In 2016, Saudi Arabia embarked on the adoption of an ambitious national vision for the Kingdom in the year 2030. Although the Kingdom has experienced short and medium-term country-wide plans, such as the five-year National Development Plans initiated in the 1970s, a long-term strategy has never been witnessed before.
‘National vision’ and ‘development plan’ are terms that are usually used interchangeably and a discernible differentiation is hard to find. Nonetheless, national development plans, which spread worldwide in the aftermath of the World War II, are usually considered as an expenditure plan for countries to build necessary infrastructure to support economic and social development.
In contrast, and considered as an advanced endeavor, a national vision typically goes beyond infrastructure provision and growth objectives to address well-being and sustainability issues. Whilst most countries around the globe have some sort of vision plans, the financial crisis that hit the world in 2008 has impacted this growing tendency due to budget shortage and a shift in national priorities. Saudi Vision 2030 is therefore unique, not only for its time span, which extends over 14 years, but also for its multifaceted dimensions of prosperity and its transformational impact expected in the community.
Although Saudi Vision can be conceived as a set of policies, the presence of urban planning as a field that deals with the physical environment is noted, though not emphatically defined. When looking at the 27 strategic goals, an elaboration of the six main goals of the Vision, we can easily pick an explicit goal that directly addresses the urban scape through upgrading the quality of life in cities. More emphasis has been made on this goal by dedicating one of the 13 programs established to realize the vision to take this endeavor forward, namely the ‘Quality of Life program 2020’.
Nevertheless, some goals implicitly deal with the urban planning field, such as hosting more pilgrims and visitors to the two holy mosques which entails the provision and management of a wide spectrum of physical and technical infrastructures. Other one addresses improving the performance of government apparatus which impacts the governance on urban (local) level. Since land is the incubator for human activities, it is clear that urban planning concerning the utilization of land constitutes the channel for realizing development efforts, and therefore is undoubtly inherent in the Saudi Vision 2030 in a way that calls for more efforts to be supported and enhanced.
Traditionally, Saudi cities have received great attention from the government, evident in the nurturing of the growth in urbanization and provision of a well-established physical infrastructure. Nevertheless, cities under Saudi Vision 2030 will be both attraction and catalyst for tremendous interventions and experimentations.
The goal of the ‘Quality of Life program 2020’ is to list at least three Saudi cities within the top 100 cities for quality of life in the world, and this inevitably pinpoints the vital role of urban planning in this transformational era.
Urban planning practice in Saudi Arabia is characterized by numerous trends and surrounded by multiple challenges, all of which will unavoidably impact the ongoing steps towards achieving the Vision 2030. The trends and challenges discussed in this article include regional planning, placemaking, sustainable urban development and urban governance.
Regional planning
Regional planning has attracted an upsurge of interest in recent decades after a considerable period of neglect. This is due to the growing believe that regional planning is a necessary intermediate level to validate national policies at local level and to aggregate local needs into solid national directions. This recognized gap has led to a frustrating failure of national plans claimed by countries for a long time. As a collaborative effort to plan for common issues within a common geographic area (1), and as a process of linking social objectives with economic activities within a space that is larger than one city (2), regional planning acquired more attention in our globalized economy when regions, instead of cities, become economic nodes for capital investments.
Besides, complex and escalating issues nowadays, such as climate change and natural disasters, cannot be tackled by individual cities or confined by strict boundaries. Thus, it is not only the evolving interest in regional planning which dominates the global scene, but also the way it is becoming more integrative in its approach to successfully respond to these complex and often transnational challenges.
Regional planning is currently the most rapidly developing urban planning trend in Saudi Arabia. Although initial attempts may be traced back to 1980s, regional planning went through a faltering development and varying results. A screening of those attempts shows that Saudi regions are still unknown in terms of their nature as well as their potential strengths, and this has subsequently led to produce less-comprehensive and less-integrated plans that lack clear visions and region-specific strategies (3).
The importance of regional planning in Saudi Arabia, especially at this time, is influenced by many factors. First and foremost comes the perennial factor which is the concentration of Kingdom’s population in three development corridors with a high level of primacy dominated by the large cities (5). This tendency has resulted in regional disparities and unbalanced development across the country, a situation in which only first-tier cities reap the development fruit.
Another factor is the various inter-region developments that make regional collaboration a must-to-have, of which transportation projects come at the forefront. The Eastern railway line that links Riyadh with Dammam, the north railway project that links northern region with the central one, and the Haramain high speed railway that connects the holy sites represent a key manifestation of regional planning practice that dominated globally in early twentieth century. To provide an efficient network that links different destinations across the Kingdom requires regional plans that identify the most important nodes along the proposed routes for each region to leverage their potentials to serve people and deliver goods for the sake of development and prosperity, not just for mobility issue.
