Abstract
Integrated Metropolitan Governance Framework for the GCC Future Metropolis Khaled Abdellatif Urban Planning Consultant, Giza, Egypt, khaled.latif@hotmail.com ABSTRACT The GCC cities have been witnessing continues changes in its governance systems to cope with the post oil era. Recently the GCC governments have allocated multibillion US dollars to finance major infrastructure and transit projects in most of the major cities. As a result, transit oriented development initiatives and intensive real estate projects around metro stations have taken place without formulating an integrated governance mechanism that would steer the growth of the TODs and eventually shape the GCC metropolises Due to gap between the current GCC urban governance systems and the future of its newly born metropolitan areas, this paper will examine and tackle various patterns, problems and challenges of the current urban governance system, to reach to the optimum scenarios for governing the future GCC metropolis Accordingly, a comparison and a historical analysis of the existing urban governance systems will be covered in this paper supported by political, spatial, economic, demographical analysis to produce an integrated metropolitan governance framework for the GCC future metropolis The paper suggests several roads maps to govern the metropolitan areas and metropolitanize the major GCC settlements on the short, medium and long terms. In addition, it answers the following questions; how to move from traditional municipal urban governance to metropolitan one? What are the required economic, social and cultural transformation and restructuring programs to support a smooth transition in the governance system? Why is it the right time to develop the metropolitan governance framework for the GCC metropolis? How will the framework guide the smooth transition towards transit metropolitan governance? The outcomes of this paper will provide a road map for the municipal leaders and urban development authorities to formulate a specific governance framework to steer the future metropolis.
