New Jeddah Downtown Concept Master Plan
Competition-winning master plan for a 5M sqm mixed-use downtown projected to create 36,000 jobs in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Award-winning pre-master planning concept for New Jeddah Downtown, a transformative 5 million square metre mixed-use development. It spans six integrated districts. They hold residential communities, hospitality precincts, commercial centres and cultural museums. They also hold social spaces, sports facilities, and coastal and marine amenities. The smart-sustainable city framework was built across three kinds of infrastructure: institutional, physical and social. Its six pillars are governance, economy, utilities, mobility, community and environment. The design honours Jeddah's cultural heritage and embraces AI-powered smart city technology.
The New Jeddah Downtown competition called for a pre-master planning concept for a 5 million square metre mixed-use development. It was projected to create 36,000 new jobs and spanned six integrated districts. The plan had to be deeply rooted in Jeddah's heritage. It also had to offer a sustainable model for urban growth with AI built in. All of this sat within a competitive bid against other master planning teams.
Led as Technology and Security Lead. Built a smart-sustainable city framework across three infrastructure layers. The institutional layer covered economic development strategy. The physical layer covered green building, renewable energy and climate-resilient design. The social layer covered community cohesion and cultural preservation. Alongside these came a six-pillar smart city architecture: governance and administration, economy, utilities, mobility, community, and environment. Set the destination vision. It balances cultural heritage with AI-powered smart city technology across six kinds of district: residential, hospitality, commercial, cultural, social, and coastal and marine.
The competition was won. It positioned New Jeddah Downtown as the model for culturally sensitive, AI-enabled, sustainable urban development in Saudi Arabia. The master plan was set across all six integrated districts, with the smart-sustainable city framework as its technical backbone. The same downtown Jeddah Corniche was later chosen by the Kingdom for the SR75 billion Jeddah Central Project, launched by the Crown Prince.
- My role
- Technology and Security Lead, Meinhardt Group
Winning a competitive master plan bid takes the same discipline as winning any pitch. Judges need a clear, structured framework they can follow, not a list of impressive features. The six pillars here are governance, economy, utilities, mobility, community and environment. Any business can use them as a template to structure its own transformation story. Name the pillars, show how they connect, then prove the framework scales.
The same diagnostic logic from deployments like this one, applied to your business in half a day.
Book the WorkshopDiscuss a similar programme- New Jeddah Downtown Concept Masterplan, MIC-HUB project profile, 5M+ sqm mixed-use redevelopment of the Jeddah Corniche
- Jeddah Central Project, Saudi Vision 2030: the government-led mega-project subsequently launched for the same downtown Jeddah waterfront district
- Employer testimonial letter from Meinhardt SUIT Pte Ltd (Managing Director, July 2025) naming this project available to procurement teams on request; not published online
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Competition submissions live or die on whether the judges can follow your logic in the time they have. So the six-pillar structure here was as much about clarity under a deadline as about the technology itself. We rewrote the governance pillar three times in the week before submission, because the first version read like a checklist instead of a plan. Watching that same stretch of Corniche later become the site of the Crown Prince's Jeddah Central Project is a strange, good feeling to sit with.