Moreover, a wave of mega developmental projects has recently been launched, such as Qiddiya and Neom, that targeting a new way of life. The allocation of these giant projects in virgin sites away from concentrated areas, their role in redefining destinations and lifestyle, and their impact on local economy, all emphasize their regional dimension that requires integrative and sustainable approach. If this is added to the other wave of industrial and economic cities that are under development, despite emerging challenges, it certainly highlights the significance of regional planning as a decision-making and coordination tool in creating harmonized developments on a large scale that avoids project-by-project approach.
A key pressing factor that takes regional planning to a higher level of focus is the new law of Development Authorities, which enables these entities to take a wider and comprehensive scope of regional planning and supports them with the needed power and budget, so as to be more efficient than the existing administrative regional councils which lacked such tools and faced numerous obstacles.
Placemaking
Placemaking is a trendy concept and practice that has dominated recent discourse in urban planning field since the 1990s. Placemaking is simply a cutting-edge approach of urban design that looks and deals with urban design from both aesthetic and social perspectives (5). It focuses on taking care about the visual appearance of the design elements and while giving attention to the way that people actively and diversely use the space and the way it is linked to their collective memory.
The concept’s roots stem from the failure of inhuman large-scale renewal developments applied to downtown areas during the mid of the twentieth century (6). This directed placemaking to become more oriented towards humanizing and activating public spaces. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, placemaking philosophy began to gain additional momentum due to the rapid urbanization of the world that led to a rising concentration of more people in cities. This trend left little or no room for public spaces as venues for socialization and fulcrums within urban fabric. Coupled with the growing tendency of community participation in public policy, the placemaking concept redefined itself and evolved as a community-led initiative, and further advocating technical tools to help people getting it done through a deliberate process.
Placemaking is an intrinsic yet inevitable component for the quality of life in cities, and hence becomes a high priority for the Kingdom. Saudi cities, especially the major ones, have undergone an incredible growth and urbanization process, through which western urban planning approaches were applied.
High dependency on cars, horizontal stretch of urban boundaries, and degradation of neighborhoods are the ultimate consequences of how it turned out (7). As a result, the pedestrian’s needs to move around and the ‘sense of place’ have been neglected and both are integral part of placemaking philosophy.
This concept is urgently needed more than ever, not only to rejuvenate public spaces in Saudi cities, but also to reinvent residential neighborhoods that suffer from periodic degradation and weak social bonds.
One of the main reasons that makes placemaking critical is the on-going development of sophisticated public transportation projects, especially in Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam. Metro-based systems, such as those being developed, require a complete environment that intensively capitalizes on walkability and quality of place to increase their ridership in order to be economically feasible, and this simply means adopting placemaking concept. The most important areas for placemaking are around metro stations as well as bus terminals; this implies enhancing a considerable portion of public spaces in Saudi cities.
Moreover, the cultural and entertainment events that are being promoted by the Vision 2030 around the Kingdom dictates upgrading the surrounding urban setting to offer quality places that facilitate accessibility, sociability and enjoyment.
Sustainable Urban Development
Sustainable development has become a prevalent term since the last decade of the twentieth century, launched by the United Nations to raise serious warnings about the fate of our planet if resources continue to deplete at the current pace. It calls for a balanced production and consumption of goods and services without negatively affecting the natural environment (8). It also emphasizes the development of the built environment in a way that not only respects the nature and be in harmony with it, but also enhances the interaction between people and urban form to achieve decent standard of living for all.
The central issue in sustainable urban development is the ‘urban sprawl’ phenomenon, in which a low-density policy, single-land use strategy, and horizontal expansion practice dominate the management and growth of urban areas. This will obviously lead to an extensive pressure on infrastructure as well as increasing the distance traveled, laying a path for more social, economic and environmental consequences.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), a world commitment action plan for 2030, identifies 17 attainable goals including the eleventh one; sustainable cities and communities. Extra emphasis and obligation have been applied in the New Urban Agenda, adopted in 2016 as a global vision for better future, persuading authorities and communities to rethink current urban development practices and shift to more sustainable approaches and strategies (9).
For Saudi cities, sustainable development is not a choice; it is rather a compulsory action. Unsustainable practices in Saudi urban development can be seen through their symptoms; urban sprawl, traffic congestion, low density development, and loss of place character. It is evident that all major cities in the Kingdom; e.g. Riyadh, Jeddah, Makkah, Madinah and Dammam, have experienced a rising decrease in urban density while they developed.
A discrepancy was also observed between Riyadh’s population growth and its urban growth; where the latter exceeded the first rate. Although an urban growth boundaries policy was declared in Riyadh, not much success was gained in preventing urban development from spilling beyond the defined boundaries.
The problem of white lands that are kept without development in most cities, although they are located in prime locations and furnished with necessary infrastructure, constitutes an enduring dilemma in urban development. Nevertheless, authorities started to impose a tax on such vacant parcels to encourage their owners to develop them.
