Abstract
Cities in this ever-changing world are struggling between survival and prosperity, amid multiple challenges and divergent targets. From one hand, they are confronting escalating environmental issues such as the rising global warming, and from the other hand they are facing local urban problems that are deeply rooted in their growth and urbanization process. The situation however seems more complicated. Countries are required to adopt global agendas such as SDGs and the New Urban Agenda that promote sustainable development while pursuing their promising visions and development plans towards a prosper economy and a decent quality of life. This is a multifaceted puzzle that brings the issue of ‘urban transformation’ to the forefront of this contemporary urban battle. Riyadh city, as its counterparts in the Gulf region, took advantage of the oil booming in the second half of the twentieth century to grow from a small town of compact traditional form to a sprawled modern metropolitan. The rapid pace of urbanization that the city had undergone resulted in numerous urban problems, such as urban sprawl, traffic congestion and neighborhood degradation. The city now is undergoing huge social, cultural, administrative and economic changes guided by the Kingdom Vision 2030. Taking this into account, along with global agendas and commitments, it’s inevitable to pose a critical question of how Riyadh is going to balance all that and transform its current urban situation to the most urged one; the sustainable, resilient and livable city! Based on Riyadh case, the paper is going to develop a framework for sustainable urban transformation (SUT). This will follow bringing insights from literature along with the analysis of existing conditions and practices of Riyadh city as well as targeted agendas to develop such a framework. Koch et al. (2018) highlight that transformation is becoming an obvious paradigm in both scientific debates on sustainability as well as political agendas on global environmental change. They argue that although the need for deep changes that take place primarily in cities is acknowledged in political arena, academic debates still lack a clear definition of urban transformation. Maassen and Galvin (2019) assert that urban transformation has attracted many discussions and debates in terms of its potential and mechanism, whereas agreement on what constitutes sustainable urban transformation and how it’s achieved represent a gap that needs to be bridged. Gϋlersoy and Gϋrler (2011) argue that approaches for urban transformation in the 21st century tend to focus on integrated urban regeneration as a result from the development of strategic models. In addition to the debates and gabs evoked in related literature, the importance of this framework arises from the fact that there are no clear implementation plans and sound measurable criteria for both global and national agendas. Another apparent and serious problem in these agendas resides in their approach to the existing context; they sound as if we are dealing with simple problems for new cities being established in vacant tracts! The reality is however totally different; we are addressing existing cities within over-utilized limited boundaries and facing wicked problems. This makes balancing multiple agendas and initiatives even more complex and critical in a way that sheds light on the importance of the framework. Apart from the necessity of sustainable urban transformation for all cities due to evolving global trends driven mainly by the climate change, gulf cities are in a critical situation that oblige them to spark and adopt sustainable urban transformation owing to numerous unsustainable growth and practices. The SUT framework is expected to be useful for Gulf cities; as they share similar socio-cultural aspects, economic base, and urban problems.
