be one of the most enjoyable cities to live in on Earth. Smart cities

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in aid of the planet Masdar City is the embodiment of the hopes that have been pinned on smart cities and digital technology to improve our lives. And there’s good

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our interaction and collaboration as citizens in the interest of our planet. And the starting point of a greener world is a more organised one. Masdar is the full-scale test of just this. The city must rely solely on renewable energy without producing any carbon dioxide emissions or waste. To

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as the solution to all urban challenges!’ says Federico Cugurullo, an Italian scholar who has long been researching Masdar City.5 In 2007, the British architectural practice Foster + Partners was commissioned to raise Masdar from the sand, which it did using good common sense.6 The city is north-east facing, limiting

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replaced by a fleet of more modest autonomous shuttle buses.7 As for smart homes, the implementation of the ambitious Building Management System for optimising Masdar residents’ electricity consumption has been held up, as users try to figure out how to get it to work.8 The real environmental price to

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Today, only 10 per cent of the initial plans for the eco-city have been built, and the city barely has 2,000 inhabitants. Is Masdar condemned to become the first ‘green ghost town’, as suggested by some news sources?9 And it is really the eco-friendly city its developers

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in and out of built-up areas — as way of assessing cities’ environmental performance. So what kind of metabolism does a smart city such as Masdar have? ‘It’s a legitimate question; smart technology requires material, and we need to factor in that material’, insists Cugurullo who, in vain, requested detailed

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’ll never be able to get that kind of information in Abu Dhabi’, says Gökçe Günel, a Turkish academic and author of a book on Masdar City, in a thinly veiled comment on the authoritarian Emirati regime.12 Most astonishing of all is that, up until recently, not a single global

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to smart cities, we should remain circumspect.’17 For his part, Federico Cugurullo has the intuition — but not the proof — that ‘the environmental costs of Masdar City [also] exceed the desired benefits’. He assures me that ‘advanced solutions are the very cause of the problem: talk to geographers and urban planners

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only on) the aesthetics of the immaterial, green artificial intelligence (AI), Bluffdale, the environmental cost of state surveillance, the material input per service (MIPS) unit, Masdar City, Encana, the colours red and blue, Dominion Energy, the coal of the Appalachian mountains, the history of media critique, etc., to which she applied

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. 24 Trine Syversten, Media Resistance: Protest, Dislike, Abstention, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Chapter One: The digital world’s environmental benefits 1 Turkish researcher Gökçe Günel describes Masdar City in her book, Spaceship in the Desert: energy, climate change and urban design in Abu Dhabi, Duke University Press, 2019. The pandemic made it

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impossible to travel to Masdar, and so I base my descriptions on official promotional material. 2 Federico Cugurullo, Exposing smart cities and eco-cities: Frankenstein urbanism and the sustainability challenges

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of the experimental city, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 16 November 2017. 3 Op. cit. 4 See ‘Welcome to Masdar City’ on YouTube. More promotional material available at masdarcity.ae/en. 5 Interview with Federico Cugurullo, Assistant Professor in Smart and Sustainable Urbanism at Trinity

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College Dublin, 2020. 6 fosterandpartners.com/projects/masdar-city/ 7 For example, if a bird flies in front of a self-driving car it would grind to a halt to avoid hitting it

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, ‘and no one seems to understand why these features do not work’, Gökçe Günel reports in her book Spaceship in the Desert, op.cit. 9 ‘Masdar’s zero-carbon dream could become world’s first green ghost town’, The Guardian, 16 February 2016. 10 ‘Mapping Smart Cities in the EU’, Directorate

Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City

by Richard Sennett · 9 Apr 2018

. The Ninth Avenue façade of 111 Eighth Avenue, in the Chelsea district of Manhattan. (Scott Roy Atwood/Creative Commons) 31. Googleplex interior. (Marcin Wichary) 32. Masdar City centre plan. (LAVA – Laboratory for Visionary Architecture) 33. Songdo Central Park in Incheon, South Korea. (Pkphotograph/Shutterstock) 34. Berm designed as part of the

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displayed visually in the room. Such cockpit control embodies the prescriptive model of a smart city. Songdo’s sister smart city, Masdar, is near to and financed by Abu Dhabi. Masdar is meant more as a smart suburb, its 40,000 residents complemented by 50,000 daily commuters from Abu Dhabi. The

