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An expert speaking at Arab Future Cities Summit Qatar 2014.

Qatar in major smart cities push

DOHA, February 25, 2015

Qatar, with its vision for 2030, is poised to be one of the key Gulf players in this global move towards smart cities  with focus on key areas such as mobility, environment, infrastructure and systems, said experts.

A smart city, by its very definition, conjures up visions of developed urban spaces created with for the purpose of providing a high quality of life for its citizens.

To achieve this end, the city focuses on excellence in key areas such as mobility, environment, infrastructure and systems. The drivers for these would be human capital, social capital and information and communications technology (ICT), they said.

And ultimately, this movement has to be viewed against the overarching theme of sustainable economic development, said the experts ahead of The Arab Future Cities Summit in Qatar.

The event produced by global conference organizers, Expotrade, will run from April 13 to 14, 2015 at the Ritz-Carlton in Doha, Qatar.

A complete understanding of such key elements of smart city management can only be achieved when they are viewed against the context of an actual modern city. Doha can be taken as an example, said the experts.

Its new-found eminence as a major city based on its position in the global energy market has led to a boom in its expansion plans and its attendant resource requirements.

With knowledge becoming the new buzzword in a post-oil scenario, Doha’s new urbanism becomes all the more relevant for Qatar and its 2030 vision.

According to experts, Qatar is constructing a new urban development brand backed by political commitment and with financial resources at its command.

This creation of ‘Dohaization’ is a carefully crafted one. Understanding the dynamics of constructing such a brand can offer keen insights into the well-planned process for building Qatar’s new identity, said Ali A. Alraouf, the professor of architecture and urbanism, Head of CB, Training, Research and Development, QNMP Doha.

He will be a key speaker at the summit discussing about branding Qatar via Doha’s emerging knowledge-based smart urbanism.

Coming down to brass tacks, any push for smart city development needs to include citizen participation and empowerment.

With open innovation and ecosystems in the cities increasingly coming to the forefront, strategies must be developed with an eye on understanding newer and newer concepts of innovation and collaboration, global innovation chains, transformative and reactive governance models, and the crucial role of the citizen in shaping the direction of participatory urban development, said Katalin Gallyas, the policy advisor, City Council of Amsterdam.

He will speak at length on open innovation ecosystems in cities at the upcoming summit.

But such strategies will be deemed incomplete unless ground-level realities are considered. Take parking, for instance. With modern cities acutely aware of the potential pitfalls of an improperly planned parking management system, they usually have a tailored policy in place, to deal with it.

However, all plans can go awry unless this policy is integrated with the full scheme of the city transportation plan, said the experts.
 
With many cities in the Arab world instituting plans to improve public transport and sustainable modes of transportation, the challenge can often be to understand the subtle difference between adequate, inadequate and extra parking areas usually meant for private passenger vehicles, remarked Mohammad Nabil Ibrahim, the lead transportation engineer, Integrated Transportation Planning Division – Surface Transport Sector, Department of Transport, Abu Dhabi.

He will talk about smart solutions for these very real challenges in his session on planning for parking at the Arab Future Cities Summit.-TradeArabia News Service




Tags: Qatar | GCC | Smart Cities |

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