OK, so if the city is going to be zero-carbon, I guess that means there will be no animals and the people will have to walk around with gas masks?And I bet it also means that barbecuing is out, huh?
Construction work on the world’s first zero-carbon city housing 50,000 people in a car-free environment will begin in the oil-rich Gulf emirate of Abu Dhabi next month, the developers said on Monday.
In Masdar City, which will be run entirely on renewable energy including solar power to exploit the desert emirate’s near constant supply of sunshine, people will be able to move around in automated pods.
“This is a place that has no carbon footprint and will not hurt the planet in any way,” Khaled Awad, director of the Masdar project’s property development unit of the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company (ADFEC), told AFP.
“At the same time the city will offer the highest quality of life possible for its residents,” he said on the sidelines of the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Once completed in 2013, residents will be able to move around the six-square-kilometre (2.4-square-mile) city using a light railway line and a series of automated transport pods.
“They’re like a horizontal elevator. You just say where you want to go, and it takes you there,” Awad said of the pods.
Unlike the gleaming towers of nearby Abu Dhabi, a model of the Foster and Partners-designed Masdar City displayed at the summit showed only low-rise buildings with solar panels on each roof.
The city will be sited to take advantage of sea breezes, and a perimeter wall will protect it from the hot desert air and noise from the nearby Abu Dhabi airport.