Regenerating an Unplanned Settlement
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia is a city of over three million people. Like many other cities in the emerging world, Jeddah contains significant areas that exist as unplanned settlements, and as a result, suffer from lack of infrastructure. Flooding after a light rainfall recently killed over 125 Jeddawis due to poor drainage. A new law now allows the government to create public-private entities to regenerate large parts of the city that have never been planned.
Al Ruwais is a 140-hecatre (346 acre) unplanned settlement near the center of Jeddah that has great potential as a new urban quarter. The current site generally suffers from substandard and often non-permitted construction, poor municipal services, especially sewage and storm drainage, and uncoordinated road standards. The inhabitant population is often claimed to be un-documented foreigners who have overstayed their pilgrimage visas (Jeddah is the eastern gateway to Mecca) to settle and work illegally within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
AECOM designed a masterplan for the Ruwais Development Company and TAMLIK. With a density roughly equal to that of Manhattan's Upper East Side, the new development is a mixed-use quarter with strong residential and medical research components and an integrated mass-transit hub. With more than 6 million square meters (65 million square feet) of gross floor area, it will be home for over 60,000 residents and the center for over 80,000 jobs. Nearly seventy percent of the GFA is devoted to residential use, and schools are positioned throughout the development to be within walking distance.
The regeneration of Al Ruwais and several other sites ringing Al Balad (the old center of the city), including the City Center Development, Jeddah Gate / Old Airport, and Khozam Palace, will serve to refocus development and activity on the urban core. Al Ruwais has a close relationship to the Corniche (the nearby Red Sea coast) as well as connections to King Abdullah University and Al Balad to the south. The major north-south roads of the city embrace the site on east and west, giving it high visibility.
Working with the site's current conditions as an unplanned settlement, a system of irregular paths was evaluated to determine which routes should be retained as major roads. Key buildings and spaces were also identified for retention. The surrounding grid was extended into Al Ruwais to foster better connections to the outside as well as a more orderly system of rectangular plots within. The 'inner frame' and the 'borrowed grid' were integrated to form the new street pattern. The Civic Space, the major open space corridor, was introduced to provide east-west connection across the site.
Jeddah Great Park is the focus of the development. Twin towers mark the eastern and western limits of the park, communicating its presence and orientation to passersby at some distance with two landmarks that clearly contrast with the mid-rise construction around them. The facades of the towers are intended to have facade-integrated LEDs (light-emitting diodes) that incorporate digitally-controlled environmental imagery. Nine distinct neighborhoods, each with their own community clusters and related open spaces, are grouped around the central park. With the exception of the towers, the urban fabric consists primarily of mid-rise perimeter blocks that create human-scaled, pedestrian-friendly environments.
Current residents of the area have been offered statutory compensation as part of the land-entitlement process. Future residents will likely be a combination of current residents buying back into the development, as well as other local, mixed-income market-rate buyers. The employment offers within the development area relate to the planned industry clusters, especially the specialized Medical City (an outgrowth of the two international-caliber medical clinics already on site), as well as supporting conference, hospitality, commercial, retail, service, and leisure land uses.
Jake Herson