Urban Regeneration of GCC Cities: Preserving the Urban Fabric’s Cultural Heritage and Social Complexity

Abstract

Urban Planning is the activity aiming at organizing the urban space, ordering the land use and the built environment where human activities take place. In the past decades cities located in the GCC have experienced a concurrent rapid urban development and regeneration. Scholars stress that [1] in the past two decades the urban planning process, which has led the urban growth of GCC cities, has been mainly based on western patterns with no much consideration of the unplanned urban evolution and social complexity of the city, and that [2] land speculation has succeeded in distorting the intended orderliness of urban space. This approach to urban planning has resulted in the urban regeneration and modernization of the built environment with a philosophy based on land speculation and urban sprawling causing negative effects on the live ability of cities. The effects of land speculation and sprawling consist of poor land subdivision and dominance of private residential land use over recreational and public land use which represented the vibrant unplanned and social nodes enhancing the live ability of the urban space. This paper argues that in order to plan the urban growth of GCC cities and to pursue modernity, a comprehensive urban planning strategy should be aiming at preserving and regenerating the city’s[1] cultural heritage (or historical urban evolution) and [2] social complexity, which are source of generative ideas and principles for the design of liveable communities.