Futuristic Design Johannesburg
jay keasling: we are in a race.the race is against time. we have to buildcities, we need them. but we have to makethem in a different way. dan kammen: we need awave of innovation, not only for our way of life,but also for the planet. the consequences wouldbe enormous if we lose this battle. thomas goetz: i'm thomas goetz,executive editor at wired magazine. at wired, we look
at the innovators andinnovations that are changing our world. in the next hour, we'll see three storiesfrom acclaimed filmmakers about the future of energy. we'll explore cutting edgeinnovations in how we drive, how we live, and, in our first story,how we fuel our cars. they're all ideasthat promise to shape the path tothe world of 2050.
[♪...] the world has right now,close to a billion cars, and we might double the number of cars onthe planet by 2050. so if we double the number of vehicles, we really increase theamount of fuel they consume, and that's going to have a big, bigfootprint in terms of our demand for resources to move allthose vehicles around. kay keasling: we're pullingup carbon that's been stored
underground andburning it in our automobiles and putting allthat carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. if we don't reduce that, wecould have changes in the climate that we couldnever recover from. there's a number of forecastsfor what type of transportation economy we could move into. one vision is that we would usemore and more liquid fuels, another one is we'll usemore and more electricity.
right now, more of the industrial activity isfocused around liquid biofuels. the thing about a fuel is, itsreally unparalleled on a weight basis how much energyis in a gallon of fuel. and even if batteriesdevelop as some of the advocates hope they develop,we're not going to see batteries running large trucksand we're certainly not going to see anelectrified air flight. we're going to needtransportation fuels for
those that will directlyreplace the petroleum based fuels that we're using today. this has kicked off peoplelooking at a whole range of other alternatives topetroleum in your tank. isaias macedo: commercialproduction of ethanol as fuel started in brazilin 1975. when we started the ethanol program,nobody talked about reducing emissions. this wasnot an issue at that time. first, and most important,we didn't have money
to buy oil anymore afterthe first oil short. we were importers of oil. and today, more than 50%of all cars use ethanol instead of gasoline. brazil made a very consciouschoice to try to find a way to reduce their fossilfuel dependence. and they didn't have to lookvery far because brazil's climate is idealfor growing sugar cane. carlos dinucci: when youhave sugar cane plantation,
you have only twothings to make: sugar and ethanol. my family has been in thesugarcane business since 1955 and about thirtyyears ago, i thought "there's an opportunityto make more ethanol." now, we're producing 120,000cubic meters of ethanol. brazil today has veryclose to 400 sugar mills. the overall salesis 30 billion us dollars. and this number is increasing.
if you look at how they makeethanol and how efficient the process is, it'sreally a model for all of us. they grind the plant up,extract the sugar from the cane, the sugar goes into theselarge fermentation tanks which combine sugars together withyeast that naturally produces ethanol. they use the rest of the plant to generate heatto distill the ethanol and turn it into fuel. they also use that heat togenerate electricity renewably,
not putting excess carbondioxide into the atmosphere. brazil has gotten to a pointtoday where they're using about 40% less petroleum than theywould be otherwise, but brazil cannot supply the whole worldwith ethanol because they would have to cut verystrongly into food production and into criticalnatural areas like the amazon to make that happen. this really boils down to thefact that there's only so much arable land, and growing fuelfor our gas tanks is yet another
demand on that landscape. we cannot kid ourselves intothinking that we've found a general solution forthe world problem. i think we have to face theworld in this way today. we have no oil in verylarge quantities anymore. we have no coal transforming ina clean way, in the meantime we have to do the best wecan, and the best at the moment is thatwe can do biofuels. sugarcane to ethanol is anincredibly efficient process.
