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Suggested citation: Cugurullo, F., and Ponzini, D. (2018). The transnational smart city as urban eco-
modernisation: the case of Masdar City in Abu Dhabi. In Karvonen A., Cugurullo F. and Caprotti F.,
(eds), Inside Smart Cities: Place, Politics and Urban Innovation. Routledge, London
The transnational smart city as urban eco-modernisation: the case of Masdar City
in Abu Dhabi
Federico Cugurullo, Trinity College Dublin
Davide Ponzini, Politecnico di Milano
Abstract
This chapter explores the notion and practice of the smart city, with a geographical focus on Abu
Dhabi, the capital city of the United Arab Emirates. Smart-city projects are understood and discussed
as the products of overarching political economies whose objectives are pursued through a fast-track
urbanisation. The case of Abu Dhabi shows that smart-city initiatives are connected to the state’s
goals of changing its economic base and preserving the political status quo, through the development
and commercialization of smart-clean technology. In this sense, the smart city, as a living laboratory
meant to produce new cleantech products, such as smart grids and state-of-the-art solar power
stations, becomes the physical locus where new strands of the regional economy are cultivated.
Through the example of Masdar City, a new high-tech district under construction in Abu Dhabi, the
chapter unpacks and critiques the contradictions between the economic imperatives that underpin so-
called smart interventions and their overall sustainability, revealing that, as in most cases of
ecological modernisation, socio-environmental concerns are overshadowed by business interests. We
conclude that, in addition to being ineffective against the majority of the social and the environmental
problems caused by cities, by supporting transnational capitalist machines of production and
consumption, smart-city solutions risk to backfire and exacerbate the same vicious circle that they
should be breaking.
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Introduction
This chapter explores the incarnation of the smart-city ideal in the context of Abu Dhabi, the capital
of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), focusing in particular on a new high-tech urban project: Masdar
City. The aim of the chapter, based on field research over a three-year period (2010-2012), is to
explain the rationale behind the development of Masdar City in relation to the politico-economic
development of Abu Dhabi. In this sense, the protagonist of the chapter is not Masdar City, but Abu
Dhabi and this is where the narrative underpinning the following sections starts. However, before
proceeding further, there are two important preliminary considerations to take into account, regarding
where Masdar City stands from an ideological and spatial perspective.
Masdar City between labels and reality
This chapter seeks to illuminate one of the most controversial aspects of smart-city developments:
the difference which lies between the label and the materiality of the project or, in other words,
between what the project has been called and what has actually been implemented. Masdar City is a
new settlement which has been under development in Abu Dhabi since 2007, through the aegis of the
Masdar Initiative, a public company controlled by the government of Abu Dhabi. In ten years, the
Emirati project has been promoted, described and called in a variety of ways. Originally, the project
was labelled by its developers as an ‘eco-city’, and later it was rebranded as a ‘zero-carbon city.’
When, in 2010, the developers realized that the complete decarbonisation of the settlement was
impossible, the official label of Masdar City became ‘low-carbon city.’ When, between 2013 and
2015, the Emirati project was heavily criticized for its scarce environmental performance and its
unecological inclination, the Masdar Initiative stopped referring to its creation as an eco-city and
began to use the expression ‘smart city’ which, at that time, was growing in popularity and carried
less emphasis on sustainability. More recently, following the hyper popularisation of the concept of
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smart city, the Masdar Initiative seems to have readopted the original 2007 moniker and is now
promoting Masdar City as the first and best eco-city in the world (Masdar City 2017: no page).
What this carousel of labels reveals is not the shifting nature of the project, but rather the shifting
nature of the discourses surrounding it, and how public narrative has been morphing accordingly. As
showed in a number of studies (Caprotti and Romanowicz 2013, Caprotti 2016, Crot 2013, Cugurullo
2013a, 2016a, 2016b, 2017a, Evans et al. 2016), the implementation and evolution of Masdar City
has been, in practice, fairly linear. Of course, in ten years, the physical shape of the city has changed
along with the masterplan, in order to face a number of contextual challenges such as the 2008 credit
crunch and the Arab Spring in 2010 (see Cugurullo 2016a). When the financial crisis hit the global
economy, for example, the scale of the Masdarian autonomous transport system was considerably
reduced. However, the Masdar City project has not experienced any fundamental change which
justified a completely new label.
