TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE URBAN DEVELOPMENT IN ARID REGIONS: MASDAR CITY AS A CASE STUDY

The United Nations has highlighted the importance of the issues of development and housing policies through endorsing the International Strategy of Sheltering in 1988 [25]. The efforts of the United Nations in the domain of housing, whose concepts have been formulated so as to include Sustainable Cities in the conference of the United Nations: "Rio + 20: The Future We Desire", concerned with sustainable development, and held in Brazil in 2012. Hence, there is stress on partnership bonds among governments, the civil community and the private sector in order to develop cities in which opportunities are availed and everyone gets the chance to attain the basic services, energy, housing and transport in a sustainable manner [27].
The increase in population, however, has led to expansion in establishing new cities so as to fulfill the need for housing and effectively participate in accelerating development. It is also important to reclaim the desert regardless of the harsh environmental circumstance of those regions. Thus, the planners and the decision makers adopt the strategies of sustainable development in order to avoid creating new environmental, economic, social problems. Therefore, it is important to research in the study of experimenting in establishing sustainable cities in the environment of arid areas for the purpose of finding the pros and cons of those experiments and lay the foundation of developing those cities in a sustainable manner. Thus, we have chosen the city of Masdar in Abu Dhabi Emirate as a case study due to the richness of experimenting on that Emirate concerning the shift from investing in the formidable revenues of petro-urbanism, in what is known as petrol communities, to sustainable urban development represented in establishing the city of Masdar as the first sustainable city in the world. Nevertheless, so as to achieve those objectives, the research adopts the analytical descriptive methodology in the study of that strategic shift which is witnessed by Abu Dhabi Emirate. Also, the methodology of the case study is used in analyzing and evaluating the strategies of sustainability in the city of Masdar.
The research includes three principal aspects. The first aspect centers on the study of the environmental, economic, social and political factors which leads to transforming Abu Dhabi Emirate from petro-urbanism to urban sustainability. The second aspect deals with defining the city of Masdar as well as studying and analyzing its system of sustainability. The third and final aspect deals with analyzing the case study according to the three main principles of sustainability: social participation, economic sustainability and environmental sustainability. Thus, the research concludes many results and recommendations, on top of which the importance of providing an integrated system that works on developing cities in arid areas in a sustainable manner.