you get out aboutseven times the energy you put into growing the sugar cane.in the us when we produce ethanol from corn, for everyunit of input of energy we get about the same amountof energy out. so we're reallynot gaining anything. we need a better process. we don't have to take whatnature's given us, we can actually engineer plants andyeast to be more efficient. and that's the basis
for a lot of the workthat we're doing now. what we need to look at though,is which of the pathways to come out of this are notonly good financially, but those that are alsogood for sustainability. and this equation isreally wide open right now. we are in a raceto develop fuels. the race isn't withother countries, the race is against time. cristiano borges: to meet theimmediate and future demands, we
made the energy solutionspring from the ground. luis scoffone: brazil is themost efficient ethanol producing country in the world. sugarcane alcohol from brazil can reducethe total carbon footprint by up to 70%, compared with gasoline. the biggest challenge for fuelproviders, and car manufacturers is to reduce co2 emissionsover the next twenty years. demand for mobilitywill continue to grow. we believe thatbiofuels are very
important because theyhelp in an immediate way. all forms of fuel are goingto be needed; hydrocarbons, natural gas, biofuels,all of them are going to be part of the energy needs forthe future of transportation. brazil has been very successfulat taking a resource they had and finding the processto make that into ethanol and people callthose first generation biofuels. we have lotsof lab work around the world thatare looking at the
second generation and that'sgenerally turning cellulosic material from for exampleweeds, into biofuels. and the united statesis very much at the forefront of the innovationpart of the equation. for centuries we've been usingyeast to consume glucose and produce wine and beer. we're trying to do somethingvery similar, only we're engineering the yeastto consume that glucose and turn it into a fuelor drug or chemical.
we call this synthetic biologyand when i started in this area, many of my colleaguessaid "oh jay, this is great work, but where'sthe application, what are you going to do withthese tools?" who cares? malaria is an enormous problem. in any one year,a million or so people die of the disease and most of themare children under the age of 5. so we thought this was a greatopportunity to engineer yeast to produce an antimalarialdrug called artemisinin.
this drug is derivedfrom plants right now, but its too expensive forpeople in the developing world. so my laboratory engineeredyeast to produce small quantities of artemisinin, nowthat process is being scaled up and we'll have this drugon the market shortly, but at a substantiallyreduced cost. it turns out that thatanti-malarial drug is a hydrocarbon and it'svery similar in many ways to diesel fuel.
we thought, gosh we canturn our attention now to fuels. we can make a few changesin that microbe to turn it into a fuel-producing microbe. if we imagine that glucose isgoing to be our new petroleum, we need a sourcefor that glucose. so the crops that we'relooking at are crops like switchgrass. this is a native grass, it growswithout a lot of water and on marginal lands. we couldturn it into energy farms.
the challenge though, isthat unlike sugar cane, it's very difficult to get thesugar out of that biomass. so we use what we call apre-treatment process to extract the glucose from the plant,and then we feed that glucose to a yeastthat we've engineered to produce hydrocarbons. and that yeast takes in thesugar, and it changes its composition and gives usthis high-energy molecule. they float to the top,you skim them off,
you put them in your tank. but it takes a lot of work toget from that small test tube all the way up into the million-gallon tank,so we have to give it time. but i think that some of thediscoveries that are happening might be applied bythe end of the decade. in terms of a sustainableequation for the planet, the role of biofuelsis quite tricky. there are a variety of cropsthat do not compete directly
with food, and findingways to utilize those types of crops first,that's very attractive. so solving the science ispart of the story, but then evaluating all of the newfuels in terms of the land-use impacts that they couldhave, that is an even harder story thandoing the good science. imagine that you could have oneprocess that could take in sunlight and carbon dioxideand turn it into fuel. and imagine if thatdidn't involve growing
anything at all. nate lewis: the syntheticbiologists are trying to take plants and make them do thingsthat they wouldn't normally do. on the other hand,materials chemists, like myself, want to do artificialphotosynthesis to improve on the process that nature doesin real photosynthesis. we should follow the blue printof plants converting sunlight into fuel, but take the approachthat it could be much simpler. all we really needis a light absorber
that absorbs sunlight. we also need a catalystlike iron or nickel. so when you see the hydrogencoming off of the photo-active material, that's anexample of a semi-conductor breaking the chemicalbonds of water to make hydrogen and oxygen. ultimately, our pieces aregoing to be contained in something that is easy toroll out like bubble wrap, where in would comesunlight and water.
you would vent the oxygento the air, but the bottom would wick out your liquid orgaseous fuel, that then you could collect and use for ourcars and planes and storage. our goal is within two years,to have the first artificial photosynthesis solarfuelsgenerator that we can hold in our hands. and then, getto scale beyond that time. we're certainly not good atpredicting the future, but to me, electric vehicles looklike a sustainable option. we've heard proposalsabout things as
far-fetched as nuclear powerplanes, and even some proposals to move freight around withlighter-than-air vehicles. and so if thefuture in 2050 does include a fair amount of oil,what it means would be that we haven't deployedas many of these clean technologies as we alreadyknow are possible. if you think about how long it'staken for us to build up the petroleum industry, we can'thope to reverse that overnight. it's a huge change inour infrastructure.
