NEWS EXTRA DUBAI WORLD EXPO 2020
Chris Hayward, NMBS managing director and President of Euro-mat, visited the postponed World Expo 2020 in Dubai, at the end of last year. He reports back for BMJ on what he saw.
I WELCOMED the chance at the end of November, as President of Euro-mat, to join a small delegation from The Netherlands, UK, Switzerland, Spain, Lithuania and Czech Republic to visit the postponed World Expo 2020 in Dubai.
Our first day included a visit to the Sustainable City which is a large 46-hectare housing and property development about 30 minutes away from the coastal area of Dubai.
Surrounded by desert and ringed and shaded from the blistering sun by carefully planted trees that also keep out both noise and dust pollution, it stands out as a welcoming green oasis. It is the first net-zero energy development in the Emirate of Dubai. The development includes 500 villas, 89 apartments and a mixed-use area consisting of Offices, Retail, Healthcare Facilities, Equestrian Centre, School, Nursery and Food and Beverage Outlets. It was built in 2015 for $354 million US dollars and it has now reached 99% residential occupancy and is home to over 2,700 people. Widely promoted as a gateway to a green future, residents manage to reduce their carbon footprint by virtue of living in a place that has been very efficiently planned and enjoy high levels of community interaction and togetherness. The city is mostly pedestrian as cars are relegated to parking lots and roads that wrap around the development. As a result, people are free to walk, run, and play in the streets without fear of cars and there are biking and shaded jogging trails. Residents are only permitted to take public transport (electric buses), drive electric-powered golf carts, or take horse-drawn buggies around the site.
The parking areas include multiple charging stations for
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The properties make good use of wastewater recycling, with segregated drainage for greywater and blackwater using papyrus as a biofilter.
Most of the positive lifestyle changes residents make are related to the infrastructure that the sustainable city has to offer, where recycling is made easy. Locally grown food is supported by 11 futuristic biodome greenhouses, organic garden farms that are located along the middle of the development, which grow both vegetables and herbs throughout the year. Residents have first choice of any produce with any surplus being sold to local restaurants and shops. The Biodomes operate by using a passive cooling method with fans and pads powered by solar panels.
The city has a visitor centre with a scale model of the whole development and a very knowledgeable support team and researchers, who explain to visitors how the project works and displays key information and statistics on how well it meets its Environmental, Social and Economic goals, that are intrinsic to its culture.
The Sustainable City offers an inspiration of what can be achieved by practical measures on sustainable living in even the most hostile of environments, especially when compared to the coastal Dubai city, a place better known for extremely resource- and carbon- intensive high-rise developments and projects.
electric cars and are topped by solar shading, featuring solar panels that are connected to an electrical grid to supply energy into different sections of the city.
The Houses are carefully designed to be windowless or shaded where they face the sun
and have UV reflective paint to reduce the thermal heat gain inside the homes. To help with cooling, solar water and PV panels are also placed on the roofs of the houses and buildings, with even solar units that can generate drinking water from the atmosphere.
Whilst this gated community development is not necessarily scalable to the masses, it
demonstrates the real opportunities from effective building design and good use of energy saving devices and building materials which hopefully can serve as an example of what can be achieved in the built environment to help reduce our
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net January 2022
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