Abdulaziz Alzahrani
Abdulaziz is an architect and urban designer who has a different educational background (US, UK, KSA). He has a bachelor’s degree in Islamic Architecture from Umm Al-Qura University. During the last three years of his undergraduate study, he was a member of the Engineering Commission in the Pilgrim Public Service Camp in Pilgrim year of 2003-2004-2005. His role was to produce and updating guiding maps of the holy sites in Makkah (Mina, Arafat, and Muzdalifah) by GIS.
Starting his profession as an architect in the Urban Development & Studies Centre in 2005, helps him to build a fundamental understanding of various aspects of public spaces such as social and environmental dimensions and its relationship to the publicly accessible spaces in the contexts of urban design. His first public space role was assessing the quality and observing social activities of Ibrahim Al Khalil Street at Al Masfala area, located near The Holy Mosque, Makkah, in 2006 when he was a Member of the planning team of the Beirut Millennium office who was in charge of this project.
His passion for public spaces and the social interaction attached to them encourages him to continue this journey with public spaces. Abdulaziz has a master’s degree in Urban Design from Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD) in 2009, Savannah, GA, US. His MSc Graduation Project: Sustainability in the residential neighborhoods of Makkah, and He got the award for the best master’s project that year. He then has two years of experience working in planning and urban design projects such as Bawabt Makkah Project and some other similar projects while being a technical manager in the Omraniyoun office, Makkah.
His commitment toward public space leads him to continue his education and learn more about placemaking and the quality of places. The latest degree for him was a Ph.D. in urban design from the University of Nottingham in 2017, which was focusing on the social value of urban design in mixed-use developments in London. He investigates the United Kingdom (UK) government’s influence on the quality of urban design through the role of mixed-use developments and the publicly accessible privately-owned spaces within these developments.
Abdulaziz is a faculty member of the Architecture Department, the University of Al-Baha, since 2010. He develops many courses during his teaching experiences, such as urban design and landscape courses. He works on graduation projects, with many students trying to shift their focus toward public spaces within their projects.
Abdulaziz participates with scientific papers in many conferences that related to public spaces such as the AESOP Annual Congress – AESOP: Definite space – fuzzy responsibility 2015, Prague, Czech Republic, the 11th International Conference on Urban Regeneration and Sustainability 2016, Alicante, Spine, and last one was Culture in Urban Space 2020, Malmö, Sweden.
Abdulaziz is a Supervisor of the Strategic Planning Office at the University of Al-Baha and a certified balanced scorecard professional offered in association with the George Washington University Centre for Excellence in Public Leadership.
Abdulaziz is interested in assessing the quality of public spaces and their classifications. He is spreading the importance of their presence in development projects and highlighting their vital role to users. He is interested in scientific publishing and currently works on many scientific papers related to public spaces and its perception and quality in different regions of Saudi Arabia.