Bringing Life Back to Falastin Street in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Abstract

In modern urbanism, streets are essential to providing urban vitality, with pedestrians playing a key role. The process of pedestrianization of a city is important to the quality of life of all its inhabitants, but does not always receive the attention it deserves in urban plan development of cities in Saudi Arabia. Improved pedestrianization could significantly contribute to bringing vitality to the streets of the Kingdom’s cities, where many of the city residents tend to use private cars rather than walking in the streets. In this empirical study, we chose Falastin Street as the case study in the city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. As part of the underlying theoretical framework, we reviewed the new urbanism criteria and principles. Subsequently, site analysis was performed, including land use, traffic, building height, wind, sunlight, access and nodes. The nodes were obtained by applying social media data gathered from the application Snapchat, which was used to create the heat map of the Falastin Street. Furthermore, four successful case studies were chosen, with at least one common feature in terms of weather, economy, social life, and length, in our case. The case studies were divided into two types: new and renovated projects. The streets were evaluated according to various urban and architectural aspects. Comparison of studies yielded several flaws, including lack of appropriate lighting and human scale consideration, as well as insufficient public spaces and attractive elements. A review of cases of effective pedestrianization of streets enabled us to outline the principles of urban renovation projects, including diversity in commercial activities, increased density in the center of the street and architectural quality improvements, such as addition of open spaces around the center of the street for visitors. For the master plan, the site was divided into 5 zones, with each zone having its own public space. Approaching the urban design criteria by studied and obtained principles enabled establishment of the main objectives of the project, including spaces for outdoor daily life activities and social gathering in this street. As a main solution for increasing the density in the site, we proposed increasing the center social life activities of the street, as the main node can increase the value of the middle site due to augmented density. In addition, using the retail marketing approach, we have determined that distribution of brands on the Falastin Street can serve as attractive points for pedestrian movement. These distributions were provided by Grasshopper software, yielding five scenarios, with the optimal chosen scenario offering the best connection network among the brand stores. Finally, the master plan was generated by creating the public spaces inside the site and considering the optimal distribution of brand stores on the street. Considering the rich cultural heritage of Jeddah, another recommendation includes the use of its specific traditional windows called Rawashen for urban façades. Other strategies for enhanced pedestrianization of the Falastin Street include promotion of public spaces and brand distribution as attractive elements for visitors to visit by foot. Applying such criteria in the similar streets could help city planners and policy makers in pedestrianizing the streets in Saudi Arabia.