Al Khalidiyah is a perfect example of a suburban sprawl. Al Khalidiyah is one of the most sought after residential areas in the capital. Close to the Corniche, the blend of low rise apartment blocks and spacious villas are home to a number of coffee shops, often located inside residential buildings.
The residents have to commute quite a distance to get to their places of work as no major commercial or trade centers are close-by.The residential units are clustered together in a very systematic iron grid fashion. The nucleus of all of the units however is the mosque where all men collect at prayer timings 5 times a day to pray. The residential units are arranged around the mosques which are the only buildings that break the grid iron system.
The parks and the mall which become the main public spaces are set outside of the main residential cluster. Wider, larger and more lane roads cater to the mall and the parks which become the only spaces for gathering.Al Khalidiyah consists of apartment blocks mostly with a smaller pocket of private bungalows called the Al Khalidiyah village, which is essentially the same area but just a separate organization of houses and streets.The streets are rather forbidding as the community is very car dependent.
This in fact is very bad for the community on the whole as not many people walk the neighborhood hence they lack a sense of neighborhood and therefore do not socialize much with the other people residing in the same area. Besides that it is a waste of energy and fuel as every household has at least one car and the concept of carpool does not essentially exist.There is a strong presence of collector streets as most of the internal streets open out to them. There are times like in the evenings around 5 o’clock that they get congested with traffic returning from the offices.
However, since it’s a strictly residential area, people usually drive really slowly and do not speed in the area.Since Al Khalidiyah mostly consists of apartment buildings, the parking is either provided within the buildings or the cars parked in marked parking spaces on the ground floor of the buildings. Each building provides parking for one car within the building parking lot. Any extra car per household is usually parked on the parking spaces on the side of the street outside the apartments.
However, in private bungalows, the car park accommodates at least 3 cars inside the house in the car porch. It works as a traffic calming tool. Often the parking is also off-street with the car entering the compound of the building to enter the garages.The roads are adequately wide since they are catering to a large number of vehicles. The cars carrying passengers frequenting the coffee shops in the area park on the roadside in market spaces.
The neighborhood is an absolute concrete jungle with no plantation or shrubbery of any kind at all. That in itself is another reason deterring the people from walking or the pedestrian way of life since the sun in that part of the world is quite ruthless. The desert climate is another reason for the absence of greenery. The lack of vegetation gives the locality a very barren and cold appearance.
The area lacks an area management committee and a lot of the residents are expatriates hence nobody seems to be very concerned about the area outside of their houses hence the area lacks a sense of identity. However, the streets are well lit and extremely clean during all times of the day and night.Al Khalidiyah has been made on a grid system with all streets and all houses/apartments following the grid. The only structure defying the grid is the mosque which does so as it has to face in the direction of Mecca.
The dependence on any form of transport is so great that even to go to the park or the mosque, or even grocery shopping, people choose to drive rather than walk. In the area specific to private houses, there is a presence of cul de sacs. The street usually caters to 2-3 houses and end in a dead-end. However, they are at times connected with each other in a network like fashion.The streets of the Al Khalidiyah area promote isolated living and extreme dependency on vehicular movement.
They are the perfect representation of a suburban sprawl and the modern way of life.
