Sustainable Densification: Buraidah

As an extension of the Buraidah City Profile, the demonstration project will apply the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) principles on sustainable neighbourhood planning, applicable to the Saudi context. One of the primary goals of the project is to demonstrate how to implement possible solutions for shifting urbanisation in Saudi to a sustainable development track, without adopting heterotopic models. Instead, it intends to develop locally rooted traditions and culture and the design components. Also, the project was developed alongside the Strategic Vision for Buraidah, tapping into the four strategic recommendations, and spatially analysing them at the neighbourhood scale. 

 

 

Policy recommendations for improving urban planning strategic frameworks, and the development of implementable projects, need to be structured through a multi-scalar lens that views the city as a continuum, growing from the neighbourhood to the urban and the broader city-region scale. This ensures spatial coherence, and coordination of various actions at the different scales, therefore maximising the impact of structured and systemic urban transformations. 

 

 

As such, the project focuses on the establishment of a comfortable urban environment with a variety of housing typologies and diverse public spaces, exemplifying a different approach to neighbourhood development, which includes contextual characters, local climate and cultural peculiarities, all the while meeting the needs for a more compact, integrated, inclusive, and sustainable urban development model.