Masdar in comparisment to Hjortekær

Hi Laura
I understand you ambition to make a eco-zero waste, zero carbon city.

I think there is a some very important measures to take into account when comparing Norman Fosters Masdar project (besides the ovious fact that he used cheatcodes and had unlimited funds)

There is some issues that especially comes to my mind when comparing the Masdar and Hjortekær projects.

One is the holistic understanding of the city we see in Masdar. The city as a closed entity, maybe even more closed than what we see in the traditional centerorientated city. It even has city walls! People live and work in the same city, you have all options at hand, culture as leisure.

But is this the right way to understand the modern european city? We still have the remanence of the historic city, but the cities has long since grown beyond this entire form. The new city areas are growing towards a new shape, where agglomerations are connected throughout the landscape by their inhabitants ways of living, independent of the historic center. People can get all their needs fulfilled, in IKEA and so on.

”The economic and social life of the region increasingly bypasses its supposed core. The techno-city is truly multi-centered, along the pattern that Los Angeles first created.”
Robert Fishman

Therefore I think it is important not to see Hjortekær as one whole city as Masdar, but as a fragment of a city, with its specific role in the network-city. And to strenghten its role as this significant fragment.

Even in our fortunate situation as students, with a unlimited fantasy budget, is Masdar then the cityform we want to study?