Socially Engineering the City of Masdar

A couple weeks ago Edwin Gardner, of prss release and Volume Magazine, asked me to expand upon my post on Masdar for the forthcoming issue of Volume on social engineering. In response, my article set out to contemplate the role of Masdar in a new wave of designer cities.

[Image: Volume #15: Destination Library. Courtesy of Volume.]

Today I received confirmation on the final copy, but the magazine will not be available until sometime this summer. For now, I have included an excerpt from the piece.

Excerpt:

In a world of the human ego – where more is more – bigger and taller are the only goals to aspire toward. Places like Dubai are an architect’s playground. Here, we see one ego trip followed by another through an architecture of excess.

In a parallel world, however, the words of Mies van der Rohe ring true again, though in a different context. ‘Less is more’ now applies to our carbon footprint and an architecture of performance. Yet, as these two worlds begin to intersect, a new competition is born – the race to become the world’s first sustainable city.

Abu Dhabi, an early front-runner in this race, has already developed some promising strategies for addressing the problem of polluting cultures. Global alliances have been created as part of the Masdar Initiative, a long-term plan for the sustainable future of Abu Dhabi. Through this program, Abu Dhabi is attempting to position itself as global leader in renewable energy and sustainable technologies. The flagship of the program will be the Masdar development, a carbon neutral city master planned by Foster + Partners. Given the desert environment, the Initiative’s commitment, and the financial backing of the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, Foster appears to be living a planner’s wet dream – building a city from scratch.

[Image: Square city plan for Masdar. Courtesy of Foster + Partners.]

In the process, however, Foster + Partners ignore current discourse to create their own sustainable utopia. One discourse is the conceptualization of modern – or global – cities, the other, a means of achieving sustainable environments. Both notions are upended by a machine mentality and the creation of a closed system. This negates any notion of an open, continuous landscape that currently defines the next generation of city models, and natural systems, as a model of sustainability, that are defined as a fluid area constantly shifting between change and equilibrium.

In the end, Foster + Partners deliver a socially engineered cocktail to the marketing team at the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company – a synthetic culture for their synthetic city.

I’ll provide an update when the print version is available.

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