After reading this article about Masdar, I have a few concerns. One of these is that I don’t believe that this can be a model city for the rest of the world. This is because they are starting from scratch rather than just altering an already created city like New York City. I believe that Masdar would serve better as a testing city for different types of programs to test and see what will work and what wont. I believe that that trials that are successful should be implemented into other cities but the ones that don’t should be ignored.
Another issue I have is that I don’t see how a city like this would be popular among regular people. It is a remote city that is away from the rest of the world. Most people dont want to have to take a train or other transit to be a part of normal life. In addition to this, it is hard for humans, creatures of habit, to change the way they live all of a sudden. After learning that there are not many people living there anymore I am not surprised.
While I think that this idea is great for testing different forms of self sustainability, I dont believe that we can mass produce these types of cities because there are so many costs associated with creating a city like this, as well as all land as basically build on already and there is zero possibility of completely changing a city like New York without destroying it and rebuilding. I think that this would be a good idea if something catastrophic would to happen but not right now.
