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"We felt it was important for an Arab country to join and because other Arab countries were not involved militarily, we felt we should," Gen. Mubarak al-Khayanin, the Qatari Air Force chief of staff, said in an interview Sunday at Souda.

"We are physically small country, but with leadership comes responsibility," he said. "Certain countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt haven't taken leadership for the last three years. So we wanted to step up and express ourselves, and see if others will follow."

Abu Dhabi Media Summit is thought to have set the stage for a major transformation of that United Arab Emirate from a more reclusive presidency of the Gulf federation to an international media player.

Although flashy neighboring Dubai has to date been the undisputed leader in the region with its Media City (http://www.dubaimediacity.com) hosting countless news and entertainment organizations, Abu Dhabi's low-key approach is slowly turning it into a news hub for the likes of CNN (www.cnn.com), which began broadcasting from studios there in recent months.

An Arab media analyst credits UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdallah bin Zayed Al Nahyan for the beefed up media presence.

Sheikh Abdallah, the late ruler's son, was his country's information minister and as a young man interned at the headquarters of an international news agency, where he is thought to have acquired a taste for the industry.

Google, represented by CEO Eric Schmidt, is seeing its fastest revenue and user growth in the Middle East/North Africa region, Gulf News quoted the company chief as telling summit participants, although he apparently declined to provide specific numbers.

Schmidt also said there was a shortage of Arabic content, and that Arabic websites were slow to be developed.

The media summit drew almost 500 global media leaders and delegates, including AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, incoming Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg, Turkey's Dogan Media Group Vice Chairman Mehmet Ali Yalçindag, and Murdoch partner Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, to name a few.

But critics dubbed it a summit for CEOs and geeks that excluded journalists from covering it first-hand.

What Masdar really represents, in fact, is the crystallization of another global phenomenon: the growing division of the world into refined, high-end enclaves and vast formless ghettos where issues like sustainability have little immediate relevance.

 That’s obviously not how Mr. Foster sees it. He said the city was intended to house a cross-section of society, from students to service workers. “It is not about social exclusion,” he added.

 And yet Masdar seems like the fulfillment of that idea. Ever since the notion that thoughtful planning could improve the lot of humankind died out, sometime in the 1970s, both the megarich and the educated middle classes have increasingly found solace by walling themselves off inside a variety of mini-utopias.

 This has involved not only the proliferation of suburban gated communities, but also the transformation of city centers in places like Paris and New York into playgrounds for tourists and the rich. Masdar is the culmination of this trend: a self-sufficient society, lifted on a pedestal and outside the reach of most of the world’s citizens.