Although sticking to sustainable guidelines in developing new cities or developmental projects seems easy and not negotiable, dealing with existing urban areas that suffer from accumulated problems is a real challenge and it urges prompt consideration and intervention. It can be said that creating a prosperous future as promoted by the Vision 2030 requires sustainable development to be embraced fully in the built environment, as it represents the spatial incubator for realizing the vision.
This is to be carefully thought through for both existing urban centers and new developments, not only for protecting the natural environment or just enhancing a decent way of life, but also for supporting economic competitiveness for Saudi cities and regions. The key approach for existing urban centers to incorporate sustainable development is to take advantage of rising opportunities, to be more integrative in parallel developments, and to apply context-specific strategies based on local characteristics and potential strengths.
For Saudi cities, sustainable development is not a choice; it is rather a compulsory action. Unsustainable practices in Saudi urban development can be seen through their symptoms; urban sprawl, traffic congestion, low density development, and loss of place character. It is evident that all major cities in the Kingdom; e.g. Riyadh, Jeddah, Makkah, Madinah and Dammam, have experienced a rising decrease in urban density while they developed.
A discrepancy was also observed between Riyadh’s population growth and its urban growth; where the latter exceeded the first rate. Although an urban growth boundaries policy was declared in Riyadh, not much success was gained in preventing urban development from spilling beyond the defined boundaries.
The problem of white lands that are kept without development in most cities, although they are located in prime locations and furnished with necessary infrastructure, constitutes an enduring dilemma in urban development. Nevertheless, authorities started to impose a tax on such vacant parcels to encourage their owners to develop them.
Although sticking to sustainable guidelines in developing new cities or developmental projects seems easy and not negotiable, dealing with existing urban areas that suffer from accumulated problems is a real challenge and it urges prompt consideration and intervention. It can be said that creating a prosperous future as promoted by the Vision 2030 requires sustainable development to be embraced fully in the built environment, as it represents the spatial incubator for realizing the vision.
This is to be carefully thought through for both existing urban centers and new developments, not only for protecting the natural environment or just enhancing a decent way of life, but also for supporting economic competitiveness for Saudi cities and regions. The key approach for existing urban centers to incorporate sustainable development is to take advantage of rising opportunities, to be more integrative in parallel developments, and to apply context-specific strategies based on local characteristics and potential strengths.
Reflecting on Riyadh, the ‘Quality of Life program 2020’ as an opportunity could serve as an overarching umbrella, a basis for future development. Using the Riyadh metro project as a backbone and the placemaking concept as a healing instrument, along with admitting the location and biological limitations, could go a long way to overcome urban problems.
An integrative approach is likewise crucial; for instance, new mega developments in Riyadh should be advised and encouraged to situate themselves along the metro network, and the recently launched projects such as the ‘sport boulevard’ and ‘green Riyadh’ should provide a platform to support the metro project. This would result in a multiplier effect that extends beyond these individual projects to produce quality places.
Urban Governance
In recent urban planning practice, a shift from “urban management” to “urban governance” has been observed due to numerous drivers. The devastating natural disasters at global level; the rapid urbanization phenomenon with its inevitable consequences; the escalating complexity of urban projects, and the growing tendency towards community participation in public policies all have led to rethink the way by which cities’ authorities deal with their urban areas.
As a top-down approach that inherently tends to control and direct, urban management fell short of successfully tackling the emerging issues within urban context (10). Urban governance refers to the process by which different actors such as governments, private sectors and community work together to plan, finance, and manage urban areas (11).
Urban governance in Saudi Arabia has developed and is still evolving around the concept of urban management. Dubbed as ‘local governance’, it refers to the ways by which many governmental agencies exercise their duties of decision and policy-making in the administration and development of regions, cities and rural areas (12).
Urban governance represents the driving force of smart and effective change in the urban milieu. A glance at the aforementioned issues of regional planning, placemaking and sustainable urban development, reveals that none of them can be endorsed, embraced or even implemented without the presence of sound urban governance and this rationalizes its significance to the Kingdom. Notwithstanding, the practice of urban management in Saudi Arabia is confronted by a number of challenges that weaken the overall urban performance.
Distributing urban responsibilities among many entities who report to different authorities and eventually lack proper coordination is the most recognized challenge. Regions as well as cities are dealing with numerous governing agencies, sometimes driven by conflicting directions, with no common platform for coordination or appropriate channel for building a unified vision.
Limited resources in terms of mandated power or allocated budget is another obstacle that faces urban management in the Kingdom. In this regard, the establishment of development authorities to guide urban management at regional level, in some administrative areas, is seen as a forward leap to empower local entities with needed authority as well as to enhance the regional dimension in Saudi urban planning.
