Well spread

Daniel Hajjar
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With the emphasis on building faster, higher and taller, thinking big never came easy during Dubai’s construction boom – resulting in a city that lacks public space and is so often all too reliant on the car.

But this attitude has changed since the financial crisis, with other GCC countries keen to learn from Dubai’s mistakes. Saudi Arabia has a number of master planned mega-projects on the boards, while Abu Dhabi has put big picture-thinking at the centre of its 2030 plan.

It is a good environment to be in for a firm with a track record like HOK. The design firm responsible for Dubai Marina, Festival City and, most recently the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), HOK does not need to go far to point to its credentials.

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But Daniel Hajjar, HOK’s Dubai-based vice president, believes that it is not just attitudes to the importance of master planning that have changed, but the nature of master planning itself.

“Master planning has really become more than an engineered statement. It has become about looking at how you can create quality within the urban environment, as opposed to looking only at how to break a development up into the most convenient grid,” he said.

It was something that HOK tried to achieve with its Dubai Marina framework, one of the few new residential sites in Dubai that is not dissected by highways and unbearable outside in the summer heat.

“It was perhaps one of the first ones that responded to the public realm, within the city. In the sense that it really was, and remains, truly public. People can go down, walk along the waterfront, and you have these pockets of urban space where you can relax and watch the world go by,” he said.

“In that sense I think it’s done very well for itself.”

Of course, the Marina is very much an exception to the rule in Dubai, a lesson not lost on the rulers of Abu Dhabi. The emirate’s 2030 plan has set down guidelines for everything from building height to the width of pavements, and ensured that the planned metro system effectively links the city.

“The thing that should be admired with Abu Dhabi is the fact that the political will is there to address some of the issues that we continually talk about but that we never do anything about,” Hajjar said.

“It’s going to be an interesting exercise primarily because no other place has done it in the Middle East. We’ve had master-planned communities but never a master planned city.”

It is well-known that the climate is one of the biggest challenges for designers in the Middle East, and creating habitable outside space is one of the aims of Abu Dhabi’s plan. Hajjar pointed out that since HOK first started planning communities and developments in the Middle East in the 1980s, people’s attitudes to the heat, and what temperature is bearable, have changed.

“When I first came to Dubai no one would sit outside in March, April, May, now you see people quite often sitting outside. As long as it is comfortable,” he said.

“If you actually take away the humidity, it is hot but you don’t need very much to make it comfortable for yourself.”