Top urban experts from around the world are being used to shape the capital's development

Written by: Philip Langdon

In 2006, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan's desire for a more stable and sustainable pattern of development for Abu Dhabi led him to recruit Larry Beasley as a "special advisor" - in effect, chief planner for the municipality and the Emirate.

The Sheikh - Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces and brother to the ruler Sheikh Khalifa - sought out Beasley because he had heard about the accomplishments of Vancouver, British Columbia, 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 neighbourhoods, aided by mass transit, walkable streets, and other civic amenities.

Beasley retired as the long-time co-director of planning for Vancouver that august and began working in Abu Dhabi the following month. He now spends seven to 12 days a month here, and will probably continue until the beginning of 2012. He has brought in high-quality urbanists from around the world, and changes have come rapidly:

• A freeway that would have carved a destructive path through the city has been cancelled. "The whole freeway was overscaled," Beasley observes. "It was a disaster waiting to happen." At Beasley's urging, the government reassessed traffic demand (cutting it by half) and decided that vehicular movement could be accommodated in a civilised way with a more modest-scale development - the Salam Street tunnel and associated works.
• A comprehensive transportation system is being designed, including streetcars, subways, and intercity rail service.
• 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]," Beasley says. Since then, the government has formed an Urban Planning Council which now has a staff of about 175.
• The Estidama programme 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-walled structures, and toward a contemporary expression of the region's architectural traditions.

Importantly, regional and city plans are being adopted that look 20 years or more into the future - notably Plan Abu Dhabi 2030. Experts from eight countries worked with local authorities and departments to produce guidelines on how the city's population could grow to three or more times its current size and yet consume non-renewable resources sparingly.

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". There would also be development on islands like Yas, Reem and Saadiyat; a second city centre is to be developed in the Capital District to house the UAE government, medical centres, and institutions of higher education.

Unlike the megablock- and highway-fixated planning of 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.

Otak Inc, an Oregon firm which three years ago opened an office in Abu Dhabi, is working on a revitalisation 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", says Joe Dills of Otak - and establish "a clear and logical circulation system that prioritises the pedestrian."

For Tavistock Abu Dhabi Investments, Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ) has produced a conceptual design for a marina on reclaimed land near ADNEC that would be a walkable, compact, and complex development organised around harbours offering "water plazas".

Torti Gallas, headquartered near Washington, DC, is one of a group of firms who have completed conceptual designs for a 3,000-hectare site in Al Ain to be developed as 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; for example, the 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.) Internal walkways interrupted by little piazzas would make it possible for women to reach a neighbourhood centre via a route not shared with men

"New urbanist ideas are intrinsically local," says Andrès Duany of Miami-based DPZ, a leader in the ‘new urbanism' movement aimed at creating compact, walkable communities that offer appealing public gathering places. DPZ‘s "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 local architecture, they get nervous."

"One of my biggest efforts is to get as many new urbanists working in the public and private sector as I can organise," 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 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.

So far, the crown prince has strongly supported ideas from Beasley and his worldwide pool of talent. "The Abu Dhabi government is expecting a higher standard than has ever been delivered," says Jeff Tumlin of San Francisco-based Nelson/Nygaard Consulting Associates. "They're doing 50 years of city-building in five years. It's on the scale of what Napoleon III did for Paris or Catherine the Great did for St Petersburg."

This article originally appeared in a longer form in the January/February 2010 issue of New Urban News