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The United Arab Emirates will use some of the billions that it has earned exporting oil to build the world's first sustainable eco-city.

Who said life is without a sense of irony?

The city will be built on seven square kilometers of desert close to the richest city in the world, Abu Dhabi. But exactly how do you build a city, let alone an eco-city, on a bare expanse of rock with temperatures that often soar above 45C (113F) and no fresh water?

"We needed to look back at history and see how ancient settlements had adapted to their environments," Gerard Evenden, a senior planner told UK newspaper The Guardian. "The buildings will huddle together as in a casbah, and will be cooled by wind towers which will collect the desert's breezes and flush out hot air. No building will be more than five stories high. The city is to be oriented north-east to south-west to give the optimum balance of sunlight and shade."

The city will be home to over 50,000 people who will get about by walking or using energy-efficient magnetic personal rapid transport pods. Similar futuristic mini-bus sized pods will soon be in use at Heathrow Airport.

Residents will rely on desalinated and recycled water and the power to produce the water, and build the city, will come from the sun.

"We will start with a large solar power station which will provide the energy to construct the city." Evenden said, "Some 80% of all the roof space will be used to generate solar power, and because we expect technology to improve as we are building it, we hope we will later be able to remove the power plant.... We are trying to prove it can all be generated in the confines of the site,"

The city is to be named Masdar - the Arabic word for source' - and is expected to be finished by 2015. It's being paid for by an Abu Dhabi state-owned company, which intends to make a profit after it's estimated costs of $22 billion.

Environmental groups, while applauding the investment in green tech, are rightly skeptical of the project. The United Arab Emirates is the world's largest consumer of resources per-capita. Air-conditioners run year round not just to cool homes and shopping centres, but to chill pools, produce indoor snow slopes and keep the trendy Chillout' bar from melting (it's made from ice, you see).

The Word Wildlife Federation (WWF) is keeping an eye on the development in a special deal with the government. "It's a rigorous process . . . that at the end will prove if Masdar is sustainable or just claims to be," said Eduardo Goncalves, a WWF spokesman, "There is no better place to set an example and show that an ecologically friendly lifestyle is not only better, but also commercially successful."

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