Public Realm · Dubai
Reading time: 6 minMost Dubai masterplans start with the buildings and fit the green space around them. Bjarke Ingels Group has done the opposite. Its plan for the historic Jebel Ali Racecourse begins with a sea of green and sets the city down into it as a scatter of islands. It is a small inversion with a big meaning, and the horses get to stay.
There is one sentence that unlocks BIG’s plan for the Jebel Ali Racecourse, and it belongs to the architect himself. Bjarke Ingels describes the project as “an archipelago of urban islands in a sea of green.”
Read past the poetry and there is a genuine idea in there, one that quietly reverses how Dubai has usually been built. The New Dubai Masterplan, designed by Bjarke Ingels Group for the developer A.R.M. Holding, will transform the historic racecourse into a 5 square kilometre district of eight walkable neighbourhoods gathered around a large central park. Construction