Discourses have changed, largely for financial reasons, in order to better promote what, as we will
see, is essentially an urban space employed as an engine of economic growth. Discourses which, in
pure Foucauldian fashion, construct truths to support specific sets of power relationships, instead of
capturing the essence of things. On these terms, as we will observe in the remainder of the chapter,
the power gravitating towards Masdar City is, first, political and economic, and, second, transnational
in nature. It is the political power of the local elite, which is maintained in the Emirati society by
means of the economic power of its rulers, as well as the economic power of the multinationals
running the Masdarian business. The preservation of these powers is what defines the structure,
design and mechanics of Masdar City whose many labels have never reflected its actual ecological
performance (as an alleged eco-city) or the intelligence of its infrastructure and governance (as an
alleged smart city). These labels have been formulated to be appealing to a diverse pool of potential
investors (mostly cleantech companies) and clients (see Masdar Initiative 2018). For these reasons,
the process of (re) labelling, which has characterized Masdar City since its inception, leads us to our
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first consideration: there is not always a direct correlation between the label ‘smart city’ and the
actually existing urban space to which that label is attached. The very term ‘smart’ appears to be
fuzzy and, as such, loosely connected to politico-economic agendas which exist a priori.
Masdar City is in and out of Abu Dhabi
From a spatial point of view, Masdar City is located in Abu Dhabi’s territory and is therefore
influenced by its politics, economy, culture, climate and morphology. However, if we analyse the
project from different geographical perspectives, its origin, metabolism and impact, go far beyond
the boundaries of the emirate. From an ideological point of view, for instance, the key ideas behind
the architecture, the technology and the design of Masdar City, have been shaped by international
experts and companies, such as Foster + Partners, Arup and Mitsubishi, responsible for the formation
of what appears to be ‘a fairly uniform and consistent set of ideas for enhancing the sustainability of
urban development’ (Rapoport 2015: 4). These ideas and sets of knowledge originate from different
spaces, and experience a multitude of incarnations whose specifics differ in relation to the spaces
where they eventually land (Rapoport and Hult 2017). This is particularly evident in the case of Abu
Dhabi whose context, as the following section discusses, is inherently transnational and, as such,
heavily exposed to the influence of external forces (Kolo 2016). This does not mean, of course, that
Abu Dhabi is just a blank canvas which only absorbs overseas inputs. In terms of expertise in urban
development, urban design and architecture, for example, Abu Dhabi (like many other cities in the
Gulf) is not just the destination of urban ideals, policies, projects and technologies, but also their
origin (Molotch and Ponzini forthcoming).
If we approach the study of Masdar City with a focus on supply chains, then Abu Dhabi can be seen
as a node within a much broader international network. The majority of the physical resources that
are used to build the new city, such as metals, plastics and minerals, do not originate in Abu Dhabi.
An example of this condition is coltan (short for columbite–tantalite), an ore used to construct a
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plethora of smart technologies, which, as noted by Kaika (2017: 90) comes largely ‘from the
Democratic Republic of Congo, and is mined by hand under what the UN repeatedly reports to be a
highly organized and systematic exploitation of both local nature and local people’ (see also Moran
et al. 2014). Similarly, the labour working on the implementation of the project, consists mostly of
foreign workers originally from Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and the Philippines. In this sense, we
must consider the fact that the socio-environmental impact of Masdar City has a transnational scale
which cannot be forgotten if one wants to evaluate the project, particularly from an urban
sustainability point of view.
Abu Dhabi as a transnational context
From an urban perspective, Abu Dhabi, the capital city of the UAE and the context of the Masdar
City project, has a strong transnational character. Until the discovery of immense oil and gas reserves,
Abu Dhabi was a small village whose economy was based on fishing and pearl diving. Soon after the
creation of the UAE (a federation of seven emirates) in 1971, a series of projects targeting
modernization started, leading to the demolition of most of the original settlement, and the
implementation of infrastructural plans and land-use schemes based on Western urban models. The
population doubled between 1986 and 2005, due to a massive influx of foreign workers. The current
population of Abu Dhabi is about three million, and what was a fishing village is now a metropolis.
Such fast-paced development has been fuelled largely by waves of migration of temporary workers
which are now the majority of the population (almost 90% of it, is composed of international
migrants). Speed is also relevant in terms of how long people tend to stay in Abu Dhabi, as immigrants
typically leave the country after only few years of work, and after having received salaries which are
typically higher than those in their country of origin.
