Ahmedabad: Several urban planners have been motivated to try and imitate Riyadh and seek collaboration with the Kingdom as a result of Saudi Arabia's G20 representative Fahd Al-Rasheed's appearance at the Urban 20 Mayoral Summit in Ahmedabad, India, this week. He focused on the importance of engaging with citizens for development projects.
As CEO of the Royal Commission for Riyadh, Al-Rasheed, now a consultant to the Saudi Council of Ministers, worked to make the Saudi capital one of the top smart cities in the world. On Friday, he told the attendees of the summit about the city's success.
He emphasised that one of the key issues was citizen engagement and that good governance ultimately served "every person that lives in the city."
Indian planners and top municipal officials gained new perspectives from this perspective of urban development as a multi-level endeavour spanning the economy, lifestyle, and infrastructure.
The mayor of Srinagar, Junaid Azim Mattu, told Arab News that he was "quite impressed with the fact that he envisions cities as multi-dimensional living organisms that have to evolve with time, which have various facets, various functions, and various roles."
He discussed the retail economy, infrastructure, and its connection to human behaviour, as well as how human behaviour, as well as measures of human prosperity and activity, must be at the centre of infrastructure development. That was incredibly fascinating to me.
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For Mattu, the growth of Riyadh was "definitely a success story" that Indian cities could take inspiration from.
He said, "I'm sure there are many things in Riyadh that should and can be imitated." I requested that my team start a mechanism for knowledge sharing with the city of Riyadh in a conversation with them.
The significance of citizens' wellbeing was the main lesson from Al-Rasheed's speech that Somya Gurjar, the mayor of Jaipur, took away.
"Citizens' health ought to come first. Healthy citizens will undoubtedly make significant contributions to the growth of a city, she told Arab News, adding that she also identified with the Riyadh planner's emphasis on skill development to support the city's economy — a goal she is also attempting to achieve in Jaipur.
Al-Rasheed's background in both the public and private sectors, according to senior urban planner and educator Dr. Chetan Vaidya, made his ideas appealing to his audience.
We require a strong technical team in addition to appropriate funding that links public and private financing. We should take a lesson from Riyadh in this regard, Vaidya told Arab News.
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Another lesson was to interact with the city's residents and learn what kind of environment they prefer.
I believe we will create our new cities incorrectly unless we get the lifestyles right, which is a lesson from his presentation, said Vaidya.