Urban Sprawl and City Vulnerability: Where Does Muscat Stand?

Abstract

The past decades witnessed the birth of sustainable urban development as a focal research theme and a potent planning approach. Not only academics, but also planners, administrators, and politicians began to see in sustainable development an effective tool to address the pending economic, social, and environmental issues and problems in an integrated manner. Elements, choices, and patterns of sustainable city planning and management are varied. They build mainly on physical site characteristics (topography, surface hydrological system, land cover, natural buffers, etc.) and population’s social and cultural attributes. However, as far as climate is concerned, the design of urban plans is customarily built on the assumption that weather conditions are normal and, hence, they seldom take into account the disastrous impacts of anomalous weather conditions. The human and capital damages caused by cyclone Gonu, which of late hit Muscat, have undoubtedly demonstrated that Muscat, being a coastal city facing the neighboring Indian Ocean, is extremely vulnerable to impacts of severe weather conditions, which may lead to devastating floods. However, vulnerability of Muscat is not only related to its maritime location. The population growth, which the city has experienced in the past decades, led to a very wide sprawl along the coastal fringe as well as across hill slopes and wadi valleys and, hence, made the population settlements therein more exposed to the disastrous impacts of any sudden severe weather event. With the expectation of increasingly severe weather events in the forthcoming years, planning for the management of associated risks raises a serious challenge for planners. Therefore, there is a dire need to understand the processes, correlations, and probable expectations in case weather events like Gonu were to take place.