National Plan to Stimulate Urban Policies by 2025

The Saudi government has announced a national plan to stimulate urban policies by 2025, aiming to enhance the quality of life for residents. This initiative includes the development of a “Digital Twin” model to simulate urban policy impacts, plan for emergencies, and foster collaborative city design.

RYADH: To guarantee integrated services for citizens by 2025, Saudi Arabia intends to drive urban programs, says top minister, so improving quality of life. Speaking during the first Global Smart City Forum’s opening remarks in Riyadh, Kingdom’s Minister of Municipal and Rural Affairs and Housing Majid Al-Hogail said that this will be significant since Saudi Arabia is about to create a national model called the Digital Twin.

Emphasizing Vision 2030 as a transforming trip for Saudi Arabia and stressing its part in inspiring enthusiasm, optimism, and ambition among people, the minister further described its urban development plan. We also keep very ambitious in creating one of the most well-known national applications and models, the Digital Twin, which is revolutionizing our city planning and operation. Al-Hogail said.

“Our goal is for at least 10 Saudi cities to be among the top 50 global cities by achieving the factors of governance, sustainability, and interaction with the population, so meeting their aspirations, and achieving high prosperity for them,” the minister said, describing the development made by Saudi cities in the field of smart technologies and urban development.

He said, “Four of our energetic cities were ranked on the Smart Cities Index last year. This remarkable path towards change has allowed us to use data, artificial intelligence, and technology to really and practically influence local governments.”

Al-Hogail highlighted a case study of how technology is being used to enhance infrastructure and city services. She said that in Jeddah, waste management solutions were created using newly discovered technical breakthroughs like the Internet of Things to plan and monitor operations properly.

“We thus lowered violations related to waste and hygiene by 25 percent to reach a cleaner city to avoid the disturbance of residents resulting from the movements of cleaning crew in Dammam on the Arabian Gulf coast.” he said.

“We have presented an application that manages more than 20,000 parking spaces, through which access to the most crowded areas has been facilitated to achieve a seamless experience for residents to find available parking spaces.” the minister said.

Al-Ghamdi highlighted during the opening remarks that this is a result of government efforts to make use of the national smart city platform.

“We gather today and tomorrow to achieve three main objectives and vision sustainable smart cities of the future, enhance governance, smart city initiatives globally for the government, stimulate businesses to invest in building smart solutions” Al-Ghamdi said.

He also pointed out that utilising weekly footage of the Kingdom’s major cities, algorithms and models were created to identify visual pollution in streets.

Under cooperation with the Ministry of Municipality, this project sought to maintain urban beauty and raise general quality of life.

“During the last Hajj season, in collaboration with the Ministry of Interior, we supported traffic and cloud management in one of the world’s most challenging event scenarios with several advanced analytics and AI solutions.” Al-Ghamdi said.

“This resulted in reducing the waiting time at the entrance gate of Makkah region significantly,” he continued.