Smart City Feature: King Abdullah Economic City
We were sitting in one of the study rooms in our library at the University of Vienna. 2 days left until our final exam in Accounting. Everybody was focused. A smell of Red Bull, coffee and cold sweat was in the air. There was almost no light coming from outside into our room. Everybody was concentrated, but wait, not everybody. Richard just received an email with an offer to work the next 2 years in Saudi Arabia. He was super excited. I couldn´t understand why. “Saudi Arabia would be the last place I want to work,” I thought. “There is nothing to do and only desert.”
-Wrong.
Saudi Arabia is smarter than you think.
King Abdullah Economic City, a $100 billion effort to build a giant port city along the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia. Located an hour from Jeddah (Saudi Arabia’s second largest city after Riyadh), is unique in a lot of ways. It’s a private effort, listed on the Saudi stock exchange with $2.5 billion in paid-up capital. The company and their CEO Al-Rasheed behind this massive project know the market pretty well. They teamed up with, Emaar Properties, a real estate development company based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
The city, along with other five city project, is part of an ambitious program to attract foreign investors and make Saudi Arabia smart.
There is no country that can build a new city “over night”, but yet Saudi Arabia tries to do so. The biggest challenge for them is to make it smart, and to do so they first decided to divide it into different main components: Industrial Valley, King Abdullah Port, Residential Areas, Sea Resort, Educational Zone, Central Business District.
You maybe thinking that a lot of cities are divided into similar components and they are still not smart, but they don’t use Internet of Things (IoT) to control them. Al-Rasheed is currently developing four IoT-relaed concepts: home automation platforms, smart lighting, security, and intelligent energy consumption. He has a vision to create the “perfect-home”, targeting mid income families looking for homes between 250.000–300.000 USD. He wants to build at least 400.000 smart residents in the city. Controlling your kitchen (fill up your fridge with fresh food), your air condition, your garden, your bathroom, your garage, your pool,… while being away is not the future anymore. In King Abdullah´s Economic City you can buy all this for a rather low price.
After this, I can definetely say that I’ve changed my mind about Saudi Arabia. It is really smart.
Enjoy Richard!