yes, we should have beenworking on it 30 years ago. we didn't. we're trying to make up forthat, and that means basic research needs to be done nowand by as many people as possible. we have a long way to go, but i'm confidentthat we'll get there. in the future, 3d maps are goingto help people get places more efficiently. as we just saw, the race toproduce cleaner energy is
charging ahead. in the meantime, demand forcars continues to climb. by 2050, it's predicted there will be two billioncars on the planet, and fuel consumptionwill have tripled. to keep pace, we'llhave to radically change the way we drive. here's our next story,'driven by design.' asaaf biderman: theautomobile came around,
in many ways it was the future. we thought of it as one of themore positive changes that had happened to society.suddenly, our ability to get a job changed, we canlive farther away with bigger plots of land, withbetter quality of living. it all looked quite good. but there are limitationsto swearing by the car. if it gets congested,your quality of life drops immediately.
you have to spendso long in the car. it's a very inefficientuse of fuel consumption. things stop makingsense all of a sudden. it doesn't bring you closerto where you want to get, it actually, sometimesbrings you farther. narrator: the average americanspends nearly 300 hours a year in their car. 38 of them stuck in traffic. annually, congestionconsumes over $1 billion in
gasoline in theunited states alone. the inefficiencycaused by traffic, both financial andpersonal, is enormous. dirk sheehan andcarmen white's story is not that unusual today. carmen white: dirk works an hourand a half away in warrenville, illinois. generally he wouldn't leave work until 6 or 6:30 and iwould say usual time for him to get home is around 8.
you all done? thanks, buddy. dirk sheehan: usually when iwake up i'm the only one up. sometimes the kids wakeup with my routine. more often than not, i don'tsee them in the morning. i think about my commutewhen i wake up. i check the traffic report tosee if there's any delays. the worst casescenario, it takes me two hours to get to work.
we are already so limited in theamount of time he can spend with the kids, and ourexpenses are crazy high. we're spending $400a month on gas. it takes away from our foodbudget, and we never paid for gas like that before. ever. if there's technology that wouldallow me to spend less time in the car, spend lessmoney on gas, and spend more time at home,i'd be all for that. mike finn: the cost of trafficis people's time, it's fuel
wasted, it's an emotionaltoll, it's a frustration. utilizing the roadsmore intelligently is a much more efficient approach tothe inability to have supply keep upwith traffic demand. john leonard: if you took asatellite picture of the highway, you can see that there's actuallya lot of open space. if we had the technology forcars to drive more closely, but safely, then you couldincrease the utilization of the
road network. what this means is that to bemore efficient, to use less fuel, we need to seethe road differently. we need cars that cannavigate through the urban landscape in aradically different way. cliff fox: maps in the futureare going to be able to help people get places either moresafely or more efficiently. today, just helps you getfrom point a to point b. but, what if i want to getsomeplace and use the least
amount of fuel possible? or, if i've got a hybridvehicle, and i want to make sure i've got plenty ofcharge to not only get there but to get back home? so, informationthat is gonna help people achieve the more efficientor the safer route is more detailed information aboutthe road than a lot of people realize is possibleto collect today. here in chicago, nokia'slocation & commerce unit is
developing the nextgeneration of mapping. lidar, sonar, 360-degree video, all are components of what nokiacalls - digital mapping. we use 64 lasers that rotate andthey collect data in a 3d way about the world. it creates what we call apoint cloud of information. that point cloudallows us to measure distances then between the pointsthat we collect. that system combined with thecameras, with higher precision
location detectionthrough inertial measurement units, that whole datasystem allows us to collect 1.3 millionpoints of data per second. probably within 2-3 years, you're gonna see 3d maps thatare gonna integrate the traffic information into yourrouting, to help you understand. if i've got 5different routes to take, which one is the most efficienttoday, given the way the stoplights are running, giventhe way traffic is running.
all of those factors are gonna be taken into consideration tomake sure i've got the best route. but better mapping that canintegrate topography, infrastructure, and density isonly part of the answer. another key to improvingtransport efficiency is building carsthat drive themselves. autonomous vehicle technologyhas a tremendous potential to improve efficiency ofour road infrastructure.
by removing humans from theequation, we eliminate all the things we do wrong behind thewheel - speeding, changing lanes too often, merging haphazardly; and by marryingthem with sophisticated 3d maps, we can make driving saferand more energy efficient. that next generationvehicle is being built right now by swedishtrucking company, scania. tony sandberg: the solution, aswe see it, is that the vehicles can utilize intelligent maps.
