First Plan Al Ain 2030 contracts due in six months

The launch last month of the UPC's Plan Al Ain 2030.

The bidding for the first construction contracts under Plan Al Ain 2030 will be available before the close of this year, Construction Week can reveal.

Abu Dhabi-based master developer Aldar Properties, which will oversee the initial phases of construction, hopes to begin infrastructural work along with building a number of villa developments by December this year.

The timetable was revealed by Al Ain Municipality director of urban planning Talal Al Salamani in an exclusive interview with CW.

“We will start on construction of the infrastructure, and the prototype villa design will be approved by the client, in this case Al Ain Municipality,” Al Salamani said.

“Based on that, the contracts to build these villas will be awarded. We will run some of the construction stages in parallel which is a project management exercise.”

The Abu Dhabi government is funding all of the initial work to build the infrastructure and the villas.

Advertisement

FEATURED COMMENT Please click here to comment on this article

Further initial works to construct a district centre, including educational, healthcare, leisure and commercial developments are to be undertaken on a build-operate-transfer basis.

The initial villa developments will be designed specifically for the needs of Emirati families.

“Building the housing units depends of approved typologies of existing housing types,” Al Salamani said.

“The villa prototypes will be delivered in a way that will suit the Emirati family size and the architectural style will be blended into the architecture of the city of Al Ain.”

According to Al Salamani, the funding allocated by the government for the villas will be paid into an account that the developer has access to.

“There is going to be a system of supervising and releasing the payment according to the needs of the developer,” he said.

Cost escalation will be guarded against through adoption of Fidic contract procedures, which measures payment amounts as work progresses, against costs incurred over a given period of time.

Under the adoption of the procedure, payments are usually released either on a monthly basis, or as set construction milestones are achieved.

Plan Al Ain 2030 was released by the Abu Dhabi Urban Planning Council (UPC) last month.

“With the population of Al Ain expected to reach one million by 2020, Plan Al Ain 2030 offers a range of solutions to regulate the quality and quantity of new development projects,” UPC general manager HE Falah Al Ahbabi said.

---