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huge consumers of energy, are concerned about shrinking their ecological footprint. As in Songdo, urbanists are bent on showing the way forward to others. In Masdar, as master-planned by Norman Foster, relatively friction-free energy use comes from renewables like solar; in planner-speak, the plan is that ‘synergistic efficient

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make these good things happen is by ‘scaling up and integrating advanced sustainable technologies’ which only a computer capable of handling big data can do. Masdar is known for experiments with self-drive vehicles. Its buildings, designed by Foster, are of much higher quality than those in Songdo – and much more

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are dark, since the worldwide recession has discouraged buyers. In the Emirates the bursting of the financial bubble has put the luxury experiment which is Masdar temporarily on hold; Suzanne Goldenberg calls it ‘the world’s first green ghost town’. Below ground, much of the high-tech kit thus transmits nothing

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modern parallel to muslin is organic muesli, which is simple, delicious and pricey. In the built environment, green ecologies equate, in the smart cities of Masdar and Songdo, with costly construction. The challenge is how to create a modest but unprivileged relation to Nature. Which requires building that relation. In coping

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‘resilience’ and ‘sustainability’ are clichés which dominate urbanism today. Everyone is for them, whatever they mean: the United Nations, the Rockefeller Foundation, the builders of Masdar, indeed most builders, tout the pair to legitimate urban developments good, bad or indifferent. The partners in this marriage of clichés are not, however, quite

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the building: work and recreation pleasure spaces combined. The firm provides cleaning, medical and other services within. 32. Closure and the ‘smart city’ 1: in Masdar City, UAE, a single control centre regulates all aspects of the life of the city. It recalls Corbusier’s description of the Plan Voisin as

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. W. Norton, 2013), pp. 93–115. 27. See Greenfield, Against the Smart City. 28. See http://www.masdar.ae/en/masdar-city/the-built-environment. 29. Sam Nader, ‘Paths to a Low-Carbon Economy – The Masdar Example’, Energy Procedia 1, no. 1 (2009): 3591–58. 30. Suzanne Goldenberg, ‘Climate Experts Urge Leading Scientists

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Zedong markets, street see also Delhi: Nehru Place Márquez, Gabriel Garcia Marx, Karl The Communist Manifesto (with Friedrich Engels) Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie Masdar, Abu Dhabi mask of civility master-plan for cities master–slave relationship Mauss, Marcel May, Theresa (Prime Minister) Mazzanti, Giancarlo Meachem, John Medellín, Santo Domingo

Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture

by Deyan Sudjic · 1 Sep 2010

. They have been herded together so as to create shaded lanes narrow enough to generate a cooling breeze, like a traditional walled city. This is Masdar, the Arab word for source. Construction workers moved on to the site three months after Foster won a competition to do the plan. It is

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called a city, but that is putting it perhaps too optimistically. Masdar is one of the string of settlements sprouting up between Abu Dhabi and Dubai. What makes Masdar different from what is around it – the airport compound that houses flight crews, next door, the golf

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a world that is waking up to the fear that it might be making itself uninhabitable. The first phase will include the home of the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, a research centre dedicated to renewable energies linked to Imperial College London, MIT and New York University. It is being

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that fringe the highways: a process that is killing the mangroves that keep the Gulf alive at its choke point at the straits of Hormuz. Masdar claims that it will be different. It aims to be carbon neutral, recycling all its own waste. Even during construction there are carefully sorted piles

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ambition in the climate of the Gulf, where in August the temperature is a brutal fifty degrees. In its optimism and its search for answers, Masdar is an echo of the first city of the future that Norman Foster explored with his adolescent imagination growing up in Manchester. Long before he

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teenager Foster read the comic strip, with its intricate depiction of a world of atomic-powered monorails and levitating taxis (which look a lot like Masdar’s personal rapid transits), every week in the Eagle, the comic aimed at middle-class adolescents in the England of the 1950s. Foster has been

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has always looked for ways to respond to the challenge that Fuller set him. Buckminster Fuller speculated about a dome over Manhattan. To judge by Masdar, the zero-carbon city for 100,000 people that Foster is building in Abu Dhabi where mass transit will take the form of as-yet

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in New York, even if it prompted Paul Goldberger in the New Yorker to dub Foster the ‘Mozart of modernism’. But the new city of Masdar in the Arabian gulf state of Abu Dhabi, Pont Millau, Wembley Stadium, and the remodelled British Museum are all achievements that suggest that Foster is

