
































Microsoft Word - Jeon final.doc


 1 

 

The Failed Potentials of Masdar City: Renegotiating the Present and Future through 

Climate Change Technologies in the United Arab Emirates 

 

Gökçe Günel. 2019. Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu 

Dhabi, Duke University Press, pp. 272 ISBN: 978-1-4780-0091-4 

 

Keywords: Urban design, Climate change, Science and Technology, Infrastructures, Energy 

 

What happens when “a technocratic dictatorship,” “an expensive toy,” and “spaceship in 

the desert” entangle together under moments of irony and contradiction to confront issues of 

climate change and energy scarcity, oscillating between the future and the present? In 2006, the 

government of Abu Dhabi aimed to create the world’s first zero-carbon city that promised an 

ambitious plan to promote clean and renewable energy to counter the environmental challenges 

of the Anthropocene. Marketed as “the city of the future and the role model for the world,” 

Masdar City was created by the government of United Arab Emirates (UAE) as an experiment to 

implement green technologies and infrastructures as a preparation for a more sustainable post-oil 

future. Throughout Gökçe Günel’s (2019) six chapters of Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, 

Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi, she sheds light on the often complex politics 

of space that are interrogated by contradictory beliefs of environmental management that made 

an ambitious project like Masdar City a failed, ambiguous experiment. Günel, an anthropologist 

and assistant professor at Rice University, establishes how this “spaceship in the desert” that 

situates itself in “a perpetual future” and constructs the present as “a vacated category” produces 

both “space and time” through what she calls “technical adjustments.” 

 In the “Introduction: The Soul of Carbon Dioxide,” Günel provides the book’s outline 

and her methodology. It is also in this chapter that she expands on the notion of “technical 

adjustment,” and her plans to focus on a different ‘technical adjustment” in every chapter to 



 2 

evoke new ethical and moral realities of contextualizing networked ideas and policies that make 

Masdar City possible through tensions and frictions. Chapter One, “Inhabiting the Spaceship,” 

familiarizes the readers with Masdar by drawing on utopian/dystopian and “frontier” imageries 

and language to illustrate the city as self-experimental, self-sufficient, and high-tech. However, 

the promises and potential of the Masdar city ultimately depends on embodiment, as it is through 

the individual body of those who visit or live in the city and is through the movement and 

interaction of this body, that the city is made as a “dwelling” (Heidegger 1971).  

 Chapter Two, “Beautiful Buildings and Research Contracts” delves into how urban 

design that included attractive buildings, and research contracts contributed to the transition of 

Abu Dhabi into a knowledge-based semiocapitalism (Berardi 2009) that depends on 

collaborations with reputable educational and research institutes such as the United States’ 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology to negotiate geopolitics and cross-national boundaries. 

These collaborations allow for the UAE to project itself as innovative, whilst also allowing 

outside countries to initiate their own research and design goals with funding from the UAE.  

 The Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, which merged with two other 

universities in Abu Dhabi to become Khalifa University, was integral to the knowledge 

production that would transform the UAE into a country that would prioritize clean and 

renewable energy. There were plans for a new “energy currency” that Günel expands on in the 

third chapter, “Ergos: A New Energy Currency.” This new “currency” named Ergos is part of 

Masdar city’s efforts to form new subjectivities and reshape everyday lives through innovative 

technologies. Ergos would issue “a balance of energy credits as a means of defining and 

regulating an allocated energy budget” (Günel 2019: 33) to reduce energy consumption. Despite 

such ambitions, the development of this new “currency” reflected tensions between individual 

freedom and choice, and the pressing need for a collective, appropriate awareness and 

responsiveness to climate change.  

