Da una lastra di deserto. Masdar City ad Abu Dhabi

In 2007, the government of the United Arab Emirates announced the Masdar City project to the international community. Built from the ground up in the desert about 17 kilometres from Abu Dhabi, it is presented as a new urban paradigm for future cities, based entirely on sustainability. The project was entrusted to the British firm Foster + Partners, whose design proposal goes beyond the functional to introduce an imaginative dimension, drawing with some ease on the architectural repertoire of the Arab-Islamic world. By alluding to a climatically appropriate but not truly local architecture, a narrative of identity is created, based on invention, and serving the broader purpose of projecting image and power, which drives the entire initiative. The economic crisis of 2008 and the resulting budget cuts significantly reduced the initial expectations. To date, only part of the plan has been completed, with significant modifications, and the city, originally designed to be carbon neutral, now relies at least in part on Abu Dhabi's electricity grid. The achievable utopia has proved to be anything but. Yet it is still presented as such on the website of the company that sponsors and manages it. At the intersection of self-orientation, greenwashing and commercial enterprise, Masdar City has accumulated layers of opacity and contradiction that this paper aims to explore.