Park Life
Ukraine’s capital is the latest must-do city break.
Alex Rayner meets the new breed of social entrepreneur turning Jeddah’s neglected spaces into parks.
ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS THAT STRIKES YOU ON ARRIVAL IN JEDDAH is the Red Sea port’s citizen’s love of the great outdoors. As we ride from the airport to the city centre* we pass a family having a picnic under the shade of a road sign, a group of teenagers setting up a volleyball net on little more than a traffic island, and a team of kids kicking a ball on a vacant lot.
Through the darkness of the tinted limousine windows, it’s hard not to be disheartened by the quality of the public spaces on offer to Jeddawis. There are notable exceptions – such as the city’s breezy Corniche – but in most of the city undeveloped patches of scrubland are an all-too-frequent sight.
Mohammad Fayez, a veteran civil engineer and the chairman of the Friends of Jeddah Parks, concurs: “You go around Jeddah on the weekend and you’ll see people sitting on sidewalks because they don’t have anywhere else to go.”
Intriguingly, many of these undeveloped scraps of real estate are in officially designated public spaces. “Each real estate development has to have a public space, thanks to zoning laws,” Fayez says, “but the areas are neglected because no one has a budget to develop them.”
Zoning authorities can only sequester the land and developers are offered few incentives to clean up these public spaces, so many of them lie vacant, a reminder of the city’s potential.
However, this is set to change, thanks to Fayez and his cohorts. They are drawing on funds, skills and resources from every section of society to transform their city’s outdoor communal spaces into the kind of green spaces that are a worthy match for their outgoing residents.
The Friends of Jeddah Parks (FJP) was founded just under a decade ago by three women, Zakia Bandakji, Sameera Niazy and Salwa Ridwan, who were concerned
by the quality of local playgrounds.
“They saw their children were kicking around Pepsi cans in the street and were around drugs and crime: that was heartbreaking for them,” says Fayez. “So they started to push the zoning committees.”
What makes the FJP all the more remarkable is that it began as a women’s movement. “Women and mothers from the neighbourhoods were able to galvanise people in the business sector, by drawing on the goodwill of the community,” explains Bader K Ghuname, executive manager of the FJP.
Nine years later, the FJP has developed from a minor pressure group into one of the Kingdom’s foremost Non-Governmental Organisations, plugging the gap between public and private undertakings and attracting some of the city’s most able executives and public servants.
“We have architectural firms who donate their time and materials,” Ghuname continues. “The design skills needed were also given for free. If we need legal advice, a top legal term is able to help us. We’re seeing contributions from society at every level.”
Their showpiece project, Faisal Sports Park in the southern Al Nuzlah Al Yamaniah district, was little more than an impromptu car park when FJP gained control of it.
“It was strewn with dirt, garbage, needles and broken cars,” says Fayez, adamant that despite The Kingdom’s zero-tolerance narcotics policy, Jeddah still has a minor drug problem, “and 16- wheelers would use it as a truck stop.”
Nevertheless, demand for some kind of leisure facility was high. Six schools surround the plot, and many children were playing games on the plot despite the detritus.
Rather than impose their own preconceptions onto the space, FJP consulted the local community. “We went into mosques, to meet community elders,” Ghuname says, “we would ask the kids, and take a good look at how they were playing before we did anything.”
They noticed that, thanks to the east-west transit of the sun, most football games were played on an improvised pitch facing northsouth. The group also observed where kids placed their rugs in the afternoon, to shelter from the midday heat.
Mapping these local preferences on to the triangular plot, FJP constructed two football fields, a basketball court, a separate set of basketball hoops for practising, a jogging track, a family and children’s play area, as well as lavatories, spectator seating and a cafeteria.
After opening in March 2007, the park now has 2,000 members, and 42 teams, including the National Handicap Basketball Squad. Locals can also hold weddings and Eid celebrations here; the park has its own security team as well as a strict 12-point set of park rules.
While the city’s grandees footed the bill for the park’s construction, local people help to maintain Faisal. Youth outreach projects are run from the park, offering English lessons and CV-writing workshops. But Fayez realises the FJP must not overstretch itself. “We can’t do everything so we don’t want to get out of our core business,” he says. They have presented their work at the most recent Jeddah Economic Forum, and were invited to start a similar scheme in Mecca (which is just over 40 miles from Jeddah). This offer was respectfully declined; Fayez recognises that the FJP has quite enough work to do.
A civil engineer of over 30 years’ standing, Mohammed Fayez has seen the city grow from a modest conurbation clustered around the harbour into one of the Middle East’s key metropolises.
“When I started work in 1973, the city was very small, with perhaps only one million citizens and no infrastructure,” he says. “Now there are about five million people here, if you count illegal immigration.”
He admits that the city’s exponential growth northwards, along the coast, has some drawbacks. “When the oil money came in the 1980s, everyone favoured low level, low density development; the car was the definitive form of transport,” he says. “Now, high density, closely quartered living seems better. The oil money allowed us to save time, and build a city more quickly. There are pros and cons. But I’m still sure that the pros outweigh the cons.”
He says that FJP now have hundreds of similar pieces of land under their control, varying from 600-square-metre plots through to tracts of several kilometres square. They’re set to found six more parks this year.
These are ambitious plans, but the carefree sense of community spirit was palpable in Faisal Park when we visited, one Friday afternoon once the heat had passed and evening prayers were over. The balls skidded across Astroturf or swished into the baskets; Saudis, often reserved, are disarmingly open within the park’s bounds.
If the FJP achieve little more than the foundation of a few similar city spaces, their work will certainly have been worthwhile. Yet, perhaps, their legacy might be slightly more lofty: to nurture Saudi Arabia’s nascent civil society.
“What you’re beginning to see as we as a society become more sophisticated,” says Ghuname, “is that there’s a place for government, a place for the private sector and a place for NGOs. People are beginning to mobilise around causes.”
And, as the teams troop off one of Faisal’s pitches, it’s hard to disagree with a cause as worthy as the FJP’s. www.fjpsa.org
