The Suit Magazine

In a dusty desert landscape just 17 miles from the city of Abu Dhabi, an experiment is taking place that could change the way we build our lives.

Fourteen years from now, this will be the site of the greenest metropolis the world has ever seen. It’s called Masdar City, and projected designs promise futuristic skyscrapers, miles of solar panels, expansive pedestrian spaces, and fantastic architecture straight from an episode of The Jetsons.  Once complete, the municipality will house 40,000 residents and hundreds of business.

Current construction is fully powered by an onsite solar photovoltaic plant—the largest in the Middle East. Once the city is fully operational, engineers predict that energy consumption will be less than half that of a typical municipality.

To cut down on carbon emissions, Masdar City prohibits personal automobiles; visitors can park their cars outside, or commute via rail from Abu Dhabi. Intra-city transportation will consist of electric buses, limited rail service, and an innovative Personal Rapid Transit system being tested on the campus of Masdar Institute. This plan calls for single-occupancy pods that run on tracks from one destination to another, like driverless taxis.

The infrastructure also makes extensive use of solar and wind power, repurposes all waste water for landscaping, positions buildings to steer cool breezes into public spaces, and provides a collaborative atmosphere designed to attract the greatest minds of the green movement.

The Home Front
In the United States, the green revolution is less about building new cities, and more about revamping existing structures. The United States Green Building Council (USGBC) stands at the forefront of this movement; their main initiative, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), is a sustainability rating and certification program. Launched in March of 2000, LEED now has participants in all 50 states and 140 countries around the world. According to USGBC Communications Manager Ashley Katz, “A lot of that has to do with the incentives that have been developed in those localities to incentivize green buildings, like tax abatement and expedited permitting.”

Local efforts gathered more steam just this February, when President Obama proposed the Better Building Initiative during his State of the Union address. The plan aims to create nationwide incentives for green construction, with the eventual goal of making commercial buildings 20 percent more energy-efficient and saving companies $40 billion in energy costs.

“Organizationally, we very strongly support the Better Building Initiative. Anything that supports greening our existing buildings is something that’s very important,” Katz said.

Government incentives are effective, but many experts wonder why they should be necessary. Sustainability cuts costs, with or without tax breaks. So what keeps organizations everywhere from jumping on the green bandwagon?

According to Nadav Malin, it’s all a matter of breaking bad habits. Malin is the president of BuildingGreen, an independent company providing informational resources to the green building community.  “It’s just that we have this difficult transition to go through,” he told The Suit. “We live in a world that is designed around the way we do things now. It’s not just about infrastructure; it’s about things that are built into our legal and political systems.

“It’s as simple as collecting rainwater off the roof of a building and using it to flush toilets. In most parts of the country, health codes don’t allow that. Why wouldn’t they? It’s crazy, but there are historical reasons why they don’t. Laws that were passed 80 years ago are still on the books, and that makes it hard to do the right thing now.”

One promising development is the creation of net energy positive buildings—structures producing more energy than they consume. Malin points to the Aldo Leopold Center in Wisconsin, a small wooden facility with a solar-paneled roof and the highest LEED certification in the United States. “In order for a building to be net energy positive, it needs to be able to collect solar energy or wind energy. That means that it needs enough surface area and solar exposure. So I would say we’re a long way from being able to do this for tall buildings or inner-city buildings.”

But building sustainable cities is about much more than individual structures. “If you’re just focusing on the buildings and not focusing on the community, you’re missing a very important piece of the puzzle,” Malin said. “If you design a city to make it pedestrian-friendly, bicycle-friendly, and accessible to mass transit, then people living and working in those cities are going to have a much lower footprint than if you design a community to be sprawling and car-dependent.” For that reason, Malin considers densely populated urban areas to be more eco-friendly than suburbs and small towns.

Fueling Humans
Well-designed cities may be the answer to curbing our carbon emissions, and current trends indicate that 80 percent of the world’s population will live in urban centers as soon as 2050. But this raises another question: how do we feed the urbanites?

