Price Tags 98 – Beasley in Abu Dhabi

The Abu Dhabi report by Larry Beasley in your Price Tags seem off on some other planet, yet reasonable city planners like Larry and Allan Jacobs are just playing right along. You’ll see what I mean…
Those contexts:
Climate change, species collapse world-wide, end of cheap energy.
Also: such massively off balance circumstances such as designing for cars when they are on the order of 30 times as heavy, 10 times faster and take up – even just standing still – 60 times the volume of a human being… Which relates to the end of cheap energy.
The Abu Dhabi scheme seemed transit and pedestrian oriented, which is OK, so far, though the New Urbanist picture of the kind of housing they were thinking of in the context of going from 600,000 to 3,500,000 people in no time flat seems wildly out of place in the same mind set. Also, building something that big on the edge of a vast desert, then saying sustainable building materials will be stone and wood – wood from where?! – seems unreasonable to say the least. Quarrying stone with what energy when they are so rapidly pumping down their oil? Will they really build dense and diverse with stone, or will it have to be concrete and steel? In Beasley’s report there was a complete lack of mention that the only living resource of any possible scale is fishing. I was there myself once and learned that the fish are diving ever deeper and migrating out of the area to avoid the heat, thus leaving fishing people in desperate straits, on the dole like the government with its oil money is doing for everyone. This too is reported as good news by Beasley – free housing for everyone as an entitlement to their citizens, as if an enormous product like a house didn’t come from labor and finite resources; it just lands on you by fateful good fortune like soft rain in some other locale. They can only think – and plan to build – like this because of the massive flow of oil, which is going away in a few years or at most a few decades. What’s going to power the massive shipping necessary to a place like that when energy is extremely expensive?
Richard Register
Seventh International Ecocity Conference Co-convener with
Rusong Wang, Chinese Ecology Society of China
Author, Ecocities – Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature
President, Ecocity Builders, Inc.
P.O. Box 697, Oakland, CA 94604, USA
Ecocity@igc.org
1 510 444-4508
http://www.ecocitybuilders.org
http://www.ecocityworldsummit.org

Dear Larry,
I’m a fan of your planning works you did in Vancouver and now in Abu Dhabi. Its amazing. I wanna read all of your works related to urban planning to en reach my knowledge on planning. could you please advise me how I can get those. any link?
I’m a town planner graduated from BUET, Bangladesh at 2007 and now working as an transportation planner in a consultancy firm in Abu Dhabi from the last three months. I really enjoyed the transport planning after start working here. Recently I read some news about yourself and find great interest to learn more from you.
Could you please help me in this regard.
Thanking you in anticipation.
Saikat Mitra
Transportation Planner
The Samer Group (www.samereng.com)
email: mitrasaikat@yahoo.com
cell: +971558254433