Imagine a city where you can move around on foot because the maximum distance to the closest personalized transportation point or to the facilities that you are looking for is two hundred meters; a city where the covered walk ways and narrow streets create an ideal environment for pedestrians; a city conceived on a human scale, with zero emissions. Sounds like a miniature paradise, doesn’t it?

This is the objective of the new Foster & Partners project, a zero emissions city called Masdar in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. This citadel is part of a development project by the government of this Arab nation to promote the use of energy from alternative sources, seeking to implement models of sustainable development in cities with a high population density.

Based on traditional walled cities with narrow streets, where distances are short and where everything is focused on minimizing energy consumption, Masdar will offer the luxury and comfort of every metropolis but without the big pollution problems faced by modern cities.

Built on a desert site of some two million square meters, the first phase will involve the construction of a large photovoltaic plant around which the city will grow. It will be linked to Abu Dhabi airport and city center by an existing road network and a new railway link that will be specially constructed, Masdar will have no cars. Outside the city walls, wind farms generating electricity and photovoltaic panels will guarantee that the city is self sufficient in energy, while other plants driven by geothermal heat will cut the use of air conditioning in buildings by fifty percent.

Masdar is not an isolated project; Dongtan, in the Pearl of the Orient Shanghai, has a similar objective: a sustainable eco model, albeit hard to believe, for the megalopolis of the future, built on eighty six square kilometers. By 2010 the plan is for around 10,000 people to live there, but the novel aspect of this project is that all energy needs for housing, commercial and industrial use and transportation will be provided by renewable energy sources: sixty percent from bio mass, thirty percent from wind farms, eighteen percent by photovoltaic panels and two percent from composting the city’s waste products.

Another proposal by a group of students from the University of Sydney, under the leadership of Rafael Pizarro, is to transform White Bay, an area close to Sydney, into the first self sufficient district in Australia. This project is notable for the proposed use of tiny vehicles guided by GPS to move around the city, and using the roofs of the new buildings as areas for cultivation, like hanging gardens, a bit like a miniature Babylon that will increase food sources, while reducing the environmental impact and cutting transportation costs.