Author and former professor Dickson Despommier has been working on this problem for over a decade. “How much land does a city need in order to feed itself? New York City, which has about eight million people, needs land the size of Virginia in order to feed it. That’s an enormous amount of land,” he told The Suit. “And worldwide, the population could increase by about three billion people in 20 years. If we continue to farm the way we’re doing it, there just isn’t enough land available. So what are we going to do?”

Despommier is the author of “The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century.” His solution to the global hunger crisis is both simple and surreal: bring agriculture into the city by stacking greenhouses to skyscraping heights.

Of course, the typical greenhouse model doesn’t work in this scenario. Vertical farms are more complicated due to their size, but years of thoughtful engineering have solved many of those issues. For instance, sunlight can be brought to the center of a tall building with parabolic mirrors or sun lamps. With hydroponic technology, plants can grow in nutrient-rich water instead of soil. Waste can be composted and reused, making each structure as energy-efficient as possible.

“The advantages are huge,” Despommier said. “For every 20 acres of farmland outdoors, you can raise the same amount in one acre indoors, and that’s because you get continuous growth of the crop. You get no destruction from the seasons so you can grow year-round, and you get no insect problems. And if you don’t have any constraints about how big to make it, just keep making it bigger until it starts feeding a decent amount of people!”

Producing food closer to urban centers can cut costs for food packaging, chilling and transportation.  It also reduces our dependence on fossil fuels, creates job opportunities, and frees up our farmland for other uses, such as residents or even wildlife. “Before agriculture, the United States had a lot of hardwood forests, which are essential for keeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. We’ve lost that because we’ve cut all the trees down to plant crops.” Vertical farming can give the land a chance to get back to its roots.

The concept is simple, but implementation takes work. “It took a long time for people to work out how to do it,” said Despommier. “But we now have an example of a vertical farm—the world’s first. It’s five stories, and that’s more than enough to start with.”

That project is led by Will Allen, who runs a nonprofit organization called Growing Power. On his 2-acre facility in downtown Milwaukee, Allen grows produce and breeds fish, worms and bees. Worms create nutrient-rich soil for planting. Fish waste fertilizes crops, and then the clean water is recycled back into the tanks. Production is highly efficient, and the organic food from Allen’s small property has become an invaluable resource to the surrounding urban area.

Continued success with this and future projects could prove to the world that vertical farming is the answer to a myriad of problems, from world hunger to environmental damage to overcrowding.  “I think that in 2011, you’re going to see a lot of cities exploring the growing of food within city limits,” Despommier said. “Urban agriculture is gonna go big time.”

Down to Earth
By every indication, green city-building is a rewarding venture. The challenge is one of motivation—how to encourage people and governments to embrace these new concepts.

Competition may drive change. The countries that experiment today with new technologies will be the ones with the economic advantage years down the road, when impending world crises demand efficient energy production and sustainable practices.

But the ultimate solution is collaboration. The energy problems we face are not regional, but global. The Middle East could reap great benefits from American advances in vertical farming, as Despommier explains. “If you go to places like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, they don’t have much soil. And they import 80 to 90 percent of their fresh produce. So they’re at the mercy of who’s growing this food. And they don’t want to be—they want food security.” Likewise, the United States has much to learn from Abu Dhabi’s Masdar experiment, especially regarding transportation. Malin explains, “In the future, the cities that people will want to live in are going to figure out how to get cars out of the way, to the extent that people are bringing cars to the periphery and then, within the city, relying much more on mass transit and walking.”

In the global progression towards sustainability, experts agree that our biggest obstacles are behavioral ones. Moving forward is about more than just putting old newspapers and empty bottles into separate bins; it requires changing our collective mindset.

As Katz explains, “There’s a misconception that we’ve been trying to clear up for a long time. People think that green building costs more, and that’s why a lot of them don’t want to take that plunge because they’re afraid to make that change, and afraid of paying more money for it. But that’s completely untrue, so we’re trying to get around that misconception and break down some barriers.”

< Prev		Next >