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(© Nigel Young / Foster + Partners) Chesa Futura, St Moritz (© Nigel Young / Foster + Partners) Drawing for Chesa Futura, St Moritz Beijing Airport photographs (© Nigel Young / Foster + Partners) Masdar images (© Foster + Partners) Interior images: Otl Aicher sketch of NF, 1985 (© Otl Aicher) Photograph of NF sketching (© Rudi Meisel) Index Throughout the index NF has

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, 51–2, 54, 206 Mao Tse Tung, 163, 175, 226 Marks, David: London Eye, London, 275 Marshall, Gordon, 130–1, 138 Masdar Development, Abu Dhabi (NF), 1–3, 155, 264 Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, 2 mass-produced homes, 144, 290–2 McMorran, Donald: Wood Street Police Station, 101 Médiathèque de

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in Beijing on Christmas Day 2003, and set up their office in the ballroom of the old airport hotel shortly afterwards. When it is completed, Masdar will be a focus for Abu Dhabi’s investment in zero-emission technologies, a mix of research facilities and offices, with homes that can accommodate

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis

by Leo Hollis · 31 Mar 2013 · 385pp · 118,314 words

could be. Elsewhere in southern China there are plans for the self-styled Sino-Singapore Guangzhou Knowledge City. Outside Abu Dhabi, an ambitious new city, Masdar, is being designed by Foster + Partners, which promises to be the smartest zero-carbon city on the planet. But this vision of the smart city

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. We are going to have to make rather more concrete plans for the future. Perhaps we should start again and build our cities from scratch? Masdar City is currently being built by the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, designed by the leading architect Norman Foster, in the desert. Foster’s career

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, investing in new materials, working on designs that reduce energy use, and always remaining visually innovative. Breaking the ground at Masdar The architect’s model for the zero-carbon city At Masdar Foster takes the idea of the sustainable city to its current limits. He began his quest by studying traditional Arabic

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wind tower situated in the centre of the city will display how much energy the community is using. For as Fred Moavenzadah, head of the Masdar Institute, which was one of the first buildings to be constructed in the city and opened in 2012, points out, this is an experiment in

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this size. We are producing no carbon because it’s all renewable. Our water consumption is less and our waste generation is relatively low.’6 Masdar is an example of the new eco-cities that herald the possible future of urban living. It is ironic, however, that

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Masdar is only a few miles from the oil fields of Abu Dhabi that paid for the experiment. In fact, while funding the project, the Abu

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their brochures and the media is keen to report the projected figures before the projects are even off the ground but, like the images of Masdar, the numbers do not tell the human story. The eco-city without people voluntarily living more responsible lives is just an exercise in gadgetry and

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majority of the world. The costs are prohibitive: in the face of the global downturn repeated cuts have been made to the construction site at Masdar, as certain projects no longer make economic sense. Thus, initially the settlement was to be built on a vast platform that allowed the desert air

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. Today, planners, politicians and urban thinkers can no longer seek answers for local problems from America and Europe. As we have seen in Songdo and Masdar, the latest technological innovations are not being tested in Europe or America. It is Singapore and Shanghai that lead the world as the business centres

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.com/commute/2012/04/why-young-americans-are-driving-so-much-less-than-their-parents/1712 5. Kahn, M., 2010, Chapter 1. 6. Vidal, J., ‘Masdar City – a Glimpse of the Future in the Desert’, 26 April 2011, www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/apr/26

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/masdar-city-desert-future 7. Moore, M., ‘Chinese move to the eco-city of the future’, 18 March 2012, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/

City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age

by P. D. Smith · 19 Jun 2012

love, and eventually grow old. Technology allows planners to design and build virtually any city, even self-sufficient eco-cities like Norman Foster’s ambitious Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, being constructed with a budget of $22 billion.60 But even the most visionary plans must allow for change over time

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reducing our carbon footprint, urbanisation might just save the planet. One pioneering project that offers a glimpse of the sustainable cities of the future is Masdar City. This carbon-neutral eco-city is being built some twenty miles from Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, which, ironically, is the world

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be seen to what extent the vision of a fully sustainable city will be realised here. With a projected resident population of about 45,000, Masdar City will be powered entirely by renewable energy. Initially, the designers hoped that its energy could be generated from within the city limits, but that

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city will be supplied by a solar-powered desalination plant, with waste water being recycled for irrigation. Residents and visitors must park their cars outside Masdar City and most of the transport in the city will be provided by a futuristic fleet of driverless, pod-shaped electric cars – the personal rapid

