Are the Zero-Carbon Cities really Zero-Carbon?
There have been a number of new developments proclaiming themselves as zero carbon city. Two most popular cities we often heard of are China's Dongtan City and Abu Dhabi's Masdar City. These two cities were planned with an ambitious goal: to become the model of zero-carbon, zero-energy, zero-waste , zero-impact city in the world. As writer Julie Sze (2015) points out in her book, Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate, Dongtan has failed to meet its promise. The zero-emission city was initially planned to start functioning as the 2010 Shanghai World Expo began. However, it has been 6 years from the World Expo and the vision has been abandoned.
Dongtan Eco City as visioned (youth-leader.org)
Masdar City has a slightly more promising destiny. The city is currently still being developed. A very small part of the whole plan has already been built. Nevertheless, there have been doubts about the future of the project due to the slow progress being made. The city was originally planned as a "sustainable city in the desert" almost a decade ago, jointly designed by Foster & Partners (the city plan and Masdar Institute), LAVA (Masdar Plaza and sunshades), Adrian Smith & Gordon Gill Architecture (Masdar Headquarter building), and Zagato and 2getthere (Automated transportation pod).
The concept of Masdar City as "Sustainable City in the Desert" (nytimes.com)
The city was originally scheduled for its completion this year, yet it is still far from complete. Ten years from its first initiation, the city is currently only occupied by 300 people, all are the students at Masdar Institute of Science and Technology. This number is obviously far below initial target of 45,000 residents. As The Guardian's Suzanne Goldenberg wrote, the city is under a threat of becoming the world's first green ghost town. Not only in terms of the built form and number of population it has been lacking behind, the very original concept to become zero-carbon and zero-energy city has also been abandoned. The authorities admitted that the city has not been able to reach its net-zero goal, as this has been too difficult to achieve (as reported by CNN on video below).
Is this the greenest city in the world? (CNN 2014)
Learning from Dongtan and Masdar, we understand that realization of ideas and ambitions is often failed to meet the promises these ambitions initially made. The next question that we need to ask: "Is building new cities the most sustainable option to do?". If the embodied energy and embodied carbon required to build these so-called new sustainable cities are carefully measured, we may come up to a conclusion that, in the end, these cities are not that sustainable as they claim. My personal point of view is it will be much better to transform existing cities to be more sustainable instead of building new ones.
References:
Goldenberg, S 2016, 'Masdar's zero-carbon dream could become world’s first green ghost town', The Guardian, 17 February, <http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/16/masdars-zero-carbon-dream-could-become-worlds-first-green-ghost-town>
Sze, J 2014, Fantasy islands: Chinese dreams and ecological fears in an age of climate crisis, University of California Press, United States.
