Riyadh has never been a city at rest. From tribal camp to oil capital, from desert silence to the roar of six-lane highways, it has lived many lives. Today, it stands at a strange crossroads — more powerful than ever, yet unsure of what kind of future to grow into.

The city’s problems are visible even from the window of a fast-moving car: heatwaves that last for months, vast neighbourhoods of low-density sprawl, public spaces designed more for vehicles than for humans. Walking here is an act of defiance. Shade is scarce. Public life is scattered. Much of the city feels like it was built not for its people, but in spite of them.

Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 promises to change this. But even as megaprojects rise and cultural reforms sweep through, Riyadh remains an enigma — wealthy but brittle, ambitious but fragmented. The question remains: what would it mean to build a capital not just of the future, but of belonging?

The answer, perhaps, is not another skyline. It is something humbler. Stranger. More alive. Riyadh doesn’t need more glass towers. It needs shade, density, slowness, and social proximity.

To explore this, I have designed a theoretical masterplan – a virtual document grounded in nothing but my own imagination. A recipe for a possible future of the city that explores its heart and soul and avoids the glitz of flashy renderings and projects that want to impress by their sheer scale:

Riyadh 2050 – an imaginary masterplan

A City That Breathes, And Does Not Burn

The new masterplan for Riyadh — whispered among planners as the “City of Wind and Earth” — abandons the blueprint approach. It doesn’t begin with infrastructure or zoning. It begins with climate, memory, and the body.

The first intervention is elemental: make shade the city’s most abundant resource. No building taller than ten stories is allowed unless it casts generous shade. A new municipal law mandates that every street be planted as a corridor of canopy — neem, ghaf, date palm, tamarisk. Not ornamental landscaping, but functional forestry. Trees as infrastructure. Each neighborhood becomes its own microclimate.

Next comes water — not in fountains or pools, but as subsurface moisture banks. Drawing on centuries-old desert techniques like qanats and stone-lined wadis, the city reclaims its seasonal rains. The new parks aren’t sculpted lawns but terraced desert gardens, designed to hold, slow, and remember water. Children are taught not to fear heat, but to read it — the shape of a breeze in a courtyard, the rhythm of cooling under moonlight.

Streets are narrowed, buildings are staggered, public squares are dug slightly below grade to create cool air basins. Cars are invited to leave — not all at once, but slowly, replaced by shaded pedestrian routes, donkeys in the old quarter, and a fleet of solar-powered water carts that mist markets and rest stops at set hours.

A City Built For Its Evenings and Nights

Perhaps the greatest shift in Riyadh’s masterplan is its rediscovery of time. A city once dictated by the global clock — meetings at 9, deliveries at noon, concrete poured by sunrise — now follows a thermal rhythm. Schools begin after the early morning cool. Markets operate in the evening, as they once did. Bureaucracy becomes crepuscular. The city comes alive not at 8am, but at sunset.

Architecture responds. Buildings are no longer sealed, air-conditioned boxes but breathable structures of local stone, earth plasters, and hand-woven screens. There is a revival of lost crafts: mud brick guilds, lime kilns, artisans working with camel hair insulation and wood lattice. Wealthy developers are required to support these guilds — not as CSR, but as mandatory cultural endowment.

Public space is ritualized. Once-empty roundabouts are converted into weekly majlis gardens, where strangers are invited to sit, drink cardamom coffee, and share poems or grievances. City planners attend. So do imams. So do teenagers. The urban is now a forum.

The Death Of The Villa – A Living Revolution

But the real revolution lies in the architecture of everyday life: the death of the single-family villa.
Riyadh’s new building codes ban the traditional private villa for any new residential district. Instead, they demand shared courtyard compounds — dense, walkable clusters of town houses, flats, and studios organized around shaded internal gardens.

Every new home is required to face a collective courtyard, not a private driveway.
Housing becomes layered: three, four, five families living around a common shaded square. Some clusters are private — extended families reclaiming their old rhythms. Others are public, designed for students, migrants, young couples.
No one can buy a whole block for themselves. Ownership is collective, modular, evolving.

The typology draws from Riyadh’s own past — the tight, protective urban forms of old Diriyah and Najdi desert towns — but reinterpreted in high-density, mid-rise forms. Earth-brick towers with deep balconies. Thick stone walls and rooftop gardens. Passively cooled staircases spiralling through sun-washed courtyards.

The result is a Riyadh that feels dense but not claustrophobic, private but never isolated, modern but deeply Arab. Public life spills naturally into alleys and gardens. Children drift between homes. Elders sit by gates, swapping news. Shade and social life are woven together.

This Riyadh is not glossy. It is not even always comfortable. But it is alive in ways it hasn’t been for generations. It listens. It breathes. It hums with social tension and possibility. It understands that progress is not aways vertical — that sometimes the most revolutionary thing a city can do is rebuild how people live next to each other.

The desert has always known this. Riyadh, finally, is starting to remember… And – the air quality would profit from that as well.