The Riyadh Strategy project
The Riyadh Strategy project aims to create a strategic vision and development foundation for the city of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. Specifically, it aligns with the city’s ambition to become one of the world’s largest urban economies and to attract over 40 million visitors a year by 2030.
Sanjay Tanwani presenting at the Digital Cities: Connected Technology, Connecting Ecosystems launch webinar
AECOM’s scope of work includes the preparation of an initial baseline assessment and outlining the Riyadh City of the Future Program Urban Spatial Planning Strategic Pillars — which introduced an Urban Innovation Centre Initiative — with an intention to build a common spatial data infrastructure for the city. The outcome would be to build a digital twin for Riyadh — a one of its kind in the Middle East — which can then be used as a prototype for enabling AECOM’s Integrated Digital Twins to run for other geographies.
As part of the project, a data acquisition and aggregation module collects varied and diverse data interrelated to city services from different governmental sources. At the same time, an AI Driven Interactive Data computation and processing module performs normalization, filtration, processing and data analysis to better analyze the existing conditions against proposed and generated scenarios, elevating real-time intelligent decision-making and user- centric output.
Meanwhile, we introduced a conceptual framework to bridge the gap between multifunctional and multisystem urban growth management. This is now being conducted as multiple projects that have been branched out of Riyadh Strategy to meet the Goals set for 2030.
In addition, connecting with the local community has been an important part of the process, and we proposed an Interactive Digital Crowd Sourcing Platform that would help gather, engage and introspect citizens’ points of view on the developments. A public ideation campaign was also introduced to guide the Riyadh Strategy in its subsequent phases of development and allow AECOM and the client to explore and account for citizen aspirations.