Masdar City Scales Back

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Masdar, the UAE's hyped sustainable city of tomorrow, is going to be arriving little late. The New York Times reports:

Alan Frost, the director of the Masdar City property development unit, told The National newspaper in UAE's capital, Abu Dhabi, that Masdar would cut costs by bringing in an outside developer to assist with construction. Frost's office has laid off 34 employees, about 20 percent of its staff, the newspaper reported yesterday.A technology originally planned for the whole city -- computer-driven "personal rapid transit" pods -- might now be limited to the site of the research institute, the paper reported. The project is also reconsidering its plan to generate all of its power on-site from renewable sources, and is looking at importing power from elsewhere, Frost told the newspaper.

After the muted opening of the Burj Dubai, this is hardly surprising, but it is too bad we won't have the citywide PRT pilot system.Photo of Masdar model from Wikimedia Commons