Moreover, regional, municipal and rural entities are still in need of professional management teams that can boost the concept of governance and smartly respond to current and future challenges. No matter what the model is, however, qualified personnel equipped with knowledge, skills and insight wisdom is the fuel of effective governance that takes management practice far beyond bureaucratic procedures and strict checklist orders into a broad platform of creativity, entrepreneurship and leadership.
The changing role of the contemporary urban planner, from a technocrat to a mediator, entails a substantial shift in the managing role and approach of urban areas. An urban manager, for instance, may lead the preparation of a long-term sustainable policy for urban development, or may be engaged in the formation of a regional development strategy, or be directly involved in placemaking intervention for a neighborhood park, or even be enthusiastically immersed in launching a celebrating urban event. All these roles demand smart urban governance that responds agilely to extremely challenging problems and proactively leads with intuition and passion.
The legal institutional framework and urban legislation should similarly be developed to lay a smooth path to the revival of smart urban governance, powerfully driven by one of the six main goals of the Vision 2030 that asserts the enhancement of government effectiveness.
An Integrated Ensemble
The above urban planning issues are directly linked to the Saudi Vision 2030, due to the importance of spatial dimension as an incubator for development. Regardless of whether the link is explicitly made, as in the case of upgrading the quality of life in cities, or implicitly referred to, such as hosting more pilgrims, the space element dictates certain considerations in policy-making as well as in implementation and management efforts.
People in this increasingly-sophisticated world are becoming more sensitive in recognizing, appreciating and advocating the value of ‘quality’ in their modern urbanity, and hence, initiatives that promote and celebrate quality of life in cities are markedly coming to the fore of public discourse.
The four issues regional planning; placemaking; sustainable urban environment and urban governance are controversial in the way that people treat them; on one hand they constitute ‘trends’ that will most likely dominate the urban planning practice; on the other hand they seem to be ‘challenges’ due to their role and impact in shaping the future of Saudi cities! Yet, they need to be taken as an integrated ensemble due to their reciprocal influence, not as individual unrelated concerns.
To demonstrate interconnectivity, a qualified local governance team, powered by resources and equipped with necessary skills and tools, would adopt and maintain sustainability as an overarching umbrella for preparing a regional plan that leverages the region’s strengths and economic potentials from a policy perspective, and at the same time dives into the spatial details of placemaking that enhance the urban landscape of cities and enrich the quality of life for residents. This certainly would be the ideal case that rarely exists. Nevertheless comprehensiveness and integration are key to confronting growing urban problems.
Another crucial factor that pinpoints the imperativeness of ‘integrated ensemble’ approach is the fear of ending up with a zero-sum-game. If these trends-challenges are not comprehensively considered and taken as a one package, an action taken in one side may adversely come at the expense of the others, and eventually lead to disappointing results.
In conclusion, it is generally agreed that Saudi urban planning is a major constituent of the Saudi Vision 2030, which represents an enormous dream and a profound shift in the national psyche. To contribute positively to this national agenda, urban planning practice is required to take advantage of dominant trends and confront intelligently the surrounding challenges of regional planning, placemaking, sustainable development, and urban governance. As moreover, they overlap and interact in policy and spatial dimensions, these trends-challenges should be dealt with as an integrated single-set to achieve desirable outcomes and avoid a zero-sum-game. In effect, it is a sort of compliance with the common catchphrase, “think globally; plan regionally; act locally”.
References
1) Piro, Rocky & Leiter, Robert. (2017). Emerging Trends in Regional Planning. American Planning Association
2) Friedmann, John. (1963). Regional Planning as a Field of Study. Journal of the American Institute of Planners
3) Future Saudi Cities Program. (2016). Review of Regional Planning in Saudi Arabia. UN Habitat
4) Future Saudi Cities Program. (2018). Status Report of Saudi Cities 2018. UN Habitat
5) Carmona, Matthew et al. (2003). Public Places Urban Spaces: the dimensions of urban design. Architectural Press
6) Kent. Ethan (2019). Leading Urban Change with People Powered Public Spaces. The History, and New Directions of the Placemaking Movement. The Journal of Public Space
7)Bakhit, Wail Ismail. (2016) Assessing Spatial Characteristics of TOD in Riyadh Using Spatial Multi Criteria Evaluation: A context-based approach for pre-development evaluation. King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals
8) Berke, Philip et al. (2006). Urban Land Use Planning. University of Illinois Press
9) UN Habitat. (2017). New Urban Agenda
10) Jurian Edelenbos and Meine Pieter van Dijk. (2017). Introduction: Urban governance in the Realm of Complexity. https://doi.org/10.3362/9781780449685.001
11 ) Avis, W.R. (2016). Urban governance: Topic guide. GSDRC, University of Birmingham
12 ) Center for Local Governance. http://www.ksclg.org/en/about/overview/