3d maps withtraffic information. the vehicles willbe intelligent and communicate with each other. they will talk to eachother, they will talk to the infrastructure. and we will seeautonomously-driven vehicles. the goal was to have multiplerobots and see if they could go 60 miles fully autonomously. helen taylor:my name's helen taylor.
my husband john and i,we're very passionate about fuel economy. john taylor: yea it's great tobreak world records, but that's not the be all and end all now. it's more importantto educate people. together we're showingdrivers around the world simple techniques to improvetheir fuel efficiency. we run these education programs,get people on the road with us, and we finally tweaktheir driving techniques.
things like justchecking your tire pressures before youeven get into your car. for every one psi your tires are under inflated, you're wasting3% of your fuel efficiency. and the difference between 65 and 75 milesper hour is a saving of 23%. when you talk to the generalpublic, they're very surprised that an energy company,like shell, is trying to educate people onhow to save money,
how to reduce co2 emissions. and here we have shell sendingus around the world to do that. you always hope when you're onthis planet that you can make a real differencein people's lives. when you get emailsfrom people saying "i've saved this amount of money thisyear, now i can put food on the table", then you know you arereally making a difference. by displaying traffic densityin the urban infrastructure in a revolutionary way,
3d digital maps will help createa more fuel-efficient future. but these technologies arelimited by the drivers who sit behind the wheel. somebelieve, that for cars and trucks to be trulyenergy-efficient, they will need to drive themselves. the technology's coming intoplay, through sensors and capabilities for carsto drive autonomously. in 2007, the united states'department of defense held a competition to seeif a completely autonomous,
self-driving vehiclewas possible. darpa stands for the defenseadvanced research projects agency. they had a competitionto develop self-driving robots that could drivethemselves in traffic. the goal was to have multiplerobots, turn them loose on a course, and see if theycould go sixty miles in six hours, fully autonomously. driving may be one of the mostcomplex things we do every day. drivers make dozens ofdecisions at any given moment.
one study found that drivers were exposed to over 1,300 itemsof information per minute. we make so many decisions whenwe're driving without even thinking about it. so in creating our vehicle,a great component of the enterprise wasdeveloping software to handle lots of sensors,feeding lots of data, and generating a bunch of potentialpaths that the vehicle might follow. and eventhough the robot doesn't have
the ability to predictthe future, by using this fast random path generation,the robot could anticipate a potential accidentand choose a path to avoid it because its alwaysthinking about what things could the car do next. no one expects millions ofcars driving themselves anytime soon. but there is aplace where self-navigating technologies are beingoptimized to create the vehicle of the future.
we're on the scania testtrack outside stockholm, where we have basically, it looks like a highway but it'sa separate test track where we conduct our own experiments. scania, the swedish truckingcompany, has recently begun testing its next generationof long-haul truck, utilizing radar, sonar, andintelligent mapping. they've been able to drasticallyreduce fuel consumption. jonas martensson: we have thisexample with platooning, where
will make use of the reductionin air resistance, or air drag, that you get from drivingclose to each other with heavy duty vehicles. and in order to controlthis, you need to know where the other vehicles are,their position, their velocity, their actionsin the near future. and to be very close to thevehicle ahead of you, it requires that you havea very accurate control. if you look at robotics broadly,there's a wonderful set of
research of peoplelooking at schooling fish and trying to develop theability for robots to work together like that. so there are wonderfulexamples from nature of how cooperation can lead to moreefficient resource utilization. jonas hofstedt: you can see itwhen people are competing in tour de france. they platoonto reduce air drag. they are not bicycling behindeach other that close because it's fun, or because they areracing, it is because they are
reducing air drag sitting behindthe man who is leading. a truck traveling 55 miles perhour expends half its energy just to movethe air around it. at 65 miles per hour, thatnumber jumps to almost two-thirds. even if platooning can reducethe energy used by 10 percent, the savingswould be substantial. if a vehicle in front of anothervehicle wants to brake,
it immediately sends outthe brake message to the other vehicles, so they actuallybrake at the same time. hassad alem: the way we do thisis by, we have an automated system. so now for instance, if i take my feet off theacceleration pedal, and turn the system on, thevelocity is automatically governed by gettinginformation from the vehicle ahead throughits wireless system. we want thesevehicles to maintain a
short relative distance. so through this system,we can reduce fuel consumption by utulizingthe air drag reduction by 10%. and 10% would mean youwould be able to save approximately 8,000 eurosper single heavyduty vehicle per year. it may be sometime beforeautonomous vehicles make up the majority of cars onamerica's highways. nevertheless, some of thesetechnologies are already
making their way into our lives. now this polarbaby wants to sleep. do you get to pick out booksevery day or is it just... i get to pick outbooks sometimes. okay. when we look toward the future,the systems will absolutely make it safer and moreefficient and less costly for you and alsomake your life easier because you're spendingless time on the roads.
