Project Profile

The Amman Plan is a unique initiative to create Amman’s first legally binding, participation-based plan to govern the City’s growth over the coming twenty years. The Amman Plan builds on, and is defined by, the character of the historic and contemporary City – that is, by what makes Amman Amman, including topography, natural and cultural heritage, views and landmarks, public spaces, stable neighborhoods, mixed-use streets, emerging variety of scales, uniformity of buildings, as well as the City's ongoing growth. The Plan seeks to extend the City's unique character into the future realizing that Amman is not afraid of modernity but seeks to ensure that it complements the beauty, serenity and civility that the existing City is known for.

The Amman Plan is a pragmatic exercise in which five phases have been completed. These are mostly community plans that responded to an urgent need for planning. They include the Interim Growth Strategy for High-Density Mixed-Use Areas, Corridors Intensification Strategy, Industrial Lands Policy, Outlying Settlements Policy, and Airport Corridor Plan. As planning in each phase is completed, actual development commences.

The Amman Plan is a work in progress – being built and refined as different layers of planning in Amman are contemplated – and will remain so through to its 18-year horizon and beyond.
The plan features sequential scales of planning and corresponding levels of planning details within an overall plan hierarchy:

1. Metropolitan scale: encompassing the entire area of Amman’s 1,662 kilometers, and is termed the Metropolitan Growth Plan.
2. Planning Area scale: the metropolitan planning area will be split into 8 planning areas to provide a finer scale of planning detail.
3. Community scale: covering 228 existing neighborhoods that can be reduced to smaller planning blocks.

The Amman plan represents a somewhat unorthodox approach to metropolitan, urban, and community planning. The planning occurs simultaneously on all three scales, which are being created both from the top down and the bottom up. Each scale will be informed by and in sync with the other layers, and the implications and impacts of each scale on the other two can be examined back and forth.

There are several reasons why this approach has been adopted: the first is that a plan for a city like Amman can take up to five years to complete and is often out of date by the time it is approved; the second is that conventional plans are usually informed by decisions made at the larger scale level without consideration for their implications at the community level; the third reason is that structuring the plan in this way would ensure rapid response to immediate problems on the ground; the fourth reason is that the plan is divided into stages to facilitate ongoing and uninterrupted urban development.

Client: Greater Amman Municipality
Completion Date: Ongoing
Partners: planningAlliance

Project Images

 

Related Resources

Amman Plan Summary Report.