For decades, Saudi cities were designed around a single organising principle: the car. Riyadh, a city of 8 million people, had virtually no public parks of meaningful scale, no public transit system, no pedestrian infrastructure, and no urban gathering spaces beyond shopping malls and mosques. The summer heat (regularly exceeding 45 degrees Celsius) was invoked as justification for a built environment in which walking was not merely inconvenient but physically dangerous. The result was a paradox: one of the wealthiest nations on earth produced cities that ranked poorly on every international liveability index.
Vision 2030’s Quality of Life Programme was established to dismantle this paradox. Launched in 2018 as one of the Vision Realisation Programs, the Quality of Life Programme set an explicit target: to have three Saudi cities ranked among the world’s top 100 most liveable cities by 2030. This target, while seemingly modest, required a fundamental reimagining of Saudi urban form — from car-dependent, climate-hostile, and socially atomised cities to walkable, green, culturally rich, and community-oriented environments.
The investment has been extraordinary. Across Riyadh, Jeddah, and Dammam — the three target cities — Quality of Life-related spending exceeds an estimated $50 billion in committed and projected outlays, encompassing parks and green spaces, public transit, pedestrian and cycling infrastructure, healthcare facilities, cultural venues, sports facilities, and urban design interventions.
The Green Riyadh Initiative
The most transformative Quality of Life initiative is Green Riyadh, a $23 billion programme to plant 7.5 million trees across the capital and create a network of parks, gardens, and green corridors that would increase Riyadh’s per-capita green space from less than 1.7 square metres (among the lowest of any major city globally) to over 28 square metres by 2030.
The scale of this ambition is difficult to overstate. Riyadh exists in one of the harshest urban climates on earth — an arid environment with average annual rainfall of approximately 100 millimetres, extreme summer heat, and frequent dust storms. Creating and sustaining green spaces in this environment requires not merely planting trees but building an entire water, soil, and microclimate management infrastructure.
The technical approach draws on advances in treated wastewater irrigation (Riyadh produces approximately 1.8 million cubic metres of treated wastewater daily, much of which currently goes unused), drought-resistant native and adapted plant species, and smart irrigation systems that optimise water use through soil moisture sensors and weather data integration.
King Salman Park, the flagship project, will cover over 13 square kilometres in central Riyadh — larger than Central Park in New York or Hyde Park in London. The park replaces the former Riyadh Air Base, a decommissioned military installation whose conversion represents the largest urban-to-park transformation in Saudi history. The park will include a Royal Arts Complex, sports facilities, lakes, forests, walking trails, and a nature reserve, creating a green lung in the heart of a city that has historically offered its residents no comparable amenity.
Sports Boulevard and Wadi Hanifah
The Sports Boulevard is a 135-kilometre linear park and sports corridor running north-south through Riyadh. Designed as both transportation infrastructure (with cycling and pedestrian pathways) and recreational space (with sports courts, playgrounds, and fitness stations), the Sports Boulevard represents a fundamentally different approach to urban mobility — one in which active transportation is designed into the city’s structure rather than treated as an afterthought.
Wadi Hanifah, the seasonal river valley that runs through Riyadh, has undergone a transformation from a degraded drainage channel to a rehabilitated natural corridor. The Wadi Hanifah Restoration Project has cleaned polluted water, restored native vegetation, and created recreational amenities along the valley floor. The project demonstrates that Saudi Arabia’s harsh climate does not preclude natural amenity development — it merely requires engineering creativity and sustained investment.
Public Transit: The Riyadh Metro
The Riyadh Metro, opening in phases from 2025, represents the single largest Quality of Life infrastructure investment in the Kingdom. The system comprises six lines, 85 stations, and 176 kilometres of track, making it one of the largest urban rail systems to be built from scratch anywhere in the world.
The metro’s significance extends far beyond transportation efficiency. By providing a viable alternative to private car travel, the metro enables a fundamental shift in urban form. Transit-oriented development (TOD) zones around metro stations are being planned as mixed-use, walkable districts — a departure from the car-dependent suburban pattern that has characterised Riyadh’s growth for the past five decades.
The social implications are equally significant. Saudi women received the right to drive only in 2018. Before the metro, those without a driver or a male relative to transport them had limited mobility. Public transit provides independent mobility that does not require car ownership or a private driver — a practical equality that transcends the symbolic importance of the driving ban’s removal.
The Riyadh Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, with 22 routes and over 1,000 buses, complements the metro by serving areas not covered by rail. The integrated fare system (using a single card across metro, BRT, and feeder buses) aims to make multimodal transit seamless — a necessity in a city where public transit is a novelty and must compete with the deeply embedded car culture.
Healthcare Modernisation
The Quality of Life Programme includes substantial healthcare investment, recognising that access to quality healthcare is a fundamental determinant of liveability. Saudi Arabia’s healthcare system has expanded rapidly in recent decades but has historically been characterised by heavy reliance on expatriate medical professionals, uneven quality across regions, and limited specialist capacity.
Vision 2030’s healthcare targets include increasing average life expectancy from 74 to 80 years, expanding healthcare coverage, developing domestic medical education and research, and reducing reliance on medical tourism abroad. The investment programme encompasses new hospital construction (including several medical cities), expansion of primary healthcare centres, digital health infrastructure, and a privatisation programme that aims to shift a proportion of healthcare delivery from government hospitals to private and public-private partnership models.
The King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre, already one of the most advanced medical facilities in the Middle East, is being expanded and replicated. New medical cities in Riyadh, Jeddah, and Dammam are being built with international design standards and partnerships with leading healthcare institutions including Johns Hopkins, Cleveland Clinic, and the Mayo Clinic.