Until 2004, the founding father of the UAE, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, guided the country
and its infrastructural modernization, opening his country to globalization. The openness towards
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Western economies and business models, dramatically accelerated after his son, Sheikh Khalifa bin
Zayed Al Nahyan, became the new ruler. Beginning in 2005, a season of reforms in real-estate
regulation introduced new rights for non-Emirati individuals and companies. A partial liberalization
welcomed an influx of foreign investments which favored a large urban expansion. In less than two
decades, urbanization changed the landscape and regional organization of the emirate, in conjunction
with the even faster growth of Dubai’s urban infrastructure – e.g. the gigantic Jebel Ali port which is
positioned near Abu Dhabi’s border and has become an economic magnet for the region (Ramos
2016, Akhavan 2017). The focus of the government of Abu Dhabi has often been on flashy mega-
projects, such as museums, resorts and financial districts, with little or no attention to the basic
housing needs of the low-income share of the population, as well as of the lower middle class (Ponzini
and Nastasi 2016). An example of this line of planning is the Louvre Abu Dhabi, a 24,000 m2 museum
built in 2017, to showcase art from around the world, which costed over €600 million (Louvre Abu
Dhabi 2018). Such approach to urban development has been facilitated by the local policy context.
Political power and economic resources are in the hands of a close-knit network of decision makers
and developers, facilitating a fast-track governance which, in turn, speeds up the approval of large
development projects (Ponzini 2011).
However, despite this apparent positive trend, the economic and urban growth of Abu Dhabi is now
hindered by a series of obstacles. First, Abu Dhabi’s economy is largely based on oil which, as a finite
resource, poses pressing questions about the sustainability of the regional economic system. In
addition, the emirate is characterized by a strong consumerist culture and an energy-intensive life
style which put pressure on its limited amount of natural resources, such as fresh water which is scarce
in the entire region (Luomi 2009, Molotch forthcoming). This situation, together with the rapid
urbanization discussed above, has led local policy-makers to revise not simply the economy of Abu
Dhabi, but also how development (urban development in particular) is understood and practiced.
These are concerns which, of course, go well beyond economic and environmental rationales. Like
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in most sultanistic regimes, the political stability of the country and the power of the royal family, are
based on strong welfare systems providing constant rewards to the local population (Linz and Stepan
1996). However, such gilded cages are expensive to maintain and require a solid economy which is
what Abu Dhabi will lack when its oil reserves will begin to show their limits (Cugurullo 2016a). It
is in this politico-economic context that, in 2008, Abu Dhabi released a new large-scale agenda called
Economic Vision 2030, meant to coordinate a set of plans and policies for the economic re-
development of the region. Although it includes a series of principles regarding institutional
transparency, private sector empowerment, sustainability, welfare and public infrastructure
development, the explicit target is economic diversification. This objective has been pursued mostly
by cultivating alternative sectors of the economy, such as cleantech: an industry based in part on the
research, development and commercialization of smart technologies.
This new economic vision has been interacting with local urban expansion strategies. In 2008, an
international team launched the Urban Structure Framework Plan, in order to sustainably develop the
city until 2030 (Samarrai 2016). Some of the policies included in the vision were derived from the
experiences of other cities, but their implementation was carried out mostly by local organizations
(Ponzini 2011, 2013, Murray 2012). From an urban sustainability perspective, ideas and policies were
derived, in part, from the experience of Vancouver which local policy-makers identified as a model
of best practice (Khirfan and Jaffer 2014). Emblematic is the case of the former Director of Planning
of Vancouver, Larry Beasley, who became the special advisor of the Crown Prince on matters of
urban policy and sustainability. The chapter now switches the scale of enquiry, moving the discussion
to a single urban project, Masdar City, to examine how Abu Dhabi’s new strategies of economic
diversification (which, as we have seen, find in cleantech one of the main foci) have been rolled out
via urbanization.