 Chapter Four titled, “An Expensive Toy,” reveals the shortcomings of another technology, 

a driverless personal rapid transit that ran on electricity, or PRT. Günel explains that this 

apparatus was designed to cover the entire city with plans to revamp social and transportation 

practices. However, its short length (approximately 800 meters) and its inability to create new 

levels of comfort and convenience made the PRT less than appealing to citizens, who questioned 

what this innovative technology could offer that existing “green energy” practices such as by 



 3 

bicycle or on foot, could not. Both the PRT and Ergos failed to take into account that in case of 

techno-futurism, it is important and often necessary to create new social practices rather than 

infringing on current ones— especially as it is through these technologies that the bilateral 

relationship between the “human” and the environment is being built, maintained, and rebuilt in 

the Anthropocene.  

 It is in the fifth chapter, “Subsurface Workings” that we see the final example of a 

“technical adjustment” through a discussion of policymaking issues regarding the controversial 

carbon capture and storage (CCS). This was a “controversial climate change mitigation 

technology” (Günel 2019: 157) that placed carbon dioxide waste into the ground. Reminiscent of 

what Diane Vaughan (1996) calls “structural secrecy,” and of science and technology studies 

discussions of “objectivity paradigms,” (Kuhn 1962) “boundary work,” (Gieryn 1983) or “crisis 

of expertise,” (Eyal 2019) Günel investigates how risks, uncertainty, and trust integrate into the 

discourse of CCS technology as the risks in this technology were justified by expert 

environmental engineers and professionals in their Masdar proposal to the United Nations 

Framework Convention on Climate Change due to their claims of “knowing” how to manage 

them. The desires to mitigate climate change through a new technology whilst maintaining 

normalcy ultimately created a complexity in which moral judgements became skewed. This 

chapter also enlightens readers on the disagreements between the government, businesses, 

stakeholders that emerge from policymaking efforts, as the oil industry remains vital on a global 

scale when it comes to climate change policies.  

 The Epilogue titled ‘The Potential Futures of Abu Dhabi’s Masdar” ends on a somewhat 

somber note, as Günel (2019) writes: “the plans for Masdar City in particular and the green 

economy in general shifted, becoming more ambiguous about their expectations for the future” 

(182). This ambiguity is a further reflection of the people who lived and interacted with Masdar 

as a utopian space of possibility and yet felt troubled by its dystopian qualities— in other words, 

as a primary example of what a new, eco-friendly, and high-tech city as an experiment both 

succeeded and failed to do.  

 As an anthropologist interested in science, technology, knowledge, and society, this book 

was both compelling and thought-provoking in its recognition that although the technologies of 

Masdar City might not have been successful solutions to the climate crisis per se, they are still 

important contributions to the continuing discussion of the relationship between climate change 



 4 

and capitalism. It was comprehensive in its methodological and theoretical framework, and 

engage readers through a concise and structured argument prevalent throughout its six chapters. 

Günel encourages us as academics and as persons to rethink, renegotiate, and recreate our 

imaginations of the future through climate change technologies that do not preserve the status 

quo, but rather, alter it in the present.  

 

Hai Ri (Sophia) Jeon is currently an anthropology graduate student at Columbia University. Her 

interests lie in science and technology studies, with her next research project focusing on smart 

city technological infrastructures in South Korea and the United States. Her previous 

contributions have been in the dialectics of surveillance and anonymity present in South Korean 

hashtag feminist movements, and on the renegotiations of gender prevalent through a unique 

South Korean linguistic marker of “aegyo.”  

 

 

 

© 2020 Hai Ri Jeon 
 

Cited 

Berardi, Franco. 2009. The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Boston: MIT Press.  

 

Eyal, Gil. 2019. The Crisis of Expertise. John Wiley & Sons.  

 

Gieryn, Thomas. 1983. “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: 

Strains and Interests in Professional Interests of Scientists.” American Sociological Review 

48:781–95. 

 

Heidegger, Martin. 1971. “Building, Dwelling, Thinking.” In Poetry, Language, Thought, 154. 

 

Kuhn, Thomas. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago 

Press.  

 

V

a

u

g

h