the city begins to talk, beginsto tell you where is there congestion, what's going onin different areas of town? suddenly the carbecomes a part of a much bigger ecosystem. we can look at how carsinteract with other cars, how cars interact withinfrastructure and us, the drivers, can start to make smart decisions abouthow to move around. suddenly, mobility becomesa whole other thing.
paul goldberger: no matter howmuch money they have, no matter how much oil they have, everybody has to go ina different direction. we've seen that changingthe way we drive can improve transportation efficiencies. but what if we change the way webuild and live in our cities? that's the subject of our nextstory, "searching for utopia". we'll travel to theunited arab emirates, and discover a city risingout of the desert.
let's take a look. from the beginning,we've dreamed of utopia. a place where we could live in harmony with each other,and in balance with nature. many have imagined it, tried to design it, but thedream always slipped away. then, i heard they werebuilding a new city called "masdar", near abu dhabi,in the arabian desert. it sounded like anunlikely place for utopia,
and i wanted to see it. the last half-century has been apretty bad time for the making of cities, mostly. the natural tendency has beento accommodate to the automobile more than anything else. try walking aroundabu dhabi, it’s impossible, you have to takea car everywhere. dubai, the same thing. they are amongthe least pedestrian-friendly
places in the world,they are not green by any other measure either, and theseare not easy things to fix. masdar is still underconstruction, and it doesn't look like much from the highway. but they claim it's going toredefine the way cities are designed, built, and powered. masdar city in abu dhabi, willbe the city of the future, and the role model for the world. once you see what they'veenvisioned for this
utopian city,its very impressive. it's carbon-neutral, pedestrianfriendly and powered by renewable energies. but i do notice, we'regoing to have to change our relationship with cars. car audio: welcometo masdar city. austin relton: we are driving inthe bowels of masdar city in an electric transportation system. it's slightly unnerving to seethis for the first time and
"where are we going?" the first big move thearchitects at foster and partners made was to put alltransportation underneath the city, leaving the streetsof masdar totally free of cars. the place reminded meof a medieval city. and actually, many designelements are adapted from ancient arabictowns and villages. it's all about looking backinto history to move forward.
there are some very very simple ideasthat have a huge impact. this is a pedestrian zone,there's no cars here. this has enabled us to pushour streets together to take advantage of the shade, channelthe cooling breezes through. the whole scale here is based onthe human being, its not based on the motor car. as soon as you lift up thepedestrian plane by seven meters, you've suddenlycaptured this breeze.
what you can see here onthe balcony is we've got a modern interpretation ofan ancient arabic screen. what we must avoid is direct sunlight hittingany piece of glass. as soon as thesun hits the glass, the heat's transferred into thebuilding and we have to use more energy to cool it down. can this really make allthat much of a difference? yeah, absolutely.
for example, downtown abudhabi... sixty-meter wide streets, black asphalt, mirroredreflective buildings, no relief from the sun. on a day in september, theair temperature in both places was 39 degrees. in abu dhabi, the temperature measuredat the asphalt was 57 degrees. in masdar, thetemperature measured on the ground, 33 degrees,so we've actually lowered
the air temperature. we're trying to do as much aspossible, with as little as possible. these simple design moves, cutair conditioning needs by 60%. but this place is also,technically, very sophisticated. the roof panelsnot only provide shade, they alsogenerate electricity. and the wallsthemselves are made of glass reinforced concrete,literally sand taken from the
desert. everything here is gearedtowards maximizing energy efficiency. masdar does represent awhole different value system. it represents anacknowledgment that, eventually, everybody has to go in adifferent kind of direction. no matter how muchmoney they have, no matter how much oil theyhave, no matter anything else. all of the cities herein this part of the world
have come out of nowhere. there was nothing herenot so long ago, except small settlements in the desert. and then all of this oiland all of this money, and suddenly, you know, wham,these cities started popping up. but they sprung upin a false love of a western model that wasalready out of date. the model of the late 20thcentury automobile-based energy-hogging city.
