Chapter 3: Adaptive Physical Activity as a Measure of Healthy City Transformation: The Case of Jeddah

During the World Resilient Forum in 2015, the enhancement of the population’s outdoor physical activities was considered a marker of the city’s resilience levels, which needs more attention from urban officials and decision-makers. The capacity to recruit strategies and measures to counter multiple forms of hazards, including health ones, has been supported by the “Healthy City” approach and driven by the promotion of the population’s outdoor physical activity with the objectives of the well-being of communities, environmental sustainability, and investments in future generations. While such an approach is viable for new cities’ master plans and regulatory urban ordinances, outdoor physical activities, such as walking, bicycling, jogging, and exercise, have not been a principal component in primary cities’ structures. This represents a challenge to urban officials when dealing with the concept of city transformation into a sustainable and healthy city. This challenge demanded local urban entities recruit adaptive urban strategies for the city spaces to transform, integrate, and enhance outdoor physical activity settings all over their city’s zones. This research investigates those strategies and measures adopted by the local urban entities to adapt their cities to outdoor physical activity settings, taking Jeddah as a case study. It uses the Function Quality Deployment Method to evaluate the degree of the design quality and success in achieving resilience objectives. The research recommends a strategy model for adapting the physical healthy setting to suit the primate cities in the Arab regions.