Pedestrian-friendly Abu Dhabi, a step in the right direction

Jessica Hume

• Last Updated: April 13. 2009 9:30AM UAE / April 13. 2009 5:30AM GMT

If having the tallest buildings in the world made a city a great place to live, the UAE would be up at the top of anyone’s list. But buildings in themselves don’t make a city interesting: rather it’s about how people use them. It’s time we paid more attention to what happens at street level, not 50 storeys up in the clouds.

Despite their ubiquity, tall towers are controversial. Because more than half the world’s population live in cities, there are strong arguments for high-density development, in which towers play an integral role: they accommodate a large number of people in a relatively small footprint, and they reduce both the need to drive to work, and urban sprawl.

The arguments against tall towers are that they shade too much of the streets, they diminish views for those who live and work in them, and their sheer size can be antisocial. While creating shade might not be considered much of a problem in this part of the world, our towers have a long way to go before they truly add to civic life.

The 1920s marked the beginning of the skyscraper era, when the colourful but polarising Swiss-French architect and urban theorist Le Corbusier came up with his wildly antisocial design for the Contemporary City. The planned city, which he said would accommodate three million people, had a series of 60-storey skyscrapers in the city centre, around which wide roads would snake. Vast tracts of grass would separate one building from the next. Walkways were segregated from roads. The buildings in his “vertical city”, Le Corbusier theorised, would become vibrant communities, envied by all who couldn’t afford them and loved by those who could.

His ideas still baffle most planners, but you have to remember that this was the man who also wanted to bulldoze a large part of historic central Paris and replace it with suburban cookie-cutter pods borrowed from his Contemporary City.

And although in architecture and urban planning circles Le Corbusier’s designs are mocked to this day, the car-centricity that informed them still manages to permeate city plans. You might think that some of the UAE’s planners, for example, had taken a few cues from Le Corbusier: major cities are a sea of skyscrapers, broken up by huge roads.

That towers have their place in any city cannot be denied. At least one significant skyscraper is always top of the wish-list of any emerging urban centre, and imaginatively designed and executed they can become symbols of a city: think of the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the Empire State building in New York, the Burj Dubai.

But there is a difference between the singular landmark and entire city centres with streets lined by high-rise buildings. The biggest problem with rows of towers is the absence of life where buildings meet the street, the only part of these structures that exists on a human scale.

Without cafes, small shops and restaurants, streets lined only with tall towers can be foreboding, ugly, even dangerous. Many cities have at least one central area made up primarily of towers, and the dynamics are always the same. The offices in these towers bring people to the streets during the day, but almost all of them disappear in the evenings. Without any pedestrians at night, these streets can become places for illicit activity – vandalism, harassment or, in some cases, drug use.

People need reasons to be in the city, whether it’s to shop, eat or sit. The presence of small businesses at the ground level of tall towers has a humanising effect on the streetscape. It extends the hours of activity: an otherwise underused pavement can become lively, a destination even, if executed well.

The absence of street life in large parts of Abu Dhabi and Dubai is a result of the rush to build. Development over the past 35 years has been at a frenetic pace: in one fell swoop, the desert turned into a metropolis, structurally at any rate.

It could be argued that both Dubai and Abu Dhabi have developed too quickly, and according to how planners thought cities ought to look, not how they ought to function. The result is the appearance from afar of large, populous cities, but the reality is that much of Abu Dhabi and Dubai are entirely unfriendly to pedestrians – and what is the point of a city without pedestrians? Because priority was given to cars and not to people, walking is difficult, sometimes impossible and usually dangerous. Street life is at a minimum.

Here, the idea of public space has not yet permeated the civic consciousness. The excessive heat is often cited as an argument against creating more exciting outdoor businesses and other spaces, but it doesn’t hold water: for more than half the year we have the kind of weather that most cold-climate people envy.

Last week the Government announced its plans for the growth and development of Al Ain, the “garden city” of the UAE, where the challenge for planners is how to create greater density in the city centre to avoid further urban sprawl. And next week, at Cityscape Abu Dhabi, the Urban Planning Council will unveil details of its proposals to make the capital a pedestrian-friendly city, with shaded walkways, safer crossings, better access and more pavements in front of buildings.

This is good news. Our cities need to begin the process of creating attractive, safe public spaces at the bottom of their towers. Then, as well as just looking like great cities of the world, they would be well on the road to becoming just that.



jhume@thenational.ae