for most of the world, energy isvery expensive. but the united arab emirates is sittingon 10% of the world's oil, and energy is cheap,so cheap you can run a ski slope ina shopping mall, and build the world'stallest skyscraper. but even here, cheap energywon't last forever, and the people behind masdar aredetermined to find alternatives. martin haigh: one of the mostcrucial aspects of our energy odeling and scenarioquantification is how much
energy in total is theworld going to use in 2050. wim thomas: the scenarios teamis a bunch of people with rich imagination, i would say. adam newton: we have political scientists, economists,geopolitical experts. really we try to simplifythe complexity all around us. jeremy bentham: we in thescenarios team are currently putting a lot of attention intocities and city development.
a lot of megacities are going tobe built in the coming decades. we're talking about theequivalent of a new city of a million people every week. that is an incredible demand. most of the world's resourcesare consumed by the cities. what if we could offer ablueprint for a better city? public transportation,information, energy. we understand demand willrise, we understand the current supplies willstruggle to keep pace.
so we have to of course, find ways of bridging the gap betweenthe demand and the supply. decisions that we take now aregoing to have a major impact on decades to come. there's enough oil underthese sands to last 150 years. but fundamental to themasdar ideal, is getting energy from renewablesources, from geothermal and wind, and most ofall, from a source they have in abundance in thedesert: the sun.
this field of solar panelsmakes more than enough electricity to run masdar, andthe excess power is sent to the abu dhabi grid. but silicon panels areexpensive, and the price of solar power needs to drop if its going to be competitivefrom africa to asia to arizona. in the future, masdar hopes toget energy from this prototype called the solar beam down. uusing highly reflectivemirrors, the solar beam down may
generate power more cheaply andecologically than silicon panels. the mirrors bounce the suns raysup to the tower, and then down to a point. reaching atemperature of 600 degrees, steam canbe generated to run turbines to make electricity. there's just one problem:neither of these solar technologies work at night. so masdar needs todraw power from the grid
when the sun goes down, and thatpower comes from natural gas. the reality is, it’s just notyet possible to power masdar entirely without fossil fuels. the great challenge with masdar, will be "how do you makeit a place that will not be just this ideal city thatno other place could actually aspire to, 'cause itdoesn't seem real." what masdar has to be is alaboratory that develops things that then can be applied inexisting cities all around the
world, because that'swhere it will pay off. there's no pay off ifit's just about itself. the payoff is "how caneverything it's trying to do matter in therest of the world?" right now, there's only a store,two restaurants, a bank, and a few hundred studentsliving here. it's too early to tell if masdarwill work as a city when it's finished, but much hasbeen achieved: they are carbon-neutral, and largely,
powered by renewable energies. solutions here won'twork everywhere though, many cities are in coldclimates, and cooling is not their energy problem. they need to let sunlightin, not keep it out. cities like los angeles orhouston are built around cars. can masdar's lessonsbe applied to them? still, its a stepin the right direction. and, its impressivethat this step is being
taken by a country thatdoesn't need to take it. i met a guy who said "actually,they did need to take it." he took me to thedesert to explain. muhamad alkhalil: god says... [arabic] god talks about man'splace in, in the universe. that this world is a trust. and god offered thistrust to the mountains, to the heavens, to the land, to earth,and all refused it, refused to
take this trust. but man being adventurous, vain,maybe too ambitious, being man accepted it. now, accepting it,there is a responsibility. taking responsibilityisn't always easy. utopia may beunattainable, but we must reach for it, and masdardoes give us a clue to what cities will belike in the future. they may not lookquite like masdar,
but they will be shapedby the same concerns. by energy. where it comesfrom, and how its used. the way we've been buildingcities lately is unsustainable. we can't go onbuilding them that way. but to say that we can'tbuild cities the way we have been building them doesn't mean we can't buildcities in the future. in fact, we haveto build cities.
cities are the essentialstatement of human civilization. so, we will continue to makethem, but we have to make them in a different way. what we've seen is that theworld of 2050 won't look drastically different fromthe world today, but the challenges of agrowing population and increased energy usedemand real solutions. its innovations like those we'vejust seen that will be critical in charting our pathto the world of 2050.
