Saudi Arabia Wants Its Capital to Be Somewhere You’d Want to Live
The crown prince’s next grand plan is to defy the skeptics and turn Riyadh into a greener, cooler city for twice the population.
By
Vivian Nereim
December 16, 2021
On
Riyadh’s King Abdulaziz Road, construction workers sweep sand off a brand-new
sidewalk. A gardener pops a spindly plant out of a plastic pot and gives it a
new home in the ground, smoothing the soft red earth with his hands.
Behind them, 15-foot-high banners advertise the future gardens and canals of King Salman Park, a plan to turn an air base in Saudi Arabia’s desert capital into a public green space four times bigger than Central Park in New York.
Saudis
have gotten used to breakneck change over the past five years under Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whether it’s the shock therapy to turn the kingdom
into a post-oil economy, a high-tech city from scratch on
the Red Sea or the loosening up of society that allows men and women
to mix more freely. But
among the most ambitious plans is to transform Riyadh — one of the world’s most
sprawling, car-dependent and water-poor cities — into a paragon of
sustainability.
That means spending tens
of billions of dollars of oil revenue on re-engineering life for the city’s 8
million residents, adding sidewalks, public transportation, electric vehicles,
neighborhood parks and millions of trees.
The goal is to green the capital enough to lower its ambient temperature by 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), giving the city a cushion against climate change in a region where summer temperatures exceeding 110 degrees Fahrenheit are already common.
If
that doesn’t sound challenging enough, Prince Mohammed also wants to double
Riyadh’s population in 10 years, turning what was a relatively conservative city even
by Saudi standards into a regional business hub that can compete for talent
with Dubai. It would be difficult to attract the highly-educated
foreigners he wants to move to Riyadh without making the city more
livable.
“The
idea is very simple: reduce sprawl and ensure density in the city is
increased,” said Fahd Al-Rasheed,
head of the Royal Commission for Riyadh City, charged with implementing the
plan. “The city is built already for that kind of capacity — it’s double the
size of Singapore.”
Skeptics abound, of
course, at home and abroad. Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest crude exporter
and has the highest carbon dioxide emissions per capita among the G-20
nations.
The
crown prince’s blueprint for his country’s future, called “Vision 2030,” calls
for new industries from entertainment to defense and a complete overhaul of the
economy. Yet the country’s fortunes still rise and fall with oil and the
prince has been trying to rebuild his reputation among
foreign investors after Saudi security forces murdered Washington Post
columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
There are also the practicalities of making Riyadh the nerve center of the new Saudi Arabia: the city’s population has already exploded 50-fold since 1950, gridlocking its streets and guzzling its limited water supply.
“The
key issue for me when you hear about these very ambitious strategies and
proposals is whether that really constitutes a massive change, or is it just
sort of window dressing — kind of green washing,” said Yasser Elsheshtawy,
an adjunct architecture professor at Columbia University who focuses on Arab
cities.
Indeed, previous attempts
to remake Riyadh fell short of their targets, including a city development
strategy 20 years ago that called for many of the same changes as today.
But
if officials succeed even partially, Riyadh will offer the world a case study
on how urban areas can adapt to rising temperatures and
water shortages.
“I
doubt if there is a much harsher environment than what we have here,”
said Saleh Al-Hathloul, a Saudi architect and former town
planning official. “If we can do it, then it can be done anywhere.”
Riyadh’s problems are
partly a legacy of its rapid growth. When Al-Hathloul moved to Riyadh in the
1960s, it was still possible to walk from one side of town to the other. Before
the oil boom transformed the kingdom, residents typically lived in traditional
mud houses along narrow shaded pathways.
Over
the next few decades, Saudi Arabia was one of the fastest-urbanizing
countries in the world. International planners including the Greek
architect Constantinos Doxiadis were brought in to shape the
capital as builders struggled to keep up with demand.
Riyadh became a city of wide avenues that baked in the sun. Today, the lushest landscapes are hidden inside royal palaces and private homes. Sidewalks are disjointed or nonexistent; life without air conditioning is almost unthinkable. Sometimes you need to call a taxi just to cross the street.
“It’s like you had your
grandmother’s recipe that came throughout the generations and you started to go
to McDonald’s and you forgot how to do that,” said Abdulelah Alsheikh, a former
bureaucrat who helped draft the strategy in 2001. He’s now the country
head of engineering firm Jacobs. “We’ve lost our way maybe, and those skills need
to be brought back.”
To do that, Al-Rasheed,
the official in charge of Riyadh’s makeover, wants to halt the city’s endless
spread north into the desert and start building denser, taller and greener.
A $92 billion sustainability strategy aims to cut Riyadh’s carbon emissions in half. It calls for planting 15 million trees and boosting the use of treated water for irrigation from 11% to 100%. Officials plan to mandate that 30% of all vehicles in the city be electric by 2030. A nearly finished metro system could carry 4 million people a day.
“You increase the amount
of sewage treatment and use that water to actually green the city. You lower
temperatures, that lowers the need for air conditioning,” said Al-Rasheed.
"It’s a system-based thinking.”
In
Al-Rasheed’s vision, the future Saudi family might live in an an apartment
instead of a villa, spending leisure time in a park instead of their backyard.
That’s a shift for a culture that values privacy highly and will require a new
mentality and way of life, said Mashary Al-Naim, an
architecture professor at Imam Abdulrahman bin Faisal University in Dammam.
That
rethink puts Riyadh in the company of cities from Miami to Bangkok that are
grappling with how to adapt to climate change. Copenhagen is
aiming to be the world’s first carbon-neutral capital by 2025. Tokyo’s 2016
environmental master plan calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 30%
and new measures to combat summer heat waves.
None of them
are aiming to double their population, though — a target that’s left many
Saudis aghast, even as they dream of a more livable future for their capital.
“The main problem here is
these initiatives are always top-down, which sort of precludes the input of
people,” said Elsheshtawy, the Columbia professor. “There is a disconnect
between policies that are being implemented and then how they are actually being
carried out on the ground.”
Some Saudi urban planners are hopeful that the new Riyadh will succeed this time because it has the full weight of the monarchy behind it. But sometimes the emphasis on a grand vision can overshadow smaller measures that could have a big impact on quality of life, several of the planners and architects said.
Alsheikh
gave the example of Wadi Hanifah, a
verdant valley that weaves through Riyadh. It was once a garbage dump and
source for construction materials. A program to rehabilitate it took decades to
turn it around.
On a recent balmy weekend,
cyclists and pedestrians made their way along dirt paths. Birds chirped and
smoke wafted from grills as families laid out blankets for picnics.
“Now it’s beautiful,” Alsheikh said. “But when people see it and experience it, they don’t know how much it took.”
