Masdar: The City of the Future Norman Foster 2008 Like many MiddleEastern states, Abu Dhabi built its modern economy on oil production. However, it is unique in the region in recognising that we must develop alternative energy models if we are to reduce the environmental impact of our contemporary lifestyles. The Masdar Initiative in Abu Dhabi was established in order to promote renewable energy solutions through research and development and to create a model for future energy security within a wholly sustainable framework. Masdar has far reaching significance in global terms, in that it tackles design in a holistic sense. It is not specific in terms of individual buildings, important though they may be. Instead it looks at the bigger picture. If energy consumption is a consequence of demand, then you could argue that demand is a consequence of design – and that everything in our world is the result of a conscious act of design. In that sense, you cannot divorce the issue of energy from architecture and urban planning. But really architecture comes down to buildings, and urban planning comes down to infrastructure. Those two elements are normally considered separately, but Masdar brings them together as its central thesis – and you can only do that at the level of community planning. That is what makes Masdar so critically important and progressive in a global context. Another way of describing this process is ‘urbanisation’. If we look at what urbanisation really means, in an industrialised society, and look at energy consumption, you find that transport represents some 35 per cent of the total and buildings 44 per cent. There is a critical interaction between the two in design terms. As we look at global population and its redistribution, it is also important to note that that process of urbanisation is changing rapidly. Today, more people live in cities than in the whole history of civilisation and that pattern is accelerating. What took 200 years in Europe or North America is now taking twenty years in countries such as China – acceleration by a factor of ten. It was not that long ago, in 1939, that London was the most populous city in the world, with a population of 8.6 million, but it has been overtaken by a number of megacities around the world, with populations in excess of 15 million. That raises several
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