A new master plan for Muscat, Oman, could see the city become notably denser, greener and better connected by public transportation.
The proposal, developed by urbanists Broadway Malyan, aims to help the sprawling coastal capital of 1.4 million adapt by 2040 to a series of challenges: a fast-growing population, an economy diversifying beyond oil, and climate change-fueled risks of extreme weather.
Still in the process of approval — although it’s backed by Oman’s Housing Ministry — the plan seeks to imagine a different form for Gulf urbanism than that of neighbors Dubai and Abu Dhabi: compact, more mid-rise than high-rise, and with a greater place for nature within the city.
Muscat’s location means it faces specific challenges, some of them geographical. The capital of a country whose roughly 4.5 million inhabitants are heavily concentrated on the coast, Muscat is located on a narrow strip between mountains and the sea. As a result the city has grown along a linear corridor-like layout, where neighborhoods follow each other like wagons on a train. This has created a polycentric city where travel times from one end to the other can be lengthy — up to 160 minutes during morning peak hours — encouraging residents to stay closer to home.
Despite its austere beauty, this narrow site also poses environmental challenges. It is crisscrossed by 14 wadi systems — riverbeds that are dry or merely moist during most of the year in Oman’s tropical desert climate, but which can swell dramatically during the summer rainy season. This makes large parts of the city vulnerable to inundations — 45% of the land area to floods from the wadis and 20% from high tides. The intensification of extreme weather has made flood management an essential component to future-proofing the city; in May 2024 extraordinary floods killed 17 people across Oman. The landscape has further encouraged a fragmented urban structure, where development stops and starts depending on terrain.
Setting a New Course
The Omani capital of Muscat is planning for a very different future from that of nearby Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
Until recently, the site has posed few problems. While the city is ancient — it was mentioned as an already important port in the first century — Muscat only surpassed 100,000 residents in 1979 and 500,000 in 1994. A modest population meant distances remained manageable and building land still easily available. So easily available, in fact, that a right to land ownership has been written into national law.
Any Omani man over 23 — and many but not all Omani women — are theoretically entitled to a free plot of land of up to 600 square meters (6,458 square feet) to build a house on. While getting a plot now requires a long wait for allocation by lottery, and many remain unbuilt, the archetypal Omani dream has still remained not apartment living but a single-family villa. Although Muscat has some densely built areas, these are usually seen as less desirable places to live, populated mainly by lower-income expats who are also the primary users of the city’s limited public transport system.
For Muscat to stay competitive, these habits will need to change. By 2040, the population will reach 2.7 million. Continuing sprawl would leave its urban area unmanageable, inefficient and lacking in sustainability.
Denser development, public transportation, bans on greenfield building and a system of parks are the key tools the master plan employs to break these patterns. A 55 kilometer (35 mile) light rail system shadowing the coast will provide a new spine for the city, tunneling through the rocky slopes that divide Old Muscat from the western bulk of the city, which is home to the international airport and luxury resorts such as a five-star St. Regis resort on the Gulf of Oman. Rapid transit buses will provide a parallel east-west link further inland. New denser development will be encouraged along the light rail, with mid-rise apartment buildings flanking the line intended to preserve mountain views.
The government is already buying up land along this spine that would allow Muscat to re-center by developing its “missing middle” — an underused area that lies between the old city and current development hotspots near the airport. At the heart of this will be a new waterfront development from Zaha Hadid Architects, where a rising string of towers curling out into the harbor would be the city’s one major concession to high-rise construction. Meanwhile, the existing downtown area of Ruwi, a lively but somewhat neglected space, will be regenerated to make it more of a magnet for people across Greater Muscat.
The new plan is as much about restricting construction as encouraging it, however. To discourage further sprawl, a no-build zone will be instated in the city’s mountain foothills and in its far west, a still largely unbuilt area destined to function as a future “green lung.” Green zones in areas at risk of floods are also being marked out.
“We’ve done a lot of flood mapping,” says Broadway Malyan’s Director of Urbanism Phil Bonds. “Broadly speaking, we’ve tried to keep all development away from zones at risk of flooding up to 50 years from now. In these zones, there’s an element of wadi-taming that needs to happen to make them more resilient and livable, but we want to avoid culverting as much as possible.”
Instead, some wadi systems will be planted with vegetation and nourished with recycled wastewater that would otherwise end up in the sea. The new tree and bush cover would provide seams of parkland through the city and likely retain enough water to self-sustain without irrigation. The city will also get some more leisure space from a revamped waterfront promenade, which has a string of beaches that are currently underutilized.
Such goals fit neatly within what is currently considered good urbanism. Whether they are delivered is a question for later, with many master plans elsewhere ending up more aspirational than binding. One strength is the plan’s coordination of projects already partly underway. A feasibility study for the light rail was delivered in August 2024, while construction should begin on the new waterfront district by the end of this year. The plan’s best chance of being fully implemented, however, is that it should end up paying for itself several times over. “When we costed the plan,” Bonds says, “we calculated that for a $19 billion investment, they’d end up with a $50 billion uplift.”
