Inhabitat

Food City: Dubai’s Self-Sufficient Ecotopia

This past February, the Dubai Chamber of Commerce authorized the development of a “free zone” dubbed Food City. GCLA, a green landscape architect firm, proposed a master plan for the city sector to turn it into an incredible off-the-grid, self-sufficient metropolis. GCLA’s future-forward urban quarter incorporates an extensive list of sustainable urban planning ideas, including vertically stacked landscape surfaces, artificial roof landscapes, renewable energy systems, aquatic farms, and thermal conditioning.

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GCLA has described their proposal for Food City as the “the marriage of landscapes and urbanism“. Their project integrates a variety of proposals to decrease overall energy use — concentrated solar collectors, towers covered in thin-film photovoltaic cells, piezoelectric pads in pedestrian areas, and methane harvesting through sewage percolation tanks.

GCLA also proposes water conservation measures critical to off-the-grid survival in water-starved Dubai, like atmospheric water harvesting, solar desalination through concentrated solar collectors, grey water recycling, and application of hydroponic sand to minimize water loss. Essentially, GCLA’s vision is an amalgamation of nearly every urban sustainability initiative in the past few years. It’s certainly utopian, but it may ultimately prove necessary.

+ GCLA

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7 Responses to “Food City: Dubai’s Self-Sufficient Ecotopia”

Brandon Buttars Says:

May 13th, 2009 at 6:32 pm

Crazy. Man does Dubai have way too much money.

stevevelegrinis Says:

May 14th, 2009 at 9:50 am

Brandon, dont worry – it was a theoretical proposal and most likely will end up going no further than what you see. Dubai has ground to a halt so it is very unlikely that it will ever be more than a conceptual idea.

obob Says:

May 14th, 2009 at 2:37 pm

“Theoretically” to be built by slaves, no doubt, like the rest of that dystopian hell?

Dubai can’t turn back to sand fast enough.

gnosis Says:

May 14th, 2009 at 10:01 pm

An artists’ dreams become our realities — dream on!!

roy domingo Says:

May 15th, 2009 at 5:43 am

This will be build by inspiring people….and planned by great minds;
i think the shek of dubai is a very promising leader of his time:…many of this green revolotion is pupping up like mushroom; this is a good idea.dessert to green,not green to dessert;
Some critics are just impormative,they are not productive;

obob Says:

May 15th, 2009 at 2:19 pm

Here’s a productive idea, roy: for the sake of the sustainability of the rest of the planet, let’s tell the truth about megalomaniacal hereditary vampires like Sheikh Makhtom. Did he lose his taste for little boys after he replaced the jockeys with robots? Or was that just another PR-generated mirage, like most everything else we hear about the greatness of Dubai? Get a clue: all those “great, inspiring minds” in Dubai are imported to paper over the true basis of the economy there: human slavery.

stevevelegrinis Says:

May 17th, 2009 at 1:32 am

obob, your comments sound very much like the words of someone who trusts blindly in journalism and has never been to dubai or asia.

The ’slaves’ you speak of are good people who have chosen to be here because the salaries and living conditions are substantially better than what is available in India or Pakistan where most of the labor in Dubai comes from. By and large most workers accomodation in Dubai is now meeting reasonable standards and temporary labour camps have been outlawed. Like anywhere there are exceptions to the rule but things are not the dystopian hell you describe. I can assure you that the treatment of labour in Dubai is quite a lot better than in other places in Southeast Asia i have seen.

Flaws and all Dubai is the prototypical 21st Century city and (just as was the case with manhattan) most people didnt like it at the time. Your refusal to accept it on its own terms is naive. The reality is that development everywhere throughout time has been built on the backs of imported and/or indentured labour. Be it the southern european and asian immigrants in Australia or the multitudes of immigrants in the US the hard work is always done by those coming from less prosperous circumstances.

Rather than sensationalise you may want to re-read the above and see that it was a speculative proposal aiming at raising consciousness about sustainable development. No labourers were harmed in the creation of this imagery.

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