The third large industrial city in Saudi Arabia, Dammam, is an attractive place for building sustainable buildings (Abubakar & Aina, 2016) . However, the city is located in the middle of the desert, has harsh climatic conditions and limited resources. These factors and many others influence the return on investment in building in Dammam. As a result, designing a sustainable building in Dammam requires detailed architectural and contextual analyzes of the city.
Neighborhood Context
Neighborhood territory includes the province of Ash Sharkiyah, as the city is located within the wealthiest oil region in Saudi Arabia (Abubakar & Aina, 2016). Dammam is a major industrial center, but also a rather motley conglomerate of nationalities. A large number of highly skilled Dammam workers are foreigners. The city has few tourist attractions, but it is known for a variety of restaurants and supermarkets. Moreover, Dammam is a strategic transportation hub. The railway line and the state route connect the coast with the capital, Riyadh. Indeed, King Fahd International Airport is near the city. The neighborhood context includes the quick development of Dammam infrastructure in the last two decades through land reclamation and filling the Gulf Beach. In 2020, the area of the city covers about 800 square kilometers (Dano, 2018) . Dammam is located near the state border, near Bahrain (Figure 1).
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Figure 1. Location of Dammam in Saudi Arabia.
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The high growth of the housing sector in Dammam, coupled with rapid construction, which does not take into account energy efficiency and focuses only on initial investments, has contributed to the unsustainable development of the construction industry (Abubakar & Aina, 2016). It has resulted in widespread of unstable houses with poor insulation or without it, leaking windows, inefficient cooling systems, and ineffective construction methods (Alrashed & Asif, 2014). However, the political motives spelled out in the Vision 2030 can motivate developers to invest in sustainable technologies such as renewable energy (Abubakar & Aina, 2016). In 2020, an insufficient number of incentives leads to a problematic situation for the development of sustainable buildings and is currently an obstacle to sustainable development.
Natural Physical Features
Dammam's natural physical characteristics include hazardous groundwater, which affects the foundations of buildings (Dano, 2018). Rare rains, leaks from water networks, and seawater contribute to rising groundwater levels (Dano, 2018). Groundwater is a problem for the development of the city, as it can create emergencies in the structure and foundation of buildings. Additionally, the topography of Dammam shows a relatively equal level of height of the earth relative to the sea (Dano, 2018). The city and its surrounding territories within 3.5 km contain small changes within 48 km (Dano, 2018).
Man-made Features and Utilities
Traditional drainage systems based on pipeline networks in Dammam are designed to collect and drain rainwater in urban areas (Poleto & Tassi, 2012). Their widespread use can lead to several problems associated with the flooding of territories, as well as with diffuse pollution of natural water bodies by the flow of water, which contains high concentrations of harmful substances such as heavy metals, oils, and others (Tarawneh & Chowdhury, 2018). Thus, designing an environmentally friendly building in Dammam requires the use of sustainable drainage systems.
In Dammam, there is a significant company, the GE Manufacturing Technology Center, which is specialized in the generation of power, oil, and gas, and water not only in Dammam but the whole country ("GE Power in Saudi Arabia", 2020). Despite the excess of oil and gas in the country, the importance of the construction sector in the sustainable development program is quite high, since carbon dioxide emissions and electricity consumption per person and the number of buildings increases sharply due to economic growth, as well as population growth. Moreover, according to Ahmed and the co-authors, Saudi Arabia's residential sector consumes about half of its electricity, as shown in Figure 2 (Ahmed et al., 2019). These indicators confirm the need to develop a sustainable design for the construction of residential buildings.
Figure 2. Electricity Consumption in Saudi Arabia (Ahmed et al., 2019)
Since Saudi Arabia has very severe climatic conditions, which are characterized by hot and dry weather all year round in the majority parts of the country, including Dammam, as a result of which buildings are exposed to a large amount of solar radiation for extended periods (Tarawneh & Chowdhury, 2018). Buildings rely heavily on air conditioning, which consumes about 80% of household electricity in Saudi Arabia to compensate for the effects of solar radiation and lower the room temperature for thermal comfort (Tarawneh & Chowdhury, 2018). Thus, a sustainable home construction design should include the active use of passive ventilation to provide residents with maximum thermal comfort with minimal energy consumption for air conditioning. The construction industry in Dammam continues to depend on inefficient methods, and houses are designed according to the traditional design process, which is linear and fragmented.
