Masdar...Resistance is Futile, You will be Assimilated

Akin to the Borg, Masdar's zero waste city in the middle of the desert has no utility for resistance from detractors. The Masdar corporation has suffered recent set backs from pushing back their launch date to 2020, to loosing the provost at the Masdar Institute for Science and Technology, to dealing with a real estate projection which predicts future difficulty in finding enough residents to fill the future city of Masdar. But Masdar continues to push on, moving forward with their plans to build the underground personal transport system, No one said it would be easy, but is it worth it. Will the ideal of a zero waste world yield from examples like the city of Masdar? Does the push for a community of innovators to be inspired by such imaginative prowess create useful achievable advances in technology or do they lead to machinations like that of the LilyPad, the floating city. Designed by Vincent Callebaut as part of a competition sponsored by the Oceans conference in 2008. The Lilypad would house 50,000 people displaced by the changing landscape due to global climate change. The design is awe inspiring and maybe more science fiction then innovation. But if Masdar succeeds then maybe these more imaginative approaches to the Green movement will become more achievable just by virtue of precedence. And competitions like those sponsored by the Oceans conference or the X Prize Foundation might get us there faster. However using competition as a driver of social innovation is not a new concept. I have witnessed this method work well in the class room. Kids love competition, its a great tool to engage everyone in the learning process, but the results are mixed when used soley it to increase comprehension. But does it mean we should not try it all. X Prize Foundation president Thomas Vander Ark has interesting perspective on the issue. Having worked on both sides of the fence in the social innovation/reform field he understands that "although prizes are no silver bullet, I am confident that they will be a powerful change lever in the social sector." Let's hope that Masdar will make it!