I urban development
Can Oman Build a Better Planned City? In a region of crazily ambitious megacities, this Persian Gulf urban project may be more viable.
There is no shortage of outlandish and ambitious urban projects in the petro-states of the Persian Gulf. The man-made islands of Dubai, a supertall curved skyscraper in Kuwait, or the enormous clock tower in Mecca that’s the size of six Big Bens are just a few. The region also has a particular penchant for planned cities— scratch-built instant metropoli built in the hope of diversifying economies that rely heavily on oil. But these projects don’t always live up to their lofty expectations. After more than a decade, only about a quarter of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Economic City has been developed, and it houses less than 10,000 of its projected 2 million
22
inhabitants. In the United Arab Emirates, Masdar City, outside of Abu Dhabi, is a sparsely populated technology incubator instead of the dense settlement that was envisaged. And Al Madina A’Zarqa, or Blue City, was to be an Omani city of 200,000 but hasn’t come to pass due to financing woes and a lack of demand for the land. However, Oman’s ambitions haven’t been dimmed, they are planning a new purpose built city: Madinat Al-Irfan will be located to the west of Muscat, Oman’s capital, near the international airport. The government has already built a convention center and a few hotels on the 1,500acre site. Over the next 30 years it plans to add