Dammam has quality roads that connect it with other cities of the country. Traffic in the city is quite heavy, as the low price of cars provokes high demand among the population to buy their own vehicles (Dano, 2018). As it is shown in Table 1, the majority of families in Dammam have one or two cars (Dano, 2018). As a result, Dammam has an ever-increasing number of traffic jams.
Table 1. Car Ownership in Dammam (Dano, 2018).
Besides, Dammam has a railway network, which connects Dammam with Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. In 1999, King Fahd International Airport was opened near Dammam. It is one of the largest airports in the world and is located 20 kilometers from Dammam, and serves several Saudi cities, including Dammam, Al-Kobar, Dahran, Katif, Ras Tanur, and Jubail (Dano, 2018). When the port was built in Dammam, the food, oil refining, and chemical industries became widespread in the city (Dano, 2018) .
Climate
The Dammam city has a harsh hot desert climate. The period from March to October in Dammam is hot, and other months are just warm. Due to the proximity of the desert at night, temperatures can drop to zero degrees Celsius in winter months. Also, there are often dust storms. Rain in Dammam is a rare occurrence, and it usually falls in small amounts during the winter months. The climate in Saudi Arabia is arid, and it has about 100 mm of precipitation annually (Tarawneh & Chowdhury, 2018). The average annual wind direction in the city comes from the east. According to Gaisma weather website, the sun in Dammam has the following path:
Figure 1. Darkness, dawn, shine, and dusk during the year in Dammam ("Dammam, Saudi Arabia - Sunrise, sunset, dawn and dusk times for the whole year", 2020).
Human and Cultural Characteristics
Archaeological surveys were carried out on the territory of this city and found artifacts confirmed that more than two millennia ago, there was a civilized settlement on this site. Still, after a while, the area was covered with sand and was uninhabited for a long time. Only in the first years of the twentieth century was a small fishing village built, the inhabitants of which were engaged in fishing and pearl mining, and a small port was also built. In 1940, vast oil deposits were discovered there, and this village quickly grew to the status of a metropolis.
In 2020, about a million people live in the city, and the population of the metropolitan area is more than 2 million. The buildings of Dammam are skyscrapers, offices, and shopping centers of great height, and everything is built in a modern style. The predominant religion in the city is Islam. Accordingly, there are many mosques in the city.
Conclusion
Based on the resources available in the region, which are presented in the form of higher income levels, high population density, and socio-economic activities, Dammam will become the most reliable area in the Eastern region. The primary problems for the development of sustainable building projects in Saudi Arabia are the harsh climatic conditions of the country, obsolete construction systems, discounted electricity tariffs, fast construction speed, as well as the lack of political incentives for the development of green buildings (Abubakar & Aina, 2016; Ahmed et al., 2019). However, the city is an excellent place for building sustainable housing, but severe climatic conditions must be considered when designing a building.
References
Abubakar, I., & Aina, Y. (2016). Achieving Sustainable Cities in Saudi Arabia. Population Growth and Rapid Urbanization in the Developing World , 42-63. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-0187-9.ch003
Ahmed, W., Asif, M., & Alrashed, F. (2019). Application of Building Performance Simulation to Design Energy-Efficient Homes: Case Study from Saudi Arabia. Sustainability , 11 (21), 11-16. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11216048
Alrashed, F., & Asif, M. (2014). Saudi Building Industry's Views on Sustainability in Buildings: Questionnaire Survey. Energy Procedia , 62 , 382-390. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egypro.2014.12.400
Dammam, Saudi Arabia - Sunrise, sunset, dawn and dusk times for the whole year . Gaisma. (2020). Retrieved 1 June 2020, from https://www.gaisma.com/en/location/ad-dammam.html.
Dano, U. (2018). Improving Traffic Safety towards Sustainable Built Environment in Dammam City, Saudi Arabia. IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science , 151 , 012031. https://doi.org/10.1088/1755-1315/151/1/012031
GE Power in Saudi Arabia . Ge.com. (2020). Retrieved 1 June 2020, from https://www.ge.com/sa/b2b/power.
Poleto, C., & Tassi, R. (2012). Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems. Drainage Systems . https://doi.org/10.5772/34491
Tarawneh, Q., & Chowdhury, S. (2018). Trends of Climate Change in Saudi Arabia: Implications on Water Resources. Climate , 6 (1), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.3390/cli6010008
The Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs and the National HABITAT Consultation Group in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. (2016). The National Report for the Third UN Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (HABITAT III) for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia . Riyadh, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Retrieved from http://habitat3.org/wp-content/uploads/Saudi-Arabia-National-Report.pdf
