The master planners of Abu Dhabi’s carbon-neutral community were now working on the launch of a modified version of the city for the government of Jordan that would be more than 10 times larger, the directors of the project said yesterday.

The city would be built on the outskirts of the capital Amman, with an initial population of 700,000 to grow to one million in five years, said Serge Younes, a director for the UK-based WSP Group. By contrast, Masdar City, which is being built near Abu Dhabi International Airport, will have an initial population of 50,000 that will eventually grow to 100,000.

“Masdar is fairly big, it’s a neighbourhood,” he said. “This project is big, it’s a full city.”
Unlike its counterpart in Abu Dhabi, the new city, which has yet to receive a name, will not be zero carbon. It will, however, utilise many of the same elements: waste and water will be recycled and reused, housing will be built and orientated to take advantage of prevailing winds and maximise energy efficiency, efficient district-wide systems will handle heating and cooling, and electricity will come from planned wind and solar thermal plants, or be generated on site.

Mr Younes said Amman’s more temperate climate and ingrained habits of sustainability among Jordanians made the project’s environmental goals much easier to achieve than at Masdar.

“It’s very, very nice weather and you don’t need to do as much. People will happily open their windows,” he said.

Average temperatures in Amman, which sits at an elevation of 779 metres, range from 12°C to 32°C throughout the year, compared with 23°C to 39°C in Abu Dhabi.

He noted that Jordanians were some of the lowest per-capita consumers of water in the world, averaging 90 litres per day, per person. Estimates for per capita consumption in the UAE, by contrast, range up to 500 litres per day, partly because the economy here is more developed.

“In that circumstance, achieving sustainability is easier,” he said. “There is not much you have to do, because they have these habits already.”

Masdar itself will not have a hand in the Amman project. On Wednesday, the company’s chief executive indicated he was not yet ready to replicate the Masdar City model.

“Yes, we have been approached by different governments and different interested parties from the international market to come and develop this model in their own backyards,” Sultan al Jaber said at the Abu Dhabi Cityscape exhibition. “But our position today is we need to produce our own city, capture the knowledge, capture the intellectual property, and then we will expand it.”

The plans for a green city comes after King Abdullah of Jordan launched a US$7 billion (Dh25.7bn) programme in February to build 120,000 units of housing for middle- and low-income citizens in response to a housing shortage across the country.

Mr Younes did not provide a cost estimate for the new project, which will be officially unveiled in June.

He expects contractors to break ground in December or January, and deliver the first 100,000 homes five years after that.

The financing details for what was sure to be a multibillion-dirham undertaking have yet to be finalised, Mr Younes said. He said the government had signalled interest in offering shares to the public.

“The plan is to open it up to any investor,” he said. “They’re talking about an IPO, to allow any class of investors in.”

The city’s developers will clearly not have access to the same levels of funding as Masdar, which received an initial US$15 billion injection of funding from Mubadala, an investment arm of the Abu Dhabi Government. Jordan’s government has forecast a US$1 billion deficit for its 2008 budget.

The project has the support of the highest levels of Jordan’s government, said James Rayner, lead master planner for the architectural firm BroadwayMalyan, which is developing the master plan in partnership with WSP. “It’s being underwritten at a very high level,” he said.

“There’s a huge amount of investment going into Jordan right now, and this project is really part of that trend.”

The project will fill an acute need for middle-class housing in Jordan, said Mr Rayner, since developers have tended to focus on the luxury market.

“There’s a critical need to meet what the rest of the community wants,” he said. “This project is very much about meeting Jordan’s agenda, it’s not about making big statements.”