Kufra & Ajdabiya

What does 2100 hold for some of the most arid regions on the planet? Visitors to extraction-city outposts in Ajdabiya and Kufra will find these formerly underutilized desert regions, once deemed scarce in resources, transformed into vast centers of production for large-scale agriculture, solar energy, energy producing crops, fresh water, and electricity.

These case study sites combine more traditional sustainable strategies, such as spray cooling and layered-shading techniques, with new technologies that hybridize the buildings to perform both as places of human inhabitation and renewable-energy generators.

A walk through Ajdabiya’s coastal-outpost settlement in 2100 reveals a built landscape of repurposed infrastructure. Abandoned water-storage tanks and discarded pipes, once used to carry and store water from Libya’s Great Man Made River, were tilted, cut and reshaped to create renewable-energy plants, storage space, and hybrid dwellings. Ajdabiya’s tank buildings, which extend deep into the ground, are connected by a large-scale urban canopy outfitted with artificial-photosynthesis infrastructure, positioned to provide sun protection in open areas between underground settlements.

Under the canopy, saltwater is evaporated in order to create exterior space that is sheltered and more humid, reducing the scorching outside temperature to bearable levels, and allowing vegetation to grow in the public outdoor space. The canopy’s artificial photosynthesis produces hydrogen, which is combined with oxygen, in a process that generates both electricity and water, a very valuable byproduct. Reflected solar power plants, shimmering in the distance, produce power through the generation of heat. Kufra, Libya, some 858 kilometers inland from Ajdabiya, is the place from which the fossil water preserved within the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer has been extracted since the mid-1980s.

In 2100, the city of Kufra maintains much of its original organization, its buildings and outlying fields arrayed in a series of hexagons, and its agricultural plots organized in a circular pattern. A high-tech farming community, it is dominated by an array of massive domes sheltering both human and plant life. As in Ajdabiya, much of the space dedicated to human habitation is below ground, where temperatures are substantially cooler.

To irrigate citrus and other crops, such as the algae used for energy production, desalinated saltwater is piped in from the coast using former oil and fuel infrastructure. Salt water is also used to humidify greenhouses. The farms of Kufra produce cotton, sunflowers, chickpeas, oranges, and corn.

Algae are cultivated in ponds or enclosed bioreactors as biofuel. Algae’s beauty is that, while it grows, it extracts more CO2 from the air than is produced when the resulting fuel is burned.8 Through technological advances and design, the resources of the arid desert are harnessed and harvested to create a fertile oasis.