Constructionshows
Work will soon begin on a major residential construction project. The project, which comes from the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Finance’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) will see around SAR55 billion (approx. £8.5 billion) worth of funds pumped into the building of homes in Madinah.
According to local source Al-Madinha Daily, the project will include the construction of an impressive 100 towers within the 151,990 km² region, which is located in the Western part of the country beside the Red Sea. Of these 100 towers, 80 will be residential and the remaining 20 will serve administrative purposes.
Specifically, the towers will all be located in a particular part of the region, which is located south of major landmark and religious site the Prophet’s Mosque, which is notable for being the second mosque ever built and one of the largest in the world. The site that will contain the towers, which will have a total area of 1,600 km², is roughly equidistant between this site and the Al-Meeqat and Quba mosques, both also notable landmarks within the region.
Construction work on the project is planned to take place across two separate phases. The first phase will have a value of SAR12 billion (£1.8 billion) and will handle the preparation of the infrastructure that will be necessary for the project. The second phase will deal with the construction of the towers themselves, standing at over 30 stories in height.
The project is primarily a residential one, with 80 of the 100 towers given over to this purpose. This should help ease the pressure that the city of Medina’s 1,180,770 inhabitants (as of the 2010 census) put on the local housing market.
However, the administrative portion of the project, though comprising only one fifth of the towers in numerical terms, is also of impressive scope. It will house a number of offices for companies, travel agencies, and delegates of various kinds. In total, it will be able to house roughly 31,000 employees.
On top of this, the administrative towers will cater to the religious needs of Muslim locals and visitors. There will be a number of mosques housed within the towers with the combined capacity to house 15,000 Muslim worshippers in total. They will also contain 76 4-star and 5-star hotels with 40,000 rooms between them for housing pilgrims. As the Prophet’s Mosque is considered one of the most important sites in Islam, the city is extremely popular with pilgrims. The hotels will be able to house up to 120,000 guests altogether.
A range of other facilities will also be located within the administrative towers. These include restaurants and catering facilities, shops, a monorail station complete with a luggage transportation service, and even a 400-bed hospital.
The project is planned for completion within two years.
Author: Matthew Scott