BALANCING PROCEDURES AND INNOVATION AT A LARGE SCALE FOR SAUDI ARAMCO HQ IN DHAHRAN, SAUDI ARABIA

The Saudi Aramco headquarters in Dhahran is not just a workplace — it’s a small city, teeming with over 30,000 daily workers and 12,000 residents as of 2022, with continual growth expected. Led by Khatib & Alami, the planning team prepared a 20-year strategy alongside a regulatory plan to guide day-to-day development management. URBAN Silence took the lead in planning services for the team.

Situated where the first Saudi oil well was drilled, this compound is the birthplace of the nation’s prosperity, giving rise to the thriving urban area of Dammam. It operates as a high-security self-contained urban and industrial district with its own planning system, traffic management, commercial amenities and housing: a legacy of its mixed American-Arab administration in the 1960s.

This unique setup presents both advantages and challenges. While it allows for initiatives like creating new biodiversity areas on a very ambitious scale, its security requirements prevent integration with public transport services, hindering the growing commuter workforce.

Moreover, data availability poses a practical challenge. While detailed, it’s geared towards business management rather than site development and is limited to the five-year horizon of business cycles. Consequently, the planning team had to identify a broad range of data sources and correlations to grasp the broader needs, including those of contractors, residents and visitors.

The master plan aims to foster change while adhering to existing governance structures, emphasizing sustainability and quality of life improvement. Key strategies include:

1. Promoting Sustainable Mobility: Establishing internal transit routes and mobility hubs to encourage sustainable transportation and reduce reliance on private cars to serve all future growth and intensification zones.
2. Enhancing Green Spaces: Creating an extensive green network to preserve biodiversity and highlight unique natural features such as geo-formations and desert wildlife.
3. Showcasing R&D and Sustainability: Increasing visibility of research and sustainable initiatives throughout the site.
4. Flexibility in Development: Adapting sites to accommodate flexible development speed and scale to suit business demands while maintaining the company’s deterministic ‘predict and provide’ approach to development.

The result is an ambitious master plan that fosters innovation and sustainability while remaining aligned with the organization’s practices and systems.