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Masdar City as urban eco-modernisation
Masdar City is a new master-planned settlement which the government of Abu Dhabi is building from
scratch in a previously undeveloped area of the emirate. Once the project will be fully implemented,
Masdar City will cover an area of 6 km2 and is expected to host a population of 50,000 people and
60,000 daily commuters. Although promoted as a city, as the map below shows, this alleged smart-
eco city is technically a district. While detached from the main population centres of Abu Dhabi, it
remains a segment of its urban fabric and, as such, part of a broader city, rather than an independent
urban cell (see figure 1). At the time of writing, the Emirati vision is far from being realized. Although
despite the delays caused by the recent global financial crisis, the construction of the district (see
figures 2 and 3) has never stopped, from a social point of view the project has been a failure. Only
less than 500 people actually live in Masdar City: a clear sign of the fact that, as we will see in the
remainder of the chapter, smart technologies alone cannot sustain urban living. On these terms, the
social plague that is affecting the new Emirati settlement, is part of a broader disease which, especially
in recent years, has been contaminating a number of master-planned cities developed under the eco
and smart banners: new cities built from scratch as quickly as possible and then filled with clean
technologies, with scarce social concerns (Cugurullo 2016c). As noted by Caprotti (2014a: 15), these
are built environments which not only lack social resilience, and are therefore prone to be shocked
by social, environmental and economic crises: they are also ‘empty infrastructural containers waiting
for an influx of residents’, where a community is a hard to form in the first place (see also Günel
forthcoming).
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Figure 1 Map of Masdar City (Source: Transnational Architecture and Urbanism research unit,
Politecnico di Milano)
Figure 2 Masdar City in April 2018 – South-west side. As the picture shows, the new district is
growing in an area which is detached from the other districts of Abu Dhabi, and is not ecologically
sterile as many might think (Source: Gianfranco Serra Photography)
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Figure 3 Masdar City in April 2018 – North side (Source: Gianfranco Serra Photography)
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The reasons why the new city has experienced such a poor social performance, are directly connected
to its geographical context: Abu Dhabi. As discussed in the previous section, through Economic
Vision 2030, the emirate is undergoing a phase of transition from an oil-based economy, to an
economic architecture made of sectors which are less dependent upon petroleum. In this sense, the
political economy of Abu Dhabi has been steered towards what is commonly called ‘green economy’,
and the cleantech industry is one of its main foci. Urbanization has become a medium to achieve this
transition, and Masdar City is but a gear of this broader politico-economic machine. The new city is
being used as a testbed for the development of new smart-clean technologies, such as concentrated
solar power stations, smart grids and autonomous transport systems, which are integrated in Masdar
City, thereby becoming part of its structure. This is why large-international companies like Siemens,
Mitsubishi and Schneider, have forged a partnership with the Masdar Initiative, opening new
laboratories and offices in the new city. The city itself can be seen as a large-scale outdoor laboratory
where companies working in the cleantech sectors can experiment with new products before
commercializing them. Eventually, once the new technology becomes a commodity and is sold, the
Masdar Initiative and, therefore, Abu Dhabi get a percentage of the revenue, ranging from 30% to
60% (see also Cugurullo 2013a, 2013b, 2017a).
The rhetoric through which this type of economic-urban development has been pushed forwards,
resonates with the ideology of ecological modernisation. As explained by Whitehead (2007: 34)
ecological modernisation or, how it is often referred to eco-modernisation, is a Western typology of
development, based on the idea of ‘making business sense out of sustainability.’ Modernisation has
always been at the core of capitalist strategies of economic growth. In order to keep selling their
products, private companies need to constantly reinvent them and keep them attractive, with new
designs and features promising a better performance. A classic example of this phenomenon is the
escalation of iPhone models which Apple has been pushing forward for over a decade. The American
multinational technology company would not survive if the sale of its products, such as smartphones,
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stopped. Therefore, it has to regularly modernize them, keeping their features state-of-the-art, so as
to make them appealing to new customers and, above all, to the existing ones who, by seeing their
iPhone as an obsolete device, are stimulated to buy the newest model. Eco-modernisation takes the
same rationale and makes it ecologically friendly, claiming that economic growth (particularly via
production and consumption) and environmental preservation can go hand in hand and support each
other (Andersen and Massa 2000, Cugurullo 2017b, Harvey 1996, Rapoport 2014).