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transport system. Home to hi-tech industries and scientific research institutes, Masdar City is planned as an ‘open-data city’, with free wireless networks providing ubiquitous access to the internet. The

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Masdar Institute for Science and Technology has already opened, with buildings that have halved the typical energy and water consumption for the UAE. Solar panels on

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the sun’s energy and to provide shade. In a warmer urban future, such ideas may prove useful in other cities. The first phase of Masdar City is due for completion in 2015, with the entire six-square-kilometre city being finished five or ten years later

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, designed by Norman Foster, is an eco-city currently being built near Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates. Masdar City is a new, planned city. For older cities, the route to sustainability will be costly and complex. But the price of doing nothing will

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the supply and drawing on a city-wide network of micro-generators, as well as a range of renewable energy sources. As the designers of Masdar City have shown, measures can be taken to reduce the effect of the urban heat island. In October 2010, New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg

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© Sylvain Sonnet/Corbis; 292 © Atlantide Phototravel/Corbis; 296 © Heritage Images/Corbis; 299 © Bettmann/CORBIS; 307 Vincent Callebaut Architectures www.vincent.callebaut.org; 309 Courtesy of Masdar City; 315 Ron Herron Archive; 320 Reproduced from the online journal of Jed Hartman www.kith.org/logos/; 331 Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre; 334–35

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

by Benjamin H. Bratton · 19 Feb 2016 · 903pp · 235,753 words

rasa on which synthetic megacities are built. No more Brasilia or Tsukuba Science City; now we have variations on J. G. Ballard's Super-Cannes: Masdar (Norman Foster, Partners, et al.), Skolkova (Cisco et al.) Songdo City (Cisco, IBM, et al.), KAUST (IBM, HOK, et al.), and on and on.23

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its brochure) in South Korea's Incheon development, or see Paolo Soleri's Arcology as a first pass at Masdar, the massive “green” smart city in Abu Dhabi. (Both Songdo and Masdar were built with Cisco and IBM as key partners.) Is Situationist cut-and-paste psychogeography reborn or smashed to bits

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might terraform the Moon because he has already, project by project, terraformed Earth. Regardless of how you may like or not like the projects, from Masdar to the new Reichstag and the Gherkin, few contemporary offices have done more to expand the perspectival scale of architectural figuration than his. Architectural students

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inhales utopian aspirations (of the client and their publics). At the same time, the universal management platform of the smart city, such as Foster's Masdar plan (with IBM, Cisco, and others), gathers its world less through the anthropometric technique of the envelope than through the anticipatory and parametric management of

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utopian schemes of yesterday, some now registered into architecture's critical canon, others still languishing in the historical junk pile of unacknowledged visionary cranks. Like Masdar, Foster's secessionist Island chooses to recommends itself as an exemplar of green urbanism in that it can generate much of its own energy needs

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), a novel of seething, barely suppressed mayhem, set in an exclusive technology park enclave. 24. Greenfield, Against the Smart City. 25. The urban armatures of Masdar City are in some places raised off the ground like server racks in a data center, allowing the replacement of components’ building parts to be

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Within cities, the implementation of automotive automation has proven more difficult, as evidenced by the retreat from initial designs for personal rapid transit transport in Masdar City, Abu Dhabi (as well as the ill-fated Aramis project in Paris, as chronicled by Bruno Latour—planned and re-planned, but never built

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freely in walled gardens, choking off other species. This may be the crux of Jameson's field notes on Walmart. This is the alibi of Masdar, New Songdo City, Skolkova, Foxconn, Peter Thiel's tutelage under Rene Girard, and the dissertation that Alex Karp, founder of Palantir, did with Jürgen Habermas

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, Herbert, 328 market fundamentalism, 446n39 market governance, 310, 329–330 market sovereignty, 21, 105, 285, 329 Marramao, Giacomo, 381n24 Marx, Karl, 52, 77, 212, 328 Masdar City, Abu Dhabi (Foster), 179, 181–182, 281 Massumi, Brian, 101 material cosmopolitanism, 257 materialism, 131, 212 mathematical space, 337, 352 mathematics, universal laws of

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

by Geoffrey West · 15 May 2017 · 578pp · 168,350 words

embellishments of central Paris and Stockholm. Top left: An example of Ebenezer Howard’s plans for a garden city; top right: the new city of Masdar in Abu Dhabi; middle and bottom left: examples of Le Corbusier’s design for a new city. Le Corbusier had an enormous influence on architects

