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Chances are, you’ve heard of Masdar: the newly-planned “zero-carbon” city, currently-under-construction 17 km to the southeast of Abu Dhabi. If you hadn’t heard of it previously, this case study in sustainable development par excellence was front-page-news in yesterday’s New York Times. In the feature article, “In Arabian Desert, a Sustainable City Rises,” Nicolai Ouroussoff articulates the vision expressed by Masdar’s design – vernacular wisdom meets high-tech innovation meets utopian isolationism – applauding the high performance veracity of Norman Foster’s design team, and deftly critiquing the project’s “gated-community mentality.”
With regards to the notion of sustainable development, however, there are some important issues that Ouroussoff’s piece fails to mention. This post looks takes a look at Masdar’s claims of carbon-neutrality.
Carbon-neutrality?
Any discussion of carbon-neutrality requires defining the scope of the system in question — drawing a “system boundary” around the project at hand. Levels of carbon absorption and emission can be measured against each other only after a limiting margin has been set, but determining where to draw this boundary line is far from obvious (a point discussed in the previous sustainable development post “The Fuzzy Math of Embodied Energy.”) In the case of the Masdar project, the system boundary is drawn to include only the functioning operation of the new sustainable city; in other words, it does not account for the carbon emitted or energy consumed in producing the materials used to build the city or in preparing the desert land for construction; nor does it account for future maintenance (or eventual destruction) of the city’s physical infrastructure.
The “zero-carbon” claims only apply to the planned operation of the city — as if the construction of a brand new city, made from high-tech materials, in the midst of a desolate desert were a trivial matter, devoid of resource-related controversies. Overlooking the project’s opulence and planned excesses, Masdar’s champions speak about the city as if it were a sustainable development inevitability. (The tendency to focus only on a project’s operation, as opposed to a holistic view of its totality, can lead to some paradoxical claims of “sustainability” such as, for example, with the previously discussed “green” Wally Hermes Yacht.)
There is no doubt that substantial efforts are being made to ensure that Masdar’s built infrastructure is highly efficient, that transportation within the city is not dependent on fossil fuels, and that the energy required for the city’s functioning comes from renewable sources. These aims are commendable and will hopefully raise the bar for future urban design. However, energy efficiency is not synonymous with sustainable development; sustainable development should take into account not only a settlement’s operational functioning, but also the big picture that drives its inception. And here is where Masdar raises eyebrows – the abundance of solar panels does not change the fact that Masdar will likely cater only to an elite and privileged minority of the population.