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Abu Dhabi: new urban showcase
in the Middle East?
Guided by Vancouver’s Larry Beasley, the oil-rich emirate is using North America’s top urbanists to shape development.
In a still-shaky world economy, one place stands out as an enthusiastic employer of new urbanists and a potential model of how to develop cities. That place is Abu Dhabi, the wealthy emirate that has recently been in the news for bailing out its profligate neighbor, Dubai.
When overextended real estate development in Dubai collapsed late last year, it was Abu Dhabi that came to the rescue with $10 billion. The largest and most petroleum-rich of the seven members of the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi has a reputation for prudent government by its royal family. In the past several years, while Dubai was erecting flamboyant towers and building islands arranged like palm trees, Abu Dhabi was searching for a course that would work better in the longer run.
In 2006, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s desire for a more stable and sustainable pattern of development led him to recruit Larry Beasley, longtime co-director of planning for Vancouver, British Columbia, to serve as “special adviser” — in effect, chief planner for the nearly 1-million-population municipality of Abu Dhabi and the 1.6-million-populaton emirate of the same name.
The sheikh — educated at Sandhurst in England, he is the emirate’s crown prince — sought out Beasley because he had heard about the accomplishments of Vancouver, including its success in managing development. Since 1986 the residential population of Vancouver’s downtown peninsula has more than doubled, to roughly 100,000, and mixed use development has flourished in outlying neighborhoods, aided by mass transit, walkable streets, and other civic amenities.
Beasley, who retired from his Vancouver post in August 2006, started working in Abu Dhabi the following month. He now spends 7 to 12 days a month there, and will probably continue until the beginning of 2012. He has brought in high-quality urbanists from around the world, including North Americans such as Calthorpe Associates, Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. (DPZ), Torti Gallas and Partners, Moule & Polyzoides, Nelson\Nygaard Consulting Associates, Allan Jacobs, Elizabeth Macdonald, Peter Swift, and Rick Chellman.
Changes have come rapidly:
• Al Nahyan, who chairs the Abu Dhabi Executive Council, cancelled a freeway that would have carved a destructive path through one of the oldest parts of the city. “The whole freeway was overscaled,” Beasley observes. “It was a disaster waiting to happen.” At Beasley’s urging, the government reestimated traffic demand (cutting it by half) and decided that vehicular movement could be accommodated in a civilized way with a more modest-scale tunnel about six blocks long. Now under construction, the tunnel connects at both ends to a more traditional network of streets.
• A comprehensive transportation system is being designed, including streetcars, subways, and greatly expanded intercity rail freight and passenger service — this in a country that until two years ago relied almost completely on private cars and taxis for individual mobility. Grade-separated rail transit, most of it underground, is envisioned to provide rapid movement citywide. Joe Dills, a principal in Otak Inc., a Lake Oswego, Oregon, firm which three years ago opened an office in Abu Dhabi, marvels that in a matter of years Abu Dhabi is going to build a transit system that “would take decades to do in the US.”
• An extensive and respected planning apparatus has been created from scratch. “When I arrived, there was no planning department and no real approval process except that His Highness would just give a nod of the head” to projects he thought worthwhile, Beasley says. Since then, the government has formed an Urban Planning Council which now has a staff of about 175, including professionals from the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere. The Council, says Beasley, “is doing very proactive planning work all over the emirate.”
• A program called “Estidama” (Arabic for sustainability) has been introduced. It is the equivalent of North America’s LEED program, but more locally oriented and without LEED’s high cost and bureaucracy. Estidama is starting to move Abu Dhabi away from buildings that are inappropriate for a hot desert climate, such as glass curtainwall structures, and toward a contemporary expression of the region’s architectural traditions.
There will be a shift toward “traditional materials and fenestration patterns” and “landscape forms that use less water or reuse water,” Beasley says. In the government’s ambitious plan for the new Capital District of Abu Dhabi, buildings will be required to meet Estidama standards, including taking advantage of breezes and other natural techniques.
“From top to bottom, the entire system is being rethought,” says Andres Duany, whose firm worked on an urban waterfront complex for a private developer and will finish work early this year on planning for the historic royal city, Al Ain. “They’re not tinkering at the edges.”
Long-range plans
Regional and city plans are being adopted that look 20 years or more into the future. An example is Plan Abu Dhabi 2030, an urban structure framework plan that the Urban Planning Council devised in 2007 to guide the emirate’s growth to the year 2030.
Model of the Capitol District of Abu Dhabi. Courtesy of the Abu Dhabi Planning Council.
Plan Abu Dhabi 2030 asserts that “new development should be designed at a human scale to ensure the city is still pleasant to live in when the population surpasses three million.” The existing city, which sits on an island, would accommodate some of the growth, but there would also be development on other islands, connected by modest-scale bridges.
Nearby on the mainland, a second city center is to be developed in the Capital District, which will be home to the UAE government, medical centers, and institutions of higher education. The main approach to this center is proposed to be a boulevard that passes under seven high arches (representing the seven emirates) and terminates at a square.
Unlike the megablock- and highway-fixated planning that foreigners did in Abu Dhabi in the 1970s, the latest plans call for a fine grain of interconnected streets. Throughout the emirate, “residential, retail, infrastructure and amenity development are [to be] clustered around a ‘high street’ or public square,” says the 2030 Plan. “Urban communities are [to be] more rigidly defined, by a grid-like system of blocks, while the desert and island eco-villages are more organically set within their landscape.”
To “contain urban growth and prohibit unplanned sprawl,” the 2030 plan recommends establishing a protected “sand belt” and “desert fingers.”
Dills, at Otak, says his firm is working on a revitalization plan for the Abu Dhabi central business district that will transform the gigantic streets, subdivide the superblocks — “the biggest I’ve seen on the planet” — and establish “a clear and logical circulation system that prioritizes the pedestrian.” Parking is to be moved underground or into above-ground structures. New real estate development will help finance the parking facilities’ construction and introduce additional uses and amenities to the blocks.
For Tavistock Abu Dhabi Investments, DPZ produced a conceptual design for a marina on reclaimed land near Abu Dhabi’s convention center. If built as planned, it would be a walkable, compact, and complex development organized around harbors offering ”water plazas.”
Adapting to the culture
Using a series of five workshops, Torti Gallas, in conjunction with other firms, including Calthorpe Associates and the Philadelphia-based Olin Studio, completed a conceptual design in December for a client who wants to develop a 7,500-acre site in the Al Foah district of Al Ain, an inland oasis city of about 374,000. Much of the site is now a date farm — date farms being a national symbol — and has been targeted to become a compact, mixed-use community.
The project gave principal John Torti the opportunity to think about how to design in a way that suits the culture and climate. The resulting proposal calls for courtyard houses, which offer the privacy valued by Arab families, especially for women. (Some houses that were built in the emirate in recent decades were freestanding in a Western mode, and failed to provide the occupants with protected outdoor space.)
For the overall development in Al Foah, Torti says the team is proposing “a circulation system that has four levels of hierarchy,” including “internal walkways interrupted by little piazzas — gathering places for children to play, where women can meet.” The walkway system would make it possible for women to reach a neighborhood center via a route not shared with men — an important consideration in a culture that believes in separation of men and women.
Some of the trees from windrows of the date farm would be replanted to form a long green space about 500 feet wide, stretching across the site; they would form a kind of linear date farm in which mosques could be set at intervals. Public spaces based on traditional emirati culture are to be incorporated into the community’s design.
“New urbanist ideas are intrinsically local,” says Duany says. A “shade way” study is looking into how to incorporate continuous shaded walkways into Abu Dhabi development. “Forms and patterns that are unique to Arabic society should pervade the city and punctuate the skyline,” declares Plan Abu Dhabi 2030.
Just how traditional the architecture will be is unclear. In parts of the developing world, there’s a tendency among decision-makers to think that new buildings should look like the latest products of Europe and North America. Whether that will prove true in Abu Dhabi remains to be seen, but Duany notes, “The minute you do a local architecture, they get nervous.”
Uncertain future
“They have a real consciousness of building a nation,” Beasley says. “There’s that sense of mission. They want things quickly and they want them to be the best.” In addition to having a highly intelligent crown prince, from a royal family that has distributed wealth broadly, Abu Dhabi offers another advantage, according to Beasley: “You’re not dealing with a vested power structure that wants to do something else.”
“One of my biggest efforts is to get as many new urbanists working in the public and private sector as I can organize,” Beasley says. Marina Khoury of DPZ says the work has been fascinating: “All these planners are having the experience of a lifetime.”
The culture of planning in Abu Dhabi has had only had a brief time in which to become rooted. It may prove fragile, particularly in a Middle Eastern society where development decisions in the past have been made in an ad hoc manner in which negotiation, not codes, ruled the day. “It will be interesting to see how negotiation meets with codes,” says Khoury.
So far, the crown prince has strongly supported ideas from Beasley and his worldwide pool of urbanistic talent. “The Abu Dhabi government is expecting a higher standard than has ever been delivered,” says Jeff Tumlin of Nelson\Nygaard. “They’re doing 50 years of city-building in 5 years. It’s on the scale of what Napoleon III did for Paris or Catherine did for St. Petersburg.”
This article is available in the January/February 2010 issue of New Urban News, along with images and many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue.
By Philip Langdon
A neighborhood center for the Al Foah District in Al Ain. Rendering courtesy of Torti Gallas and Partners.
