Masdar City - A Good or Bad Idea?

Perhaps you've heard of Masdar City, but if not, I figure that this blog would be a good place to discuss it as a community issue.

http://www.masdar.ae/home/index.aspx

The brainchild of the Mubadala Development Company, Masdar will be a city that is rising from scratch, essentially in the middle of the desert, just a few kilometres outside of the existing Abu Dhabi metropolitan area.
It is envisioned to be a "zero-carbon" city, utilising all sorts of interesting new technologies, including large scale solar panels for powering both the city and a desalination plant, wind farms, geothermal usage, greywater recycling, advanced waste management (composting, waste-to-energy incineration), and what will be the world's largest hydrogen power plant. The neatest part of all is that no automobiles at all will be allowed into the city - instead, mass transit and something called "personal rapid transit" (i.e. individual podcars on tram lines!) will be used. This allows the streets themselves to be narrow and shaded, which will create nice breezes via the wind tunneling effect (remember that this city is essentially going to be in a desert). To reduce the heat and save energy, the city will also be walled and extensively shaded.

In short, sounds awesome right? The concept art that is currently out looks sweet too. However, it raises a fundamental ethical question in my mind - is it really "sustainable development"? This is a topic we discussed in lecture 2, with some criteria being listed as: - concern for equity and fairness, - has a long term view, and - uses systems thinking. I have little doubt that, once built, its carbon and waste footprints will be minimal (and I'm sure that their Agenda 21 indicators will be stellar), but it is development itself that bothers me.

I generally disagree with the entire concept of 'sustainable development' and do not think that those above-listed criteria could ever solve our problems. Every action that human beings take has an impact on the natural world - the only way to truly be sustainable is for us to drastically reduce our population and revert to a tribalistic hunter-gather existence. This sounds like a strong statement, but think about it in terms of Masdar: once up and running, the city may, for example, not emit a single tonne of waste and be completely energy independent (it actually won't be, as it will still need to rely on gas-fired power from Abu Dhabi at night), but what about all the impacts that occurred up to that point? They always say that 95% of the waste and energy created in automobile production occurs before you ever even buy the vehicle, and this is likewise for all other materials that this city would use as well. For example, the shiny new solar panels and wind towers had to be made from something, probably in an energy intensive way, and by doing so, we continue to create demand for base metals, wood, and plastics, the mining and refining processes of which cause huge environmental degradation.

And so we are left in a troubling dilemma - no one (myself included) would ever agree to abandon our society and revert to tribalism, yet no other option is as perfect. Once we reach this realization, I suppose that we are forced to accept technological innovation as the only feasible answer. While a wind-powered city is still unsustainable as long as our population (and therefore our need for continued development) increases, it is indeed better than the alternative and so should be begrudgingly accepted until we can think of an even better alternative.

However, this too has problems. Firstly, due to lack of manpower and possible permanent physical constraints, I don't see technology keeping pace with the world's increasing number and scale of problems, especially as we begin to lose more species that may have proven useful in medicine or biomimicry. Secondly, as we have read in our "Fostering Sustainable Behavior" book for environmental economics, inducing behavioural change to adopt these new technologies is difficult at best and requires multifaceted, audience-specific, incentive-based campaigns (which of course, take lots of time and money - both of which are of increasing scarcity).

So, in short, we're probably f*cked... But at least Masdar is cool!