New Delhi: At the U20 Mayoral Summit on Friday in Gandhinagar, the capital of the western Indian state of Gujarat, Fahd Al-Rasheed, a Saudi Arabian adviser in the general secretariat of the Council of Ministers, described his ten-year experience of making Riyadh a world-class city.
Cities from G20 nations are a part of the city diplomacy initiative known as Urban 20 or U20.
U20 is a subset of the G20, a larger intergovernmental forum, and it is essential to the G20 negotiations as a whole to include perspectives, issues, and ideas from cities.
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The decarbonization of the built environment, mainstreaming women, youth, and children in urban development, redefining city investments, and launching a global urban framework to utilise future technologies are the U20's priority areas under India's G20 presidency this year.
One of the biggest U20 summits ever has taken place in the twin cities of Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar with more than 500 participants, including delegates and participants from 57 cities around the world and 35 cities in India.
Al-Rasheed served as CEO of the Royal Commission for Riyadh City (RCRC), the organisation in charge of the strategic development of Saudi Arabia's capital city, for ten years.
He was a part of Riyadh's ambitious plans to, by the year 2030, rank among the world's top cities economically and serve as a regional centre for trade, tourism, and livability.
He described to the U20 gathering how he completely rebuilt the city of Riyadh.
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The meeting, called the "Thematic and Spotlight Session," was attended by delegates from both India and abroad. Rasheed spoke at the event. "I had the privilege and wisdom from starting the city from scratch, a city of 2 million people, and I spent the 30s of my life building a utopia," he said.
It was a brand-new, 2 million-person city that the king funded. I promise you that I made every mistake in the book while building this over the course of a decade.
It was a significant challenge as well as a lovely and wonderful challenge, he continued. We have a (dry) port at the end of it that is among the top 100 ports in the world. It was chosen as the world's most effective port the previous year. We constructed housing for all income levels, an industrial zone that drew foreign direct investment from all over the world, and the first Saudi golf championship.
Al-Rasheed served as King Abdullah Economic City's (KAEC) group managing director and managing director. KAEC was the world's first publicly listed city and one of the biggest private sector projects. He served as the deputy governor and CFO of the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority before joining KAEC.
"After constructing the city for ten years, I had the opportunity to envision Riyadh, the 8 million-person city that currently serves as the capital of Saudi Arabia. So, after starting from scratch, you come to the existing city," Al-Rasheed said.
The city wants you to invest your life, your family's livelihood, your future finances, whether you are investing in a house, a school, or your interpersonal relationships. This is the one and only thing the city is after. Each of us owns them, Al-Rasheed continued.
Keshav Verma, the top urban planner in India and chairman of the high level committee of urban planners in New Delhi, was impressed by his speech.
"I told him (Al-Rasheed) that I needed to pick his brain a lot while he was in India. You are aware that India struggles to adapt to new cities. They are poorly thought out. Because the new cities don't develop a strong sense of community, we don't get that kind of response from them, Verma told Arab News.
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In order to develop urban centres in India, he wants to establish partnerships with Saudi Arabia.
"If he (Al-Rasheed) feels so inclined, we would be happy to partner with him in developing ideas and we would be happy to come there (Saudi Arabia) to have conversations," Verma said.