Monday, October 1, 2007

Bahrain’s strategic National Development Plan


We are hearing a lot these days about Bahrain’s strategic National development plan. Apparently the EDB has the study and it has been ready for a while now.
This strategy is supposed to solve our housing problem and set the strategy for the next 30 years. I have talked about this before (http://silverbahrain.blogspot.com/2007/05/bahrain-2030-national-planning.html).
My question is why the delay?? The strategy was developed a while back and the EDB keeps promising people it will be released soon.
Head of EDB says “Shaikh Mohammed said only 20 per cent of Bahrain's lands were structurally planned whereas the target is 100pc to facilitate the delivery of basic services to citizens.” http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/Story.asp?Article=195424&Sn=BNEW&IssueID=30195
So that means 80% of the land is unoccupied. Now, consider what the housing minister said a few weeks ago about going vertical because we don’t have enough land.
Conflict huh??
Another point worth mentioning is that there is an important change in strategy, the government is aiming to move away from building new towns to the expansion of currently existing villages so that citizens will remain in the area they have grown up in.
Nice one!! No new town huh?? This needs a separate article, I will let the viewers judge.

2 comments:

Ammaro said...

I dont know how enthusiastic I feel about this. We've been hyped up and let down so many times before.

Oh well. Hope for the best, expect the worst.

Anonymous said...

The reason that they cannot release all the land now is to ensure that the city can still sustain itself after 20 or 30 years. In any case, land needs to be preserved for other uses like industry and natural areas for a city to be sustainable.