In the case of Masdar City, this rationale is put into practice by means of the development and sale
of smart technologies designed to decrease the environmental impact of cities. Via Masdar City, Abu
Dhabi is embracing a typical western business model: an attitude which, as we saw earlier in the
chapter, is common practice in the emirate. The peculiarity here lies in the fact that the process of
modernisation through which new smart-clean technologies are researched, developed, tested and
then sold, is rolled out by building a city and, on these terms, we refer to it as urban eco-modernisation
(see Cugurullo 2016a). This urban phenomenon can indeed lead to a type of economic growth linked
to positive environmental externalities, such as the reduction of the carbon emissions produced by
cities. Nonetheless, there are some critical issues to consider.
The first problem concerns the nature of the economic and environmental benefits that Masdar City’s
urban eco-modernisation is generating. The smart technologies produced and sold in Masdar City
focus on the reduction of urban carbon emissions. Such focus is the outcome of precise market
analyses indicating that this typology of products is now in demand. As also noted by Swyngedouw
(2010), because of the popularisation of climate change discourses, CO2 has been identified as the
culprit responsible for the disorder of our weather systems and, as such, the international enemy to
defeat. The Masdarian technology targets precisely the annihilation of this “enemy”. However, in so
doing, it promotes an urbanism which completely forgets the remainder of the spectrum of ecological
problems that cities experience today. It is scientifically established that urban carbon emissions
contribute, to some extent, to climate change, but it is also equally established that there is a plethora
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of other urgent environmental issues caused by urbanisation, such as loss of natural habitat, water
scarcity and, in essence, the disruption, and often destruction, of ecosystems and ecosystem services
(Bulkeley and Castán Broto 2013, Castán Broto and Bulkeley 2013). In this sense, the case of China
exemplifies the ecological havoc which an urbanism implemented without drawing upon the insights
of ecology, can cause. The urban population of China reached 51.3% in 2011: an unprecedented urban
growth whose price was the loss of approximately a quarter of all the country’s forest and water
coverage (He et al. 2014, Li et al. 2015).
Seen from this perspective, the environmental contribution of Masdar City towards issues of
sustainability is relatively scarce, and so is its distribution. In terms of housing, the clean low-carbon
built environment of the new district is designed to accommodate an elite composed of high-income
workers, and little or no space is reserved for those at the low end of the socio-economic spectrum
(see also Caprotti 2014b, Cugurullo 2017a). An average one-bedroom apartment (65 m2) in Masdar
City, for example, costs over €185,000 while the majority of the population, consisting of low-income
foreign workers, has today an average salary of €220 per month and, despite working 12 hours a day,
seven days a week, is forced to share hyper-crowed flats. Common in Abu Dhabi are the stories of
large groups of people (over 40 men) sharing a three-bedroom flat, due to the country’s lack of
affordable housing (The National 2016). The same unevenness applies to the economic benefits that
the Masdarian business generates. All the money that the sale of smart technologies brings to the new
district, immediately leaves the settlement to feed into the local and, ultimately, elitist economic
system discussed in the previous section, and into the portfolio of the business partners of the Masdar
Initiative. In so doing, it reinforces the economic power of a small minority, and reproduces and
sharpens the typical issues of inequality that we find in capitalist systems: in Masdar City, smart is
not for everybody.
The second problem is connected to the supply chains underpinning the implementation of the Masdar
City project. As noted in section one, Abu Dhabi is a node within complex economic and socio-
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environmental systems, and so is Masdar City. Given that the practice of urban eco-modernisation
requires a constant production of new technologies, Masdar City needs to extract a wide-range of
resources such as metals and minerals, for building its smart devices, and to use large quantities of
oil and gases for the creation of the energy that is necessary to power the processes of production and
distribution. As emphasized by several critics of the practice of ecological modernisation, the
environmental costs of these processes are enormous (Foster 2002, Pepper 1998). The process of
extraction, for instance, not only destabilizes ecosystems and reduces the stock of resources of the
planet. It is also carbon intensive, and adds to the carbon emissions that are produced when materials
become ingredients to create products, and products become commodities which are distributed
around the world. Third, the focus of urban eco-modernisation strategies is on the economic and
(partly) on the environmental and, as a result, little or no attention is paid to the social. This is one of
the most important dimensions of cities, and its disregard inevitably prevents the formation of an
urban community. Instead, the outcome is a soulless city or in the words of Augé (2008) a non-place:
a space bereft of identity and social relations, and plagued by an extremely weak or inexistent society
(see also Palermo and Ponzini 2015)
Conclusions: Masdar City is not a (smart) city
This chapter has explored the genesis and development of Masdar City, in relation to Abu Dhabi’s
politico-economic context. The origin of the new settlement lies in a specific regional programme of
economic diversification, targeting the development of a post-oil economy. More specifically, the
aim of the political economy of Abu Dhabi is the cultivation of a cleantech sector based on the
development and sale of smart technologies, such as smart grids, autonomous transport systems and
concentrated solar power stations. In this context, Masdar City is an instrument in the hands of the
local government, employed to realize the new economic vision of Abu Dhabi. What is actually a
new district, rather than a new city, is used as a living laboratory. Here, several multinationals,
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working in cleantech, develop, test and commercialize state-of-the-art technology, eventually sharing
part of the profit with the Masdar Initiative and the government of Abu Dhabi.
