It all started with the questions: How do you project in a constantly changing economic and urban landscape while keeping people in focus? How do you protect existing public space and how do you incorporate it within the context of rapidly developing, construction-heavy, dense global city? How do you imagine the needs of the residents changing in the future, in that new urban-scape created in an unseen before fast growth and expansion?

The goal was to design a city where public space, and especially public green space is used to balance the city-scape and foster the community while keeping in the center the well-being of the residents.

The research focused on the city as an urban system that provides to its resident’s public spaces. It considered the city’s current and future growth and development plans and impact of all planned construction development over the span of the next 10-20 years. It centered on the socioeconomic, business and tourist pressures as information markers for the programmatic envelop of the mixed-use architectural proposals and the social space provided by the Capital Gardens in past, current and future context.

The scenarios anticipated how these changes would impact the city’s residents and what would be the future needs of the residents of Abu Dhabi.

A series of diagrams captured the dynamic analysis: existing conditions, historical timelines and hypothetical futuristic scenarios and alternative speculative projections.