NDC Metropolitan Park
IGA role: Collaboration on the design concept
Collaboration: Gustafson Porter, London
Location: Jeddah, KSA
The NCD Metropolitan Park in Jeddah is integral to a city-wide effort to establish a system of three linear green spaces linking the mountains with the sea. The design is a direct response to the extremely arid climate – a linear 12.5km park for local residents and visitors.
Jeddah has a very distinctive location in the world, placed just north of the Tropic of Cancer on the Saudi Arabian Peninsula beside the Red Sea. It is known as one of the World’s great trading cities, where historic trade in salt, frankincense and gold has been replaced by contemporary trading in oil and technology. Its trading history is matched by its importance as the gateway to the holy city of Mecca for millions of religious pilgrims throughout the Muslim world, with their shared beliefs but also varied cultural backgrounds. Whilst creating diversity through its landscape and streetscape events and places, the NDC Park should also offer continuity within a city where neighborhoods and districts are often fragmented by major highways. The scheme creates a new reference point within people’s mental map of the city, helping to define the new often disorientating northern suburbs as a distinctive, humane and desirable place to live. It also generates a pedestrian friendly movement infrastructure within the city, where the texture of habitation is intimate and people feel comfortable and safe in what is currently often a hostile, hot and polluted environment.
Due to its linear nature the park can help give the neighborhoods through which it passes a distinct and recognizable character, helping to engender a sense of belonging and pride of place amongst the local population. The NDC Park should create a diverse range of commercial opportunities that are in sympathy with its recreational program. Providing opportunities for socializing, shopping and playing. The scheme allows a layering of activities that create changing perceptions of the ways space can be used, creating intrigue and surprise at different times of the day, the week and during the year.
New opportunities were to be found in the park to enhance Jeddah’s fame as a city of external sculpture and art. Through the use of light, water and land movement create interactive sculpture as part of the landscape environment that can be recognized as one moves along the cities highways.