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at designing a city ex nihilo, in this case in the harsh desert environment of the Gulf States. This is the much-publicized city of Masdar in Abu Dhabi, which is envisioned to be a showcase for a sustainable, energy-efficient, user-friendly high-tech community by taking advantage of abundant

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environmentally friendly products to be supported by an influx of an additional sixty thousand commuters from Abu Dhabi itself. Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of Masdar is that its boundaries have been designed to be about as inorganic and unimaginative as possible—they form an exact square. Yes, a square city

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. It is hard not to perceive Masdar as effectively a large private suburban residential industrial park rather than a vibrant diverse autonomous city. In many ways its philosophy is derivative of Ebenezer

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privileged rather than for the working poor. Nicolai Ouroussoff, who was the architecture critic for the New York Times from 2004 to 2011, suggested that Masdar is the epitome of a gated community: “the crystallization of another global phenomenon: the growing division of the world into refined, high-end enclaves and

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vast formless ghettos where issues like sustainability have little immediate relevance.” It’s too early to tell whether Masdar will become a real city or remain just a grandiose upscale “gated community” stuck out in the Arabian desert. The tension between form and function

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some of the usual suspects: the distinguished architect Lord Norman Foster—whom I mentioned earlier as the lead designer of the weird square city of Masdar in the Arabian desert—aided by the well-known sculptor Sir Anthony Caro and the engineering firm of Arup. It’s a lovely design and

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–44 manufacturing, 211 Marchetti, Cesare, 333–35 Marchetti’s constant, 334–35 market capitalization, 379, 389–90 market share, 408–9 Marx, Karl, 228, 332 Masdar (Abu Dhabi), 256, 258, 299 Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (Newton), 181 mathematics, 8 biology and, 85–86, 87 Euclidean geometry, 130–31, 141–42

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/CC BY 2.0 Here: (Los Angeles): Courtesy of Aerial Archives/Alamy; (New York subway map): CountZ/English Wikipedia/CC BY-SA 3.0 Here: (Masdar city center): Courtesy of Laboratory for Visionary Architecture (LAVA); (Le Corbusier’s designs): Courtesy of © FLC/ARS, 2016 Here: (central place theory, Mexico): Courtesy of

Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism

by Elizabeth Becker · 16 Apr 2013 · 570pp · 158,139 words

. “You don’t need it—that was proved in New Mexico,” he said. About 20 miles outside of Abu Dhabi, a multibillion-dollar project called Masdar is attempting to do just that but on a mammoth scale that has become the norm in the United Arab Emirates. Promising to be the

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heat and glare of the sun. Eventually this refuge should show the way to a desert life after the oil economy runs dry. Masdar is part of the larger Masdar Initiative to develop alternative energy in the UAE, investing in solar, wind and nuclear. The poor environmental record of tourism in the

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Blackwater’s Founder,” New York Times, June 7, 2011. host its first Green Tourism conference: World Green Tourism Conference, Abu Dhabi, November 27–29, 2010. Masdar is attempting to do just that: Nicolai Ouroussoff, “In Arabian Desert, a Sustainable City Rises,” New York Times, September 26, 2010. Eventually this refuge should

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of, 271, 274–76 carbon footprint of, 271, 276 Chinese hotels of, 313–14, 315, 322 Marshall Plan, 52–54 Martin, Esmond, 234–35 Masdar, UAE, 195 Masdar Initiative, 195 mass tourism: at Angkor temples, 91, 94–95, 98 dangers of, 47 in Venice, 75, 76–86 Matthews, Charlie, 63–64 Matthews

Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made

by Gaia Vince · 19 Oct 2014 · 505pp · 147,916 words

, speeding baggage flows through airports, locating parking spaces for drivers, optimising waste management, reducing peak-load demand on electric grids and even cutting crime rates. Masdar, a new city being built in the desert of Abu Dhabi, has many of these elements designed into it from the start. The entire city

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is on a raised platform so that the smart-metered services – from waste to water – can be monitored and accessed from underneath. Masdar plans to be carbon neutral and is powered by an enormous solar station and wind farms, with buildings that incorporate smart shading, solar panels and

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de Dios, Peru 278–80 Manu River 280–81 Manu Wildlife Centre 279, 281 marijuana 357, 369 marine reserves 186–7 Mascho-Piro tribe 279 Masdar, Abu Dhabi 366 Matterhorn, the 48 Mawlamyaing, Burma 91 meat consumption 147, 148, 290, 322 Medellín, Colombia 353–4, 357 Mekong River 53, 88–9