Riyadh’s is rapidly expanding – in population and urbanized area.

The Decision: Growth

Riyadh announced that it was lifting the suspension on 33.24 square kilometres of land in the west of the capital to achieve several goals at the same time: balance in the real estate market, support for sustainable development, and a “distinctive urban model.”

But the decision also expands the city’s footprint. For decades, Riyadh’s development has followed a centrifugal pattern developing outward while preserving its low rise charm. Under current circumstances, this is a logical decision, but it might be worth reviewing going forward.

Today the city stretches across more than 1,800 square kilometres, a figure that comes with a real price for infrastructure.

Riyadh in Comparison

Riyadh’s population density hovers around 4,000 people per square kilometre, placing it among the least densely populated metropolises in the world but in line with its big neighbour Dubai.

Compared to London or Los Angeles, Riyadh holds fewer people across a much greater land area. Compared to Paris or Madrid, the contrast is even bigger. The city’s vastness is both, a sign of relative inefficiency, but also of cultural traditions that persist. Traditions that date back to times when Riyadh was a much smaller city and far from being the metropolis it is today.

The new western release adds another layer to this horizontal expansion, stretching the city’s infrastructure, scattering its services, and lengthening the average daily journey. The expansion may feel like progress, but it repeats a pattern that makes the city more expensive to maintain, and more fragile in the face of climate stress.

The Hidden Land: Space Occupied by Cars

Walk through Riyadh, and it becomes clear that the city’s greatest consumer of land is not housing or industry, but the automobile.

Between the wide highways, service roads, and seas of surface parking, nearly half of Riyadh’s urbanized land is dedicated to the movement or storage of cars. This is where the real opportunity lies. By reclaiming even a fraction of this space — through underground parking, shared mobility, or better transit — Riyadh could unlock hundreds of hectares for housing, parks, and public life without expanding at all.

The land for Riyadh’s next growth is already there. It’s just hidden beneath its wheels.

The False Promise of Expansion

There is a seductive simplicity in expansion. New land feels like a blank page, free of the messy constraints of existing neighborhoods. But every new expansion zone multiplies the cost of water, power, and sewage networks. It increases car dependency and moves people further away from the economic and social core.

If the goal is to make housing more affordable, then this can deliver a quick relief – but it comes at significant and lasting costs. Once an area if unlocked, the city needs to maintain the supporting infrastructure.

Let’s be clear. There is little choice for decision makers at the moment. Riyadh needs to tackle its housing problem immediately, and I am confident that this extension will be done with great care and the highest ambitions. And in an ideal world, implementing other models might happen overnight, but in real life, that is hard to achieve in city development. Traditions, skill sets, development practices, urban management, policies – they all favour or even prescribe a model that is literally set in stone. But that does not take away that one can contemplate other models and – maybe – there is a way to change things in the medium and long term. Here some suggestions what could be done.

Densification: The Different Growth Model

There is another path: densification.

Building higher and closer together is not a Western idea imposed on a Middle Eastern landscape; it is, in many ways, a return to roots. Traditional Arab cities like Jeddah, Fez, or Sana’a were compact, shaded, and walkable. They grew vertically within tight boundaries, relying on shared courtyards and layered privacy rather than sprawl.

For Riyadh, densification means developing the empty and underused spaces within the existing city — the car parks, the oversized setbacks, the vacant plots left waiting for a speculative price. It means reclaiming the interior, not conquering the periphery.

Medium- and high-rise neighbourhoods — six to twenty stories — built around transit lines and shaded streets could host diverse housing, commerce, and community life in a fraction of the space. This would cut infrastructure costs, shorten commutes, and create the density needed to support a thriving public realm and street-activating commercial activities.

Designing an Arabic Vertical City

Density in Riyadh need not look like Manhattan or Hong Kong. It could look like Riyadh itself — reinterpreted for height.

Imagine towers with shared courtyards and gardens open to the wind. Vertical neighbourhoods where mosques, schools, and terraces punctuate the skyline. Homes designed for family life and social interaction, shaded and cross-ventilated by design, not technology.

To make this vision tangible, the Royal Commission could launch a design competition — The Arabic High-Density Housing Challenge — inviting architects and planners to explore what a truly Arabic model of vertical living might be.

Such a competition could turn Riyadh into a laboratory of modern Arab urbanism, proving that verticality and identity are not opposites but allies.

The Vertical Alternative

If Riyadh is serious about sustainability, it must start solving its problems vertically.

Vertical development is not merely aesthetic — it’s strategic:

• Infrastructure is shorter and more efficient.
• Energy use drops through shared walls and shading.
• Public space expands as parking and roads shrink.
• Communities become more cohesive when distances contract.

A vertical Riyadh would not only reduce its environmental footprint; it would also rediscover a sense of urban intimacy — a city of human encounters.

Turning asphalt into architecture is not a metaphor — it’s a manifesto. The next great leap for Riyadh might not come from the desert edge but from the drive to build upward, sustainably and beautifully, toward the skyline that already waits to be imagined.

Cover image: Expansion area for Riyadh – source: Royal Commission for Riyadh City