Mental health services, historically stigmatised and underfunded in the Kingdom, are receiving increased attention. The National Centre for Mental Health Promotion has been established, and mental health services are being integrated into primary healthcare — a significant shift in a society where mental health was traditionally handled within family structures rather than institutional care.
Walkability and Pedestrian Infrastructure
The most granular Quality of Life interventions involve the redesign of Saudi streetscapes for pedestrian use. In a country where the sidewalk has been a purely theoretical element of urban design — present on plans but absent or impassable in reality — the creation of walkable urban environments requires a cultural shift as much as a physical one.
The Jeddah Corniche redevelopment, extending 30 kilometres along the Red Sea coast, has become a model for pedestrian-oriented urban design. The project includes waterfront promenades, parks, public art, recreational facilities, and climate-responsive design elements (shading structures, misting systems, cool-surface materials) that make outdoor walking viable even in Jeddah’s hot and humid climate.
Riyadh’s Diriyah Gate and New Murabba developments are being designed as fundamentally pedestrian environments from inception — a departure from the car-first approach of previous Saudi developments. Narrow streets, covered pathways, ground-floor retail, and the deliberate absence of surface parking create an urban experience more reminiscent of European old towns than of the wide-boulevard, mall-oriented norm of Gulf cities.
The Climate Challenge
The honest assessment of Saudi Arabia’s walkability ambitions must acknowledge the climate constraint. For approximately five months of the year (May through September), daytime temperatures in Riyadh exceed 40 degrees Celsius, and in July and August regularly exceed 47 degrees. No amount of urban design can make outdoor walking comfortable in these conditions without active cooling — which raises questions about energy consumption and environmental sustainability.
The engineering responses include cooled pedestrian pathways (using district cooling and chilled-surface technology), extensive shading through both traditional architectural forms and modern tensile structures, and a shift in programming that concentrates outdoor activities in cooler months and evening hours while providing indoor alternatives during summer.
The Green Riyadh programme’s tree-planting component is partly a climate mitigation strategy: mature tree canopy can reduce ambient temperatures by 2-4 degrees Celsius and surface temperatures by 10-20 degrees, creating microclimates that make pedestrian activity more viable. However, the timeline for canopy maturation (10-20 years for significant shading) means that the full temperature-reduction benefits will not be realised until the late 2030s or 2040s.
Cultural Infrastructure as Liveability
The Quality of Life Programme explicitly integrates cultural infrastructure into its liveability strategy. The logic is straightforward: cities with rich cultural offerings — museums, theatres, galleries, music venues, public art, festivals — score higher on liveability indices and attract the creative talent that drives knowledge-economy growth.
Saudi Arabia’s cultural build-out, discussed elsewhere in this publication, is partly a Quality of Life intervention. The hundreds of millions spent on public art in Riyadh, the construction of performing arts venues, the licensing of thousands of entertainment events — all contribute to a city experience that is measurably more engaging, varied, and stimulating than the Saudi urban norm of a decade ago.
The integration of community sports facilities into neighbourhood planning is another Quality of Life strategy. New residential developments are now required to include sports courts, playgrounds, and fitness facilities. The goal is to increase physical activity participation from the baseline of 13% of the population to 40% by 2030 — a target that addresses the Kingdom’s high rates of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.
Measuring Progress
How is Saudi Arabia performing against its liveability targets? The evidence is mixed but trending positive. None of the three target cities has yet entered the top 100 on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Liveability Index or the Mercer Quality of Living Survey — the two benchmarks most commonly referenced. However, the surveys reflect conditions that lag the investment cycle: infrastructure currently under construction will not affect index scores until it is operational and integrated into urban life.
Proxy indicators are more encouraging. Riyadh’s population growth rate (approximately 3.5% annually, among the highest of any major city globally) suggests that the city is perceived as increasingly attractive. International corporate relocations to Riyadh (driven by both regulatory incentives and improving quality of life) have accelerated. Tourism visitation to Saudi cities has grown dramatically.
Domestic satisfaction surveys conducted by the General Authority for Statistics show meaningful improvement in resident quality of life scores, particularly in categories related to cultural offerings, entertainment options, and park/green space access. The healthcare satisfaction scores have also improved, though from a lower baseline.
The Systemic Challenge
The deepest challenge to Saudi Arabia’s Quality of Life programme is systemic: liveability is not merely a product of infrastructure but of institutions, governance, civil society, and individual freedoms. International liveability indices weight factors including political stability, civil liberties, press freedom, and social tolerance — categories in which Saudi Arabia’s scores are constrained by structural features of its governance system.
No amount of park development or metro construction will move Saudi cities into the top 100 on indices that weight these factors heavily. This creates a tension in the Quality of Life Programme: the physical infrastructure of liveability is being built at extraordinary speed and scale, but the institutional and social infrastructure of liveability — the software, as opposed to the hardware — evolves on a different timeline and is subject to different political constraints.
Saudi policymakers appear to be wagering that the physical transformation will drive social transformation: that cities with parks, cultural venues, public transit, and walkable streets will naturally generate more open, engaged, and satisfied communities. This is a reasonable hypothesis, supported by urban studies research, but it remains to be tested at the scale and pace that Saudi Arabia is attempting.
The Quality of Life Programme is, in the final analysis, an attempt to demonstrate that liveability can be engineered. If it succeeds, it will offer a model for rapidly developing cities across the Global South. If it falls short, the reasons will reveal the limits of what money and political will can achieve without the organic social evolution that has shaped the world’s most liveable cities over centuries.