Rethinking Structure Planning in Arab Gulf Cities

This post presents some guidance notes to urban design and planning consultants preparing Structure Plans and Development Frameworks for cities/regions.

Through my work in the region, and my academic researches, I came across many city plans and have comprehensively reviewed some of structure plans, visions, and master plans for cities and regions within the Arab Gulf Region GCC.

Throughout my review I perceived the following conclusions which could be considered by teams and consultants commissioned to prepare City Plans, structure plans and future visions of cities in the Arab Gulf Region:

1- Some of the consultants typically built the Structure Plans based upon standardized templates, with the result that these plans feel lifeless and unsuccessful. They had the outward appearance of a more organic plan, but they are, in the end, standardized reproductions. It does not demonstrate how an inspired reciprocity between thinking and making might lead to deeper understandings and more liveable places. Consequently, lacking conceptual and practical ways for understanding how elements of the city belong together so that they can indeed belong, whether the parts of a well-made plan, the steps in an effective design process, or the elements of a helpful development strategy. At the end, it fails to present a method or framework to achieving coherence, integrally related to lived qualities of the city like beauty, eloquence, good health, well-being and most essentially vitality.

2- The participants, especially the local Planners, are forced to play a highly restricted role, in which the ‘‘outside experts’’, or consultants disproportionately influenced the process. Review my post in the following link for more clarification https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/approach-understanding-traditional-urban-form-arab-city-rafik-ibrahim?trk=prof-post

3- The Structure plans are usually turned over to the relevant planning agency or department, who then interpret it in a variety of disastrous ways due to lack of training and implementation strategies that account for the role of local planners, or clear strategy to transforming the particular vision into actual wholesome places. People who make things typically do not understand the extent to which what is done or what happens is a product of the processes that are governing events behind the scenes.

4- It is important to make it clear how the Structure Plan of specific city responds to the ways in which the city is likely to grow and change such that new styles need to be fashioned from the bottom up. The top down approach adds more restrictions to adaptable solutions and makes it more difficult to understand and manage all the variables that evolve from the emergence of the city. It might be beneficial to think of the urban areas as organism, as biological rather than physical systems.

This is a switch from thinking of urban forms as being artefacts to be designed to thinking of them as systems that evolve, grow and change in ways that might be steered and managed but rarely designed from the top down. Also to demonstrate a shift from an emphasis on structure and form to one of behaviour and process and to mirror the slow march from the physicalism which dominated Arab Gulf city planning for generations, to a serious concern for socio-economic process.

Ultimately, attention should be given to two major topics: first, the identification of life-evoking geometrical properties that might provide a link between the original essence of the city and its physical manifestation; second, the process of implementation, especially identifying a way of governance by which each step of planning and implementation flows from preceding steps and points toward the next step in the process.

5- Analysing the influence of chronological evolution in Arab Cities is essential to understanding the complexity of the current urban problems. While the performance criteria may be clear at the outset, it is important that designers and planners give up their egos and accept a role that does not specify the final form, but rather the intermediate processes that will generate that form. Every country/culture must have a cultural reference point. This understanding of the context should not be interpreted as nostalgic behaviour, rather, appreciation to this organic evolution of the city. For years now, planners and architects are lagging behind, still trying to treat the problems of the Arab city as either simple two-variable problems of simplicity (this many jobs over here, that many houses over there) or problems of statistical populations to be managed, almost as files in a drawer. They misunderstood the kind of problem the Arab city is with devastating results, producing 'copy' & 'paste' shallow solutions created somewhere else for different context.

The work of Christopher Alexander is informing here. The cultural values that influence the way the city would want to grow are not a vague feeling of relationship with biological forms. It is not an analogy. It is a specific structural quality: ‘‘namely, each of these cities grew as a whole, under its own laws of wholeness’’. These ‘‘laws of wholeness’’ should be developed in detailed structural logic, to propose a method by which this quality can be attained again in a contemporary context not through a conventional kind of master plans, structural plans or city visions as we see these days, but through a process involving the sequential collaboration of local planners and residents that accounts for globalization forces, technology, environmental concerns and integrated transport solutions, etc. . To cope with this complexity, a methodology must therefore incorporate an ‘‘argumentative process’’ within a network of issues. Where, the consultant “designer” is no longer a solitary ‘‘expert’’ but a collaborator with the client and with other experts. This is a challenge to the very idea of urban design as an act of conventional schematic ‘‘master planning’’, and an assertion that design must be a continuous evolutionary response to a complex of urban conditions.

To be continued..