In this sense, the origins of Masdar City are deeply rooted in the geographical location where its
construction has been taking place. However, this chapter has also shown that the project has several
translational sides. Many of the ideas behind the design and architecture of the new city, for example,
originate in international networks of experts. In a similar vein, a large portion of the labour and
materials that have been used to build Masdar City, comes from transnational supply chains which
have a transnational socio-environmental impact. More specifically, the chapter has emphasized how
the double local/transnational character of the project, resonates, in theory and practice, with the logic
of urban eco-modernisation. The development of Masdar City is carried out in sync with the
development and commercialisation of smart technologies designed to decrease the environmental
impact of urban settlements. However, the environmental performance of the new district is tailored
to fit the business interests of a small elite, and ignores those ecological issues that cannot be easily
monetized. In addition, to paraphrase Whitehead (2007), the developers’ stress on making business
sense out of sustainability by selling smart technology, has led them to ignore basic social aspects of
urban living. As a result, Masdar City has grown without a community, thereby becoming what Augé
would call a non-place.
In conclusion, the analysis of the case of Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, raises a series of critical questions
regarding the scale of so-called smart cities. First, when we look at the city and the region where
Masdar City is located, the scale of the project covers only a small portion of territory. The new
district is a relatively small settlement and, as such, the benefits that its smart technologies generate
have a limited range. As we have seen in section two, Abu Dhabi is undergoing a rapid and large-
scale urbanisation and the implementation of the Masdar City project counts only for a fraction of it.
Therefore, there is a clear discrepancy between the scale of urbanisation and the scale of smart
urbanisation. This means that, overall, the advantages of smart urban technologies touch only a
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minority of the built environment and a minority of the population. Moreover, in qualitative terms,
the case of Masdar City shows that this new high-tech development does not target some of the basic
and most crucial urban issues experienced by Abu Dhabi, such as a shortage of affordable housing
for low-income workers and the lower middle class. In this sense then, there is also a discrepancy
between the targets of smart urbanisation and what the broader urban region is lacking.
Second, there is the issue of scaling up. Even if the government of Abu Dhabi wanted to use Masdar
City to test a new model of city-making, with the idea of exporting it, in the future, to the rest of the
UAE and beyond, we argue that this is not an urbanism which can be easily scaled up. Having been
formulated for a new settlement, the Masdarian model requires a tabula rasa in order to be put into
practice, and this is not a condition which existing urban spaces can easily offer. In addition, the new
district’s sky-high costs per square metre, largely due to the very expensive technology which
permeates the built environment, makes the scaling up of the Masdar City project unfeasible even for
a rich state like Abu Dhabi.
Finally, from a sustainability point of view, it is important to compare the scale of global socio-
environmental issues, with the scale of the solutions that smart urbanisation offers (Cugurullo
forthcoming). On the one hand, we have what in the literature are increasingly being referred to as
super wicked problems (Levin et al. 2012). Issues such as global climate change whose scale of
complexity and impact is such that most smart-city solutions would turn out to be simplistic and,
ultimately, ineffective. On the other hand, we have urban projects like Masdar City, which have a
very narrow environmental focus and tackle only carbon emissions via clean technology. The lacuna
is evident. Moreover, with their simple and positive narrative of technological salvation, smart-city
projects risk to distract public attention from the complexity of large-scale socio-environmental
problems like climate change, resource scarcity, social injustice and the deterioration of natural
habitat, thereby preventing the formation of any collective action against them. We should not forget
that, at the very core of smart urbanisation, lies a transnational capitalist machine of production and
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consumption (of technology), and by fuelling it, alleged smart cities will only exacerbate the same
problems that they claim to be solving.
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