Ahmedabad: The appearance of Fahd Al-Rasheed, representative of the G20 in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, at the Urban 20 Mayoral Summit in Ahmedabad, India, this week, in which he focused on the importance of communicating with citizens in development projects, inspired a number of urban planners to try to follow the example of Riyadh and seek cooperation with the Kingdom.

Mr. Al-Rasheed, Advisor to the Saudi Cabinet, previously served as CEO of the Royal Commission for Riyadh and helped transform the Saudi capital into one of the best smart cities in the world. Share the city’s success story with summit participants on Friday.

One of the main issues he focused on was citizen participation, emphasizing that good governance was ultimately about serving “everyone who lives in the city”.

This view of urban development as a multi-tiered effort – from economics to lifestyle to infrastructure – has provided Indian planners and senior municipal officials with new insights.

“I was quite impressed by the fact that he envisions cities as multi-dimensional organisms that have to evolve over time, have different aspects, different functions and different roles,” Junaid Azim Mattoo, the mayor of Srinagar, told Arab News.

He spoke about the retail economy, about infrastructure and the relationship it has with human behavior, and about how human behavior and indicators of human prosperity and human activity should be at the heart of infrastructure development. I found this very interesting and fascinating.”

The development of Riyadh was “definitely a success story” for Mattu, one that Indian cities can learn from.

“I’m sure there are a lot of things from Riyadh that should and can be imitated,” he said. “I spoke to my team and asked them to start some kind of knowledge-sharing mechanism with the city of Riyadh.”

For Somya Gurjar, the mayor of Jaipur, the most important takeaway from Rasheed’s speech was the importance of citizens’ welfare.

The health of citizens must be the priority. Healthy citizens will definitely contribute a lot to the development of the city, she told Arab News, adding that it is also linked to the Riyadh plan’s focus on skills development to give the city a healthy economy – something she, too, is trying to do. She said in Jaipur.

Dr. Chetan Vaidya, chief urban planner and educator, said Al-Rasheed’s experience in both the private and government sectors means his ideas resonate with his audience.

We need a strong technical team, as well as the right financing – to link public sector financing with private sector financing. “This is a lesson we must learn from Riyadh,” Vaidya told Arab News.

Another lesson is to communicate with the townspeople and find out what kind of place they want to live.

“Unless we get the lifestyles right, and that’s a lesson from his show, I think we’re going to get our new cities wrong,” Vaidya said.