Saw an interesting piece on city planning (is that an oxymoron?) on Stephen Hawking's TV show the other day about a city being built for the future. It has electric cars with no driver and recycles water and solar power. It was in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. The city was called Masdar. Here is a quote from the TV show:
"Masdar is an environmentally friendly city in a region infamous for massive energy usage, and is an attempt to provide a renewable and sustainable model for other cities to follow. Technologies being developed include the largest solar power plant in the Middle East.Technologies developed and tested in Masdar will help change energy production and usage, particularly in hot cities."
You can find more information on Masdar here: http://www.masdar.ae/en/home/index.aspx and indeed here: http://www.masdarcity.ae/en/
This has got me thinking and I had a short trawl through the web to look at planning for the cities of the future and found this interesting website:
Some of the designs are incredible and it also reminded me of the concept of Aerotropolis - the building of a city around an airport. http://www.aerotropolis.com/ The logic behind this is that we did not plan our cities properly as they grew organically with the building of roads, but now we should plan correctly and have transport central to urban planning.
More info is here:
It certainly will be interesting to see what any new cities that are built will actually look like as we all want to see futuristic cities that are good for the environment, the economy and for people.
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