Oil-rich Abu Dhabi’s Masdar City: green oasis or green ghost town?
Once billed as a one of a kind zero-carbon footprint city, the project finds itself sorely behind schedule and more or less empty. But some say it still has potential to change one of the world’s biggest consumers into conservationists
As the wind howls through the narrow empty streets in Abu Dhabi’s grand ecological experiment, a deep sense of isolation sets in.
There aren’t any hotels, supermarkets and shopping malls. Residents are few, with many restaurants half empty during lunch hour. The silence is punctuated by the occasional “rat tat tat” from a construction site.
The sun is nearly at high noon, but the streets are shaded from the harsh Arabian sun – an feat made possible by the planners who designed the city – but adds to the strangeness of the place.
Welcome to Masdar City, a multibillion dollar development which was supposed to be the world’s first emissions-free city yet stands a chance of becoming an eco-friendly ghost town.
“I’ve heard people calling this place ‘a green ghost town’, and sometimes I feel the same way,” says Wafaa al-Antali, an Emirati graduate student from Fujairah who studies at the city’s Masdar Institute of Science and Technology.
There is no denying the ambition of the project, especially for the tiny emirate of Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates which holds the seventh-largest proven reserves of oil in the world.