00:01The next speaker is going to be Shannon McElvaney. How do you say? McElvaney, yeah, sorry Shannon.

00:07And he's going to talk about design of a sustainable city.

00:12Shannon is actually with a company called Pacific GIS? Is that…?

00:15Pacific GPS.

00:16GPS. Right, GPS.

00:17[Inaudible]

00:20Right. Good.

00:25Thank you very much for inviting me. I'm quite honored to speak in front of this audience. So, thank you.

00:32I'm going to talk about my role as site control and GIS manager on the Madar City development in Abu Dhabi…

00:40…and it was…all these talks just make me think of every one of them…

00:44…that these are things that we encountered on this job because it's building a city from scratch.

00:49And so it was just the biggest eye-opener that I've ever had; a year, 60 hours a week for a year in the desert.

00:59And, Abu Dhabi, here's where it's located on the Arabian Peninsula, right next to Saudi Arabia.

01:06We have Oman right next door and Iran right across the gulf.

01:11So that sets the geographic location.

01:15Abu Dhabi is the largest emirate. There are seven emirates for the United Arab Emirates.

01:20Abu Dhabi is the largest emirate with 70 to 80 percent of the oil wealth.

01:26They have 7 percent of the world's oil as well.

01:29So it's very wealthy. Abu Dhabi is reported to be the wealthiest city on earth.

01:35This is Abu Dhabi in 1959, the year I was born. Nothing much there, mud, mud dwellings.

01:43You can see a mud fort. That was where the Sheikh lived.

01:46Diamond, not diamond, pearl diving trade, camel…camel trading.

01:52They discovered oil in the '70s…I mean, they discovered oil then. They get it out of the ground in the '70s.

01:57This is them in the '90s. This is them in 2008.

02:03So they've gone in just my lifetime to fabulous wealth from basically desert, Bedouin-type tribes.

02:13They recognized that their oil wealth is finite and that, you know, they have a finite supply.

02:19They're starting to diversify heavily into everything, and renewable energy is one of them.

02:26Their mission is to make Abu Dhabi the international hub for alternative energy, to create a new, entirely, you know…

02:35…new economic sector for Abu Dhabi and to be the catalyst for change globally.

02:40They recognize their role in, you know, that fossil fuels are contributing to climate change.

02:47They even are planning the city with a 2 to 3 percent 3 Celsius degree increase.

02:55So, they're well aware of what's going on.

02:57And they have an environmental ethic as well.

03:00So Masdar City is their first part of their initiative, to build a green city, 100 percent renewable energy and zero waste.

03:09This is a model of the city to show what it will look like.

03:15You can see the two greenbelts passing through the middle, which were actually built on wadis, or they call them valleys…

03:23…but it was…they're more like swales in the desert and to make use of those.

03:30It's a mixed-use city, some place that you'd want to live, work, and play.

03:35There's a university, the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, which is being constructed now in conjunction with MIT.

03:42So they already have a hundred students, 200 I think this year, grad students, all in renewable and green technology.

03:49They want to build a technology hub, a technology cluster.

03:53All the best and the brightest of the world, they want to live there and to go to school there and to work on new technology.

04:01The three aspects of sustainability that we dealt with every day, the tug and pull between these…

04:07…was to make it livable and desirable on a social standpoint, but economically sustainable…

04:12…it couldn't cost the moon, and it had to be carbon neutral.

04:18Of course, the city is a $24 billion effort, so there is more money than usual.

04:27But, when we got on the ground, we still were dealing with developers who wanted it to be profitable…

04:33…and they weren't going to build anything without anchor tenants…

04:35…and we got down to the nitty-gritty tug and pull of commercial versus residential and all the usual.

04:41The normal city of a million people would have produced a million tons of carbon.

04:47They plan on reducing that down to a zero.

04:52They're going to do it by radical changes to both supply and demand, how the resources of the city are handled…

05:00…75 percent reduction in fossil fuel use, 300 percent reduction in water use, 400 percent reduction in waste.

05:10It's going to generate completely new ways of doing things, smart grid to the nth degree.

05:16When you pull up to the city, the city knows you're home.

05:19It starts your air conditioning.

05:22They're…just…everything is highly integrated.

05:26But, they looked at the past to look…to how to design the future and like Tom mentioned on his talk, the first talk of this summit…

05:38…sometimes we have to remember what we already know.

05:41So they looked at traditional cities, and they did a study of Aleppo, Marrakesh, Fez, and what was the street widths…

05:49…what were the building heights, what were the mass of the walls…

05:52…and they came up with these parameters that were all in common to traditional cities which had been there…

05:57…some of which had been there for a thousand years or two thousand years in this environment.

06:02They looked at orientation to the wind and the sun.

06:06They made changes so that the city is actually tilted on kind of a diamond there to make the best use of prevailing winds…

06:15…and sun shading, natural cooling.

06:20The…the optimal street size was 7.5 meters, by the way, and building heights of three to six stories.

06:29I just found it fascinating.

06:31The structure…to construct the thing had a very interesting kind of infrastructure layering effect.

06:38The bottom was the utilities. The next layer was a sublevel transportation network…

06:45…and then the two next layers were substructure and superstructure of the actual city building.

06:52And then the top superstructure was all PV.

06:56So here's a cross section, just to give you kind of a sense of how this is working.

07:00This is Masdar headquarters which is a 3 percent positive building, produces 3 percent more energy than it uses.

07:07It's a fascinating structure with wind towers and turbines that move the wind and…it's just amazing.

07:15You can find a lot about this on the web. I highly recommend taking a look.

07:19The utility trenches, I just want to point that out as a part of the sub…substructure.

07:25Here's a utility trench in actuality.

07:28The right side is wet, and the left side is electrical so that…but this is a utility trench, and these run throughout the city.

07:35They'll all be underneath the city but large enough to get into and manage into the future.

07:44Here's a shot from a crane. This is the university, phase one of the university.

07:49It's going to be four times larger than that.

07:53Done in a year, you know, at that point.

07:57Here's a night shot because when it's 120 or 130 degrees out in the day, you're going to be working at night.

08:04And sometimes there's two shifts or three shifts, but during the summer, they have to work…they can't work in the daytime.

08:12They reached 138 degrees this year at 85 percent humidity.

08:19The multimodal transportation network was the most fascinating part of this and the highest risk.

08:25The LRT on the top layer, I mean on the, you know, everything's built six meters up off the desert floor.

08:34The first, ground floor is a PRT, personal rapid transit, pods that you push a button and off you go.

08:41LRTs come in on the second level.

08:43The metro comes in underneath, and that'll link it to Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

08:50So here's a shot of what it might look like when it's constructed, when this part is constructed…

08:56…door-to-door service; automated push Starbucks, takes you to Starbucks. No…no drivers, no vehicles, I mean, no…

09:03…it's driverless vehicles.

09:07They actually…I got to sit in this one, and GIS will be a major part of how this thing gets around town.

09:16So we did just, you know, there's a lot more to this, but here's the routes, here's the stations.

09:22We do buffer analysis to make sure drive…walk times were, you know, within reason…

09:29…150 meters, no more than 10-minute type of walk type of thing.

09:33So we'd do that kind of analysis.

09:36On the energy use and production, land use often drives the amount of energies a plot is going to use.

09:42So, we would do…what if we put 68 percent PV roof cover, you know…

09:49…what would be the consumption based on that land use and floor space and population density?

09:54And then we come up with a net power balance.

09:59Then we would do things like this, we'd model…what are the 10 years…what do 10 years look like?

10:04And the red is negative, meaning they're using more power than they generate…

10:09…and the blue is positive, they're producing more power than generates [sic].

10:15We did all this in ArcGIS and then pumped it out using Adobe Illustrator and a few other things to get a KML that we could run.

10:27And this will show you at the bottom the energy usage from construction to 10 years of construction.

10:34From the very beginning, we have red. We've very negative in terms of our energy. We need a lot of energy.

10:40But as certain things come online, they turn blue, and so we have on the blue side, there's our positive power…

10:47…on the red is our negative.

10:49So what we could do is take the modeling that was in these massive spreadsheets.

10:52The guys would model everything, they'd give it to us and we'd go, I can't even tell what this means.

10:59We'd model it, and then they could actually see whether they were hitting zero, zero energy use, or not.

11:07And when they'd run the model, then they'd go, This doesn't look right.

11:10And then they'd go back and they'd change it, and so this feedback loop started happening in design…

11:14…so that they could get from 30 percent in the negative where they…they…if we build this, we're going to be 30 percent off.

11:22So, they could see it, start doing something about it and start playing with parcels, commercial versus residential…

11:29…and mix…mixes of land use to come up with a better scenario.

11:35So I felt, oops, I felt rather proud that we were actually able to do something like that for them.

11:44The next thing was construction phasing, which there has been a lot of discussion about that.

11:48The…the need for a feedback loop is just intense.

11:51You need to be able to design, see what the impact is, change it in the field, get back, make a difference, make changes…

12:00…look at it again, and that requirement is what's missing.

12:04From the survey world, the design world, 0-0, you know, we don't need to know where it is on earth.

12:110-0, survey, and GIS, CAD and GIS are so disconnected that the challenge is immense.

12:21We encountered it every single day.

12:24And that's going to be a big part of this geodesign…some of the solutions that come out of geodesign.

12:30Oh, sorry. I didn't hear the button.

12:34The last thing, 6D, we've heard 3D and 4D with time.

12:39We've added cost and then we had to add carbon so we could run the entire construction sequence…

12:45…and look at the top, we could see the carbon, embodied carbon, for the entire project…

12:52…and this is calculated into everything, from the utilities, PRT, superstructure, the entire carbon counting and see how we're going.

13:02…and then we could click on any parcel and look at the start construction time, end construction time.

13:07This was all pulling from Primavera P6.

13:11We'd get that information, the land-use stuff here, and then when the money guys started going…

13:17…We need more money, we're going to change this to commercial.

13:20We'd say, Well, this is your carbon impact if you do that. So here's your…here's the push and pull between…

13:28…environment and social and the, you know, environment, social, and money.

13:36So, anyway, that's it.