Sustainable Conservation and Reuse of Historical City Center Applied Study on Jeddah—Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Developing a historical city center leads to city resilience and sustainable heritage conservation; changing the social fabric is a fundamental problem that affects historical and heritage areas. As a result of Jeddah’s development, the community of the heritage area changed to another without the same interest or appreciation for the region’s heritage. After listing it as a world heritage, the government is taking care of many conservation projects for Historic Jeddah. The research aims to evaluate a proposed project to reverse the last decade’s social changes of the local community as a step in achieving historic center sustainability. The scope of this proposal is to select adaptive reuse of the listed historic buildings and provide the area with state-of-the-art services. This proposed project will attract the targeted community to return, which will achieve the research purpose. The research followed three different methodologies; through a theoretical approach, Jeddah city urban development and growth were highlighted, and the currently enforced conservation policies regulating land use were introduced. Moreover, the analytical approach studies the possibility of social reform of the local community by implementing adaptive reuse for heritage buildings. Three sustainability pillars were tested through a survey of three different stockholders. The research discussed the various stockholders’ visions toward the aimed sustainable objectives. Hence, the applied part of the research evaluates the sustainability of the proposed project. The study finds that the local community is essential in the conservation process’s sustainability. Reusing the heritage buildings in the resettled original community will sustain the conservation process and increase the real estate value of the Jeddah historical areas.