Masdar City : Worlds first greenfield smart city
Thoughts: Its all about Iteration
There is not a single week that passes without being asked “so what happened at Masdar City” and it has been like this for 10 years and of course it is natural given it’s prominence in the story of smart cities or green cities. My city experience of course has been influenced extensively by my time with Masdar City in Abu Dhabi (UAE), then a zero-carbon sustainable city, where I was the Head of Strategy & Real Estate for the then $20 Billion USD project. In fact, I was employee No.8 of Masdar City and within 12 months I had 120 colleagues with a total of around 500 people planning and developing the project such was the pace of the development in 2007 and 2008. Building a team, planning and designing the city while being booked in 3 meetings every hour for 10 hours a day was like the classic analogy of building the plane while flying it.
My role was development and strategy planning across all property asset classes and then infrastructure and defining the early phase of the development and included initial design setting and full feasibilities together with partnership negotiations with some of the worlds leading companies such as IBM, Cisco, Siemens etc. Masdar City led government backed missions to the UK, Switzerland, Australia, France and many others and were standard fare for this type of high-profile development at the time and constant political and diplomatic engagements were all par for the course.
The history of Masdar City though is not well known really given what I have read over the years and was originally part of a focus to develop a clean tech industry in Abu Dhabi. In fact, the Masdar Initiative was actually a 4 pronged one with a carbon division, an investment fund and a solar division ; as well as the City itself which was the physical location for it all.
The intent for Masdar City was always well founded and a noble one given the Abu Dhabi government’s reliance on old energy which itself was recognised by the Masdar name which was officially the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company.
One of the main lessons (among 100’s) at Masdar City was that any major master planned development needs to “iterate” and it must ensure that it is not a simple linear process where you say “off we go”, obtain a design and then start building it. Gateway review processes and robust questioning and changes to concept design must take place and with far more rigor than the simple “value engineering” approach which basically reduces the price of parts of the development but ignores larger fundamental design issues. Cities are made of real estate essentially supported by infrastructure. And real estate is a fickle beast at the best of times and you cannot develop real estate in the same way you would develop a bridge; real estate development will slow, stop or speed up whilst a bridge will have a beginning and an end date. The “linear” approach may well suit a bridge but an “iterative” approach is needed for a master planned city with big chunks of real estate that require phasing and have inter-dependencies with infrastructure as well.
Sadly, I have seen the folly of the “linear” approach repeated around the world in many city master planned developments. Emerging nations particularly, need to ensure that the “iterative” approach is taken instead to ensure some measure of success for their new master planned cities.