Unified Addressing System Design and Implementation
CLIENT: King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC)
LOCATION: Saudi Arabia
STARTING YEAR: 2016
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 the entire 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 program 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) Program.
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 program 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: This activity involved conducting in-depth interviews with KAEC Addressing System stakeholders and comprehensive material reviews to identify aspects of existing and current documentation.
- Initial Consulting and Liaison with Client (Workshop): The information collected and analyzed in the preceding Preliminary Research task was used to set the benchmark for street addressing GIS implementation and technology solutions for KAEC in order to develop the material required to communicate the findings, discuss the proposed approach for KAEC and gather additional requirements and intelligence with the community of stakeholders in the socialization workshop.
- Protocol Document Development: The objective of the protocol document is to provide an authoritative single point of reference for street addressing practitioners within KAEC. To achieve this, GPC-GIS needed to consolidate the results of the previous activities to create policies, procedures and protocols that support the development and maintenance of a comprehensive addressing system that provides a unique address to every residence, business and public structure in the city. GPC-GIS’s role was to ensure that the KAEC addressing protocols lay the foundation for other critical and interrelated elements by providing a governance model that incorporates the technical policies for geonaming, signage and wayfinding that underlie the detailed standards and guidelines for each element in relation to street addressing.