Today’s city planners oppose urban sprawl and the construction of new cities. Planners tend to encourage the development of existing urban conditions based on sound urban and environmental principals through increasing densities, mixed land-uses, improving infrastructure and environmentally friendly public transport alternatives.
The state of Kuwait is moving toward the establishment of the Silk City and islands project under the banner of the New Kuwait Project. The government has taken numerous steps toward this goal, including the establishment of a dedicated agency and signing a framework agreement with the government of China. Due to the unique natural setting of the land planned for development, it’s important to shed a light on a similar experiment that China carried eleven years ago, the city of Tianjin.
In 2008, China and Singapore’s government signed a framework agreement to create an environmentally friendly city in Tianjin on 30 KM² of land to accommodate 35,000 residents. The project attracted more than 600 companies and more than 7 billion USD in investments.
The master plan of Tianjin’s city was based on 22 mandatory indicators and four guiding indicators. Further, all indicators were quantitative to allow monitoring and ensure adherence.
The master plan was aimed to create an environmentally friendly city that applies the garden city principals. Subsequently, the plan sought to mitigate the dependency on private cars through well-distributed land uses, the provision of high-quality public transport systems and pedestrian walkways and bicycle lanes — in addition to strict building codes and energy use.
It’s also worth noting that the location of the city was heavily polluted due to 40 years of dumping wastewater as well as industrial waste. Inovative technology was used to clean the site. China received three patents as a result of research and technology invented for this project.
Today, eleven years after the start of its construction, the city is successful and considered a world-class smart city. It houses 100,000 residents and created more than 30,000 jobs.
Such outstanding experiments and success merits attention, and we Kuwaitis can learn many lessons such as:
– Collaboration with advanced nations can strengthen relations, transfer technologies and produce successful results.
– In this age, regional collaboration among nations became inevitable, common and successful.
– New Cities must be designed as smart, environmental cities. This is a necessity and no longer a luxury.
– Megaprojects provide opportunities to conduct scientific research and experiments with new technologies, which provides a clear path to improve the quality of research and academic institutions in the country.
– New cities create a platform for the propagation of a new social spirit, correcting the negative lifestyles that the general public is accustom to.
Thus, if we must create new urban areas and urbanize some of the most valuable Kuwaiti islands, we should implement high standards for design. These high standards will ensure that the land will be developed to better serve society at large and not used in the creation of sites for cheap real-estate investment, delusive speculations and empty concrete masses.