Gulf developers: the next generation

In a city where the Hard Rock Cafe is one of the oldest landmarks, an unlikely new concept is taking hold: regeneration. And typically for Dubai, the projects it’s currently undertaking will be bigger and more ambitious than anything happening anywhere in the world. One masterplan under development is nearly 75 times the size of London’s King’s Cross regeneration scheme – one of the largest in Europe.

That Dubai’s rulers are looking to renew the older parts of the city is in part an inevitable consequence of its rapid growth. But it also reflects a growing trend for a more thoughtful approach to development, using the most sophisticated concepts from around the world. Across the Gulf region, developers are attempting to plan not only vast infill sites and reclaimed island communities, but entire new cities covering thousands of hectares and housing hundreds of thousands of people. With development on this scale, it is this new sophisticated approach to planning, rather than merely the region’s petro-dirhams, that will make the Gulf one of the world’s great powerhouses in the 21st century.

"Large-scale projects are nothing new to the Middle East," says Stephen Oehme, regional director of value management and sustainability for Hyder Consulting, who's currently working on many masterplans, including one for a community of over 600,000 people. "What is new is the way people are looking at them. One of the great things about the Middle East is that decisions get made. The culture is to make a decision and keep moving. Now people are saying, let's still make the decision quickly but let's make sure it's the best decision. It is very progressive"

The Dubai Strategic Plan 2015, announced by ruler Sheikh Mohammed in February 2007, put urban planning at the heart of an extraordinarily ambitious growth strategy that aims to more than double the city’s population within 15 years. It’s not hard to see why. After several decades of breakneck expansion, Dubai is suffering the inevitable consequences. Its infrastructure is drowning under the floods of new arrivals. Its main arteries are clogged for much of the day, rents are soaring and inflation is in the teens.

It’s not about to stop building – the land already under development is but a dot on the map of planned expansion – so the Dubai Municipality knows it must bring some order to the chaos, superimpose some retrospective logic to the city’s infrastructure and focus development in certain areas. As well as more planned expansion on greenfield sites, this will inevitably mean revisiting developments already built. The government has set up $1bn investment firm Meraas to oversee redevelopment of the older parts of the city.

Driving down the Sheikh Zayed Road in the heart of the city, with an endless parade of skyscrapers looming on either side, Dubai feels like one of the most built-up cities on earth. But it’s an illusion – behind those towers lie vast sprawling districts of low-rise villas, shops and petrol stations. For a major city still in need of a central business district, this is seen as wasted space.

There’s a real motivation to start tackling issues of sustainability. It might seem absurd in this environment, but there is a genuine understanding and respect for what that means

Marc Stringa, EDAW, Abu Dhabi

Jumeira Gardens, one of the first regeneration masterplans to be made public, covers a site 10km long, parallel to the Sheikh Zayed Road, and 2km wide – 2,000ha to King's Cross's 27. Meraas intends to raze the older districts of Al Satwa and Al Wasl and start from scratch, building 22 million m2 of real estate to house a population larger than Edinburgh. WSP is one of the companies involving in masterplanning the scheme.

“It is probably one of the largest urban regeneration projects in the world at the moment,” says a source at WSP. “It’s a very ambitious project that will fundamentally change an area of Dubai, a very large area to be developed in a very short space of time. I don’t think this is happening anywhere else on this scale.”

But is it really regeneration as the term is used in the west, rather than just redevelopment? “Regeneration is taking an urban area and improving its overall value, not just financially but from a liveability perspective as well,” argues the source. "From that point of view it’s not really redevelopment, it’s more regeneration.”

Dubai is deploying urban planning techniques to deal with the problems of rapid growth, but west along the coast, Abu Dhabi is drawing urban planning expertise from across the world to help it avoid them altogether.

As the capital of the UAE, with 87% of the land and, more importantly, the bulk of its oil, Abu Dhabi’s potential is greater even than Dubai’s. A year ago it announced its own ambitious growth strategy, to grow from about 850,000 people today to over 3 million in 20 years’ time. A panel of international planning and development experts spent more than a year devising Plan Abu Dhabi 2030, to produce a comprehensive urban plan for the city and set up a regulatory framework to enforce it. The resulting Urban Planning Council is the first of its kind in the region.

Consultant Broadway Malyan worked with the Abu Dhabi Municipality on a masterplan last year, where the process included focus groups with key Emiratis and an international peer review – unprecedented in the region.

What’s new is the way people are looking at large-scale projects. One of the great things about the Middle East is that decisions get made

Stephen Oehme, Hyder Consulting

Abu Dhabi is sometimes wearily described as another Dubai in waiting, but this is wide of the mark. While other Gulf states may envy Dubai’s trailblazing economic growth and international reputation, none aspire to its tolerance of western mores and anonymous sprawl. Though Emirati diplomacy would make public criticism unthinkable, it’s hard not read into Plan Abu Dhabi’s stated aspirations a tacit rebuke to its brasher, smaller brother. It prizes measured and sustainable rather than uncontrolled growth. It will be “shaped by the natural environment of sensitive coastal and desert ecologies”, and its “urban fabric and community infrastructure will enable the values, social arrangements, culture and mores of this Arab community”.

Abu Dhabi’s developments are promoted with the usual slick hyperbole, but there’s a different vocabulary backing up the superlatives. Aldar’s Al Raha Beach, for example, promises with typical bombast to be “the ultimate waterfront city” but the rest of its website blurb concerns its meticulously planning, in order to become “a community where transport, safety and quality of life will be integral to the design”.

The Gulf’s developers are realising that when you plan communities like this one that will house more than 120,000 people, you can’t afford to ignore the infrastructure. It might sound obvious, but Dubai’s unprecedented growth spurt happened so fast that only now is it yielding a body of experience, says Hyder’s Oehme. “A lot of things were not in people’s minds, they just weren’t on the agenda. It wasn’t just local people, the international people they employed weren’t bringing them to their attention either.”

Increased planning is a result of the maturing market, and of greater competition as other Gulf states begin to translate their oil and gas wealth into glass and steel. Saudi Arabia is building six giant "economic cities" to diversify its economy away from oil, and much smaller Bahrain has its own 2030 plan specifying virtually every piece of new infrastructure and land use for the next 22 years. With so much development in the pipeline, the Gulf is going to become a buyers’ rather than a sellers’ market.

“I don't think there is a city that doesn't want to be adding hundreds of thousands of people," says Oehme. "They need to differentiate, compete, attract. The biggest point of differentiation in the Middle East is excellence, not the tallest anymore, as they've already got the tallest. Everyone wanted to have the biggest in the world, but after five or six projects have achieved that, it starts to become less relevant. They have to look for something else.”

This is where the new battleground comes in: sustainability. In January 2007, Dubai was stung into action when the World Wildlife Fund singled it out as having the largest carbon footprint per resident of any nation. Now the Gulf is fast becoming a world leader in research into new technologies.

There’s a real motivation to start tackling issues of sustainability. It might seem absurd in this environment, but there is a genuine understanding and respect for what that means

Marc Stringa, EDAW, Abu Dhabi

Last November Sheikh Mohammed, ruler of Dubai, announced that from January new buildings would have to meet green building specifications, and the Dubai Municipality is now working with WSP to draw them up. Abu Dhabi is working on its own set of design guidelines, called Estidama – Arabic for sustainability – and established the Masdar Initiative to research green technologies and turn 6km2 of the city centre into a car-free, zero-carbon model community. “The reason I moved permanently to the Middle East just over a year-and-a-half ago was because I think there’s a really good chance it could be the world leader in the not-too-distant future,” says Oehme.

Developments such as the $22bn Masdar City and, to a less headline-grabbing extent, Al Raha Beach have been planned from first principles to reduce dependency on transport, energy and water. With new communities on such a grand scale, the fast-growing Gulf states could quickly become world exemplars for low-carbon living. “There’s a real motivation to start tackling issues of sustainability,” says Marc Stringa, principal at masterplanner EDAW in Abu Dhabi. “It might seem absurd in this environment, but there is a genuine understanding and respect for what that means. It’s definitely changed from a few years ago. There is now a rigour that is both regulated and mandated.”

Abu Dhabi’s embrace of long-term strategic urban planning has also led to property adviser Jones Lang Lasalle to single it out as one of the world’s most important emerging cities of the next decade: “The city epitomises a fresh spirit of city-building which is almost unmatched anywhere else in the world. Abu Dhabi is unique in its potential to create a new definition of urbanity for emerging cities based on influence rather than size.”

A critical advantage that all the fast-growing Gulf cities share is that they can do this. They are almost starting from scratch and planning model communities from first principles. In established cities, the built environment is usually an obstacle to progress, but the emerging centres are free to shape themselves for the demands of the 21st century.

Another state with grand plans is Qatar, where government developer Qatari Diar has broken ground on an extension to the north of capital Doha, to house 200,000 people within 15 years. The Qataris are conservative by nature, and already take a hands-on approach to controlling development in Doha proper, but at Lusail, they’ve taken it to another level. Though the scheme will cover an extraordinary 35km2, every aspect of it has been rigorously planned. “It has a complete social infrastructure, it’s a completely self-sufficient environment with schools and hospitals. It will provide facilities that aren’t available in other parts of the city,” says a Qatari Diar spokesman.

But why build a whole new centre instead of just expanding Doha itself? “Not many people have the opportunity to knock down a city and start again,” explains the spokesman. “As much as you may love the city of London, people would say there were frustrations with the infrastructure, and so on. Doha’s such a young city anyway, it’s growing at such a speed that it needs this kind of development.”

Not many people have the opportunity to knock down a city and start again. As much as you may love the city of London, people would say there were frustrations with the infrastructure, and so on

Qatari Diar spokesman

The Gulf states also have the political will and, more importantly, the power structure to tackle these kinds of projects. What the ruling families say goes – compare the instant gratification of Sheikh Mohammed’s wishes for Dubai to the long-haul planning sagas for Heathrow Terminal 5 and King’s Cross.

For architects, moving to the Gulf makes a very welcome change. “In the UK, the planning process can feel a bit like death by consultation,” says Peter Vaughan, director at Broadway Malyan. “Projects can fall by the wayside as their time came and went while people debated their merits. It is incredibly seductive that in the Emirates people will say, 'I love your concept, let's build it,’ and are able to do so.”

There is also a lot more scope to the job, adds his colleague James Rayner, director of masterplanning. “Outside Europe where development is moving very fast, clients are not only relying on our design knowledge, but also on our understanding of the design process. Quite often we’re there to develop the brief, not only from an architecture point of view but its development value too.”

The downside is that the Gulf’s clients typically expect thorough analysis and concept-testing done in a fraction of the time. If they can build in a quarter of the time, why can’t they whip through the preconstruction phase too? “On one of our recent projects, we had 10 days to produce designs, from first principles to presentation CGIs,” says Rayner.

“There is a very accelerated timeframe,” agrees Stringa at EDAW. “A project that might take a couple of years in other parts of the world, you’d do in six months from start to finish here.”

Of course, if the Gulf states are going to meet their self-imposed targets, they can’t afford to slacken off and, indeed, show no signs of doing so. “Dubai has fewer than 2 million people and it wants to be five million within 10-15 years, so it’s less than half the way there,” says Oehme. “Abu Dhabi has even fewer and wants to triple by 2030. When you look at it from that point of view, they’re both just starting. It’s a scary thought when you look at all those cranes.”