GPC-GIS were engaged by Emaar the Economic City (EEC), Master Developer for the King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to develop their Unified Street Addressing Protocols (standard) and an Implementation Strategy for the development of a unified street addressing system for the city. The street addressing system for KAEC is based on a systematic and easy to use street addressing and signage approach that has been standardized for all of the city. It provides a way to uniquely identify the location of every home, office or facility in the residential, commercial and industrial areas, using the signage to find our way. The system is designed to establish a sense of order, comfort, and convenience that can be felt in very practical ways in the daily lives of both residents and visitors alike.
During the development of the KAEC Unified Street Addressing Protocols, GPC-GIS conducted a workshop with the street addressing stakeholders where the participants recognized the need to expand the street addressing project to an all-encompassing programme to create and manage the wayfinding, geonaming and signage as well as street addressing for KAEC. Subsequently, the initial Street Addressing Implementation Strategy was upgraded to not only address the strategy to create and manage the street addressing component, but to now outline all of the required activities that must be carried out to design and implement a complete Unified Wayfinding, Addressing, Geonaming and Signage (Uni-WAGS) Programme.
Understanding the dynamic nature of city master planning, development and management where shifting priorities, extremely tight deadlines and financial expectations to see positive return on investment are inevitable, the Implementation Strategy needed to be highly flexible, highly tactical and leverage existing available resources and systems to achieve early results. The strategy also needed to allow the city to implement the critical components of the programme in a manner that was responding to their shifting priorities. It was therefore developed such that each component could be implemented (where possible) earlier or later depending on budget availability, development priorities, stakeholders’ needs and the organization’s readiness.
The scope of GPC-GIS’s engagement for the above project included the following:
Preliminary Research
Initial Consulting and Liaison with Client (Workshop)
Protocol Document Development
Implementation Strategy and Implementation Schedule Development