“Five years ago there was nothing here,” says Hamad Said Al Rawahi as he drives fast along a stretch of freshly paved highway in Oman’s coastal desert. He just picked me up from the side of the road in his shiny black Mercedes. I am hitchhiking – the closest thing to public transport out here.
We are in Duqm, a nascent city about 300 miles (480km) from the capital, Muscat, that was a fishing village prior to 2011, when Oman reimagined it, along with a stretch of uninterrupted coastline and Bedouin camps, as a new special economic zone.
“It has totally changed,” says Al Rawahi, who has lived in Duqm “for a few years” and works at its dry dock. “Now we have five-star hotels and villas … There are shops and supermarkets, places you can go and visit.”
The city is still in its early days. The basic highway grid has just been paved, the port and dry dock have recently begun operating, the oil refinery is getting set to fire up, and two luxury hotels have opened their doors.
Within two years an estimated 111,000 people are expected to call this place home.
The project is the latest of a long line of plans stretching back to the 1980s aimed at developing and populating barren parts of Oman. Around 70% of the country’s population resides within a thin 150-mile-long coastal strip in the north near Muscat. The government now sees its hundreds of miles of unused coastline as full of economic potential.
The masterplan for Duqm follows the guidelines of transit-oriented developmentvirtually step by step. A sea port is being used to seed a vast special economic zone, which in turn is being used as an economic driver for the entirely new metropolis. The full gamut of urban offerings will be built in Duqm: industrial zones, a large refinery, a new airport, education centres, sprawling thickets of modern housing and a tourism district.
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