Sunset ,Rig,Flare, originally uploaded by ~VISTA

From The New York Times, Gulf Oil States Seeking a Lead in Clean Energy:

With one of the highest per capita carbon footprints in the world, these oil-rich emirates would seem an unlikely place for a green revolution.
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They are aggressively pouring billions of dollars made in the oil fields into new green technologies. They are establishing billion-dollar clean-technology investment funds. And they are putting millions of dollars behind research projects at universities from California to Boston to London, and setting up green research parks at home.

More interesting is Masdar located in the United Arab Emirates, designed by Foster + Associates:

For example, initial plans for Masdar excluded both aluminum and conventional concrete because the production of those materials generates high levels of carbon emissions, which warm the planet. Aluminum manufacturers protested and came back with a product that reduced emissions by 90 percent compared with regular aluminum; it is now included in the project.
Proponents say Masdar goes beyond creating new materials and is in fact exploring a new model for urban life. Masdar will use one quarter of the energy of a conventional city its size (about 50,000 people) — an amount that it will produce itself.
“When people think about sustainability, they think about devices,” said Gerard Evenden, a partner at Foster and Partners, the British architectural firm that is designing the site. “But here you’re taking it to a city scale, which has much more of an impact — connecting the devices to the structure to the transportation to the people.”
The city will have no cars; people will move around using driverless electric vehicles that move on a subterranean level. The air-conditioning will be solar powered.

Most vexing is that while I am sure that Masdar will function better than a conventional city, it is still located in the middle of a desert and I’m not wholly convinced that this isn’t greenwashing. In the above phot, you can plainly see a large airport on the top-right side. Is this a new facility, and if so, why was regional rail discarded? Additionally, I don’t know why Personal Rapid Transit passes as sustainable transit – you need vastly greater amount of infrastructure and running stock for PRT versus mass transit. Additionally, the efficiencies of moving large amount of people at the same time using highly efficient vehicles is lost when you have thousands of smaller vehicles making magnitudes more trips.
I applaud the UAE on working toward a carbon neutral society, but the proof will be in the pudding.

• Big Media Matt is in favor of Freight Rail Stimulus, and I am too (Disclosure: I have family who work at CSX)
• Ryan talks about Innovative Regions & Urban Agglomerations
• Open Wi-Fi Aids Terrorists, Mumbai Cops Say
• New York Mag on the new programmer-journalist movement at the New York Times
• Nicholas Felton’s 2008 personal Annual Report
• Credit crunch effects design process [Guardian]
• MVRDV’s Gwanggyo City Centre – insane green ant-hill building
• Decolonizing Architecture @ Bozar, Brussels

The data cables of the Mediterranean. (Image: TeleGeography)
Why the Mediterranean is the Achilles’ heel of the web:

Internet users in the Middle East and India might be glad to see the back of 2008 – it was bookended by cable breaks under the Mediterranean Sea that disrupted access across the region.
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Undersea data cables are, in fact, surprisingly delicate. Most are just a fraction of an inch thick and more than 50 Atlantic cables alone were severed or damaged in 2007, according to Global Marine Systems, a firm that repairs marine cables.

I find the political issue the most interesting: could countries, or whole continents, decide one day to close up shop and isolate themselves from the rest of the world’s data? Is this even possible? Could the EU exist without external data? How about Iran? China made a go of this and even with the Great Firewall, data is crossing borders.
This event is unlikely, but might occur if third-parties act to isolate regions or countries.

Molly Wright Steenson of Active Social Plastic is working on her Ph.D. and has a very interesting post up regarding the Pneumatic post in Paris:

Introduced to combat the shortcomings of the telegraphic network in Paris, the subterranean Poste Pneumatique (Pneumatic Post) moved written telegraph messages from 1866 until 1984. The pneumatic tube network relieved the saturated telegraph network, delivering physical messages across the city and to the suburbs faster and more reliably than the telegraph.
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By 1870, Paris also had an extensive network of vaulted sewers, built by Baron Haussmann during the Second Empire. The sewers were a natural conduit for other types of infrastructure (potable water, telegraph lines, and eventually electricity), making it easier to install pneumatic tube and compressed air lines and to access them in case of error.

She previously wrote about Postal services and pneumatic tubes and Active Social Plastic should be in your feedreader. Now.
Two things to take away from her most recent post:

1. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a stationwagon, or a piece of paper
2. Well designed infrastructure, such as Haussmann’s sewers, should accompany future technological advances being designed and constructed looking toward the future regardless of cost implications; it will always be more costly to build infrastructure projects in the future than now