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The purpose of this paper is to examine social sustainability effectiveness of eco-cities through the case of Masdar City’s strategy for urban sustainability in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Using a case study approach, the paper is an exploratory, qualitative analysis, which investigates the social, environmental and economic performance of Masdar City, a purported carbon-neutral, zero-waste urban development.

Though Masdar City substantively contributes to innovation in sustainable urban development within environmental and economic contexts and has been effective in capital circulation in green technology markets, the impetus as a commercially driven enterprise is most evident. Successful sustainable urban development requires greater consideration for the social imperative.

Eco-city mega-projects, such as Masdar City, have the potential to fuse achievements in innovation, technology and economic enterprise with the social imperative of functional urban habitats.

Eco-cities are of increasing interest given the growing need for sustainable, energy-efficient living. This paper contributes through a novel case study, exploring how the concept of the eco-city has been developed and understood in the Masdar City context and discusses successes and deficits in its strategic implementation.

Strategies for teaching engineering in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have been evolving over the past decades due to innovations in technology, as well as the development of educational methodologies. In the recent past, the focus for engineering faculty has been not only on promoting the skills needed to raise the level of employability of Emirati graduates, but increasingly on new educational methodologies, e-learning and wireless networked laptop technology. Students in the UAE exhibit certain characteristics emerging from a variety of cultural and historical traditions, as well as from methodologies of education used at the pre-tertiary levels. These characteristics include expecting to be passive recipients of taught information, and lack of independence in their approach to problem solving. In this paper I discuss the development of strategies to facilitate the transition of students from passive to active learning; examine the role of technology-driven educational methodologies in promoting independent and group-centered learning skills; and use a case study to explore the instruction of Engineering Design and Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and to examine how classroom management techniques have changed as a result of the growing use of technology.