Abstract
The GCC cities have been witnessing rapid changes in its urban systems to cope with the post oil era. Recently the GCC governments have allocated multibillion US dollars to finance major infrastructure, urban rejuvenation, and rehabilitation projects in most of the major cities to diversify its economy and have a smooth transition towards the post-oil paradigm. Despite the ongoing mega development projects which aimed to achieve drastic changes in the cities’ urban system by the year of 2030 or 2040, none of these projects have taken into consideration the readiness of their cities’ urban metabolism. As a result, the ongoing urban projects have taken place without formulating an integrated mechanism to utilize and enhance the cities' metabolic efficiency that would steer the constant growth of the cities towards resilience. Due to the need for bridging between the existing GCC urban systems and the recent pandemic challenges, this paper will examine how to accelerate the urban metabolism of the GCC cities through bottom-up and top-down approaches to reach the optimum recovery paradigm for it. Accordingly, a comparison and a historical analysis of the existing urban systems will be in this paper supported by political, spatial, and economic analysis to produce an integrated kit that will accelerate and drive the cities’ metabolism through a policy level, city & regional planning, and neighborhood design level. The paper suggests several implementation tools to accelerate the integration of urban metabolism, resources, and urban assets management concepts with the current GCC urban governance systems to support the transformation towards resilient and efficient metabolic cities in the short, medium, and long term. In addition, it answers the following questions: • How to move from linear urban metabolism to circular and agile one? • What are the required urban, economic, social, environmental, and cultural transformation aspects to support a smooth transition in the governance system? • Why is it the right time to develop an accelerator kit for the urban metabolism of the GCC cities? • How will accelerators (tools) kit guide a smooth transition towards efficient urban metabolism? The outcomes of this paper will provide a road map for the municipal leaders and urban development authorities to formulate and tailor a specific accelerators kit to steer the future resilient GCC cities. Keywords: metabolism; GCC; urban; resource management, accelerators, transformation
