Smart city strategy for Uptown Jeddah.

Uptown Jeddah is a new district in north Jeddah, planned next to King Abdulaziz International Airport as a contributor to Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030.

The developer’s brief asked for a smart city built on three principles. Efficient: lower the use of energy and water and the cost of running the place. Experience: design around the people using it, not around products. Effective: judge each measure by whether it achieves its purpose, not by whether it was installed.

Chapman Taylor, the British architecture and masterplanning practice, was preparing the concept masterplan. In October 2023 it asked ddx to define the strategy for the smart city part of the project.

The brief was specific about what it wanted covered, and there were about four weeks to do it.

Write a smart city strategy that met the developer’s brief and fitted Chapman Taylor’s masterplan. Alongside it, look at how the district’s digital services could connect with the developments around it, and show the services as everyday experiences inside the main proposal.

ddx worked alongside Chapman Taylor’s masterplanning team. Chapman Taylor led the conceptual master planning; ddx led the smart city side.

The strategy set out one smart city platform to run the district’s services, with a living lab for developing and testing new services in the district itself. It defined services in nine areas: mobility, utilities and environment, buildings, health and wellness, security, logistics, customer experience, the living lab and an innovation zone.

It planned for the platform to connect with six neighbouring districts, so that services stay consistent as people move between them. It was aligned with Vision 2030, with the international standard for smart city indicators, ISO 37122:2019, and with the national smart city platform that the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA) was defining.

A smart city would need a digital twin, a live digital model of the place. To show what one could do at planning stage, ddx loaded Chapman Taylor’s massing model into Nextspace, a digital twin platform, combined it with Google Earth tiles for accurate location and terrain, and linked it to Unreal Engine for daylight and sun-path renderings at cinematic quality. The model could be explored at that quality, flying through the district.

ddx issued the smart city strategy to Chapman Taylor in December 2023. The concept masterplan, dated March 2024, credits ddx with the smart city strategy.

The digital twin let Chapman Taylor and the developer understand the proposal in a way static 3D renderings, the usual way to present a masterplan, could not.

Time was the constraint. With about four weeks and an explicit brief, ddx set out to meet as many of the brief’s requirements as the time allowed, working with Chapman Taylor’s team.

At concept stage a project doesn’t need a digital twin yet, but a smart city eventually will. Building one from the concept model showed Chapman Taylor and the developer that it was useful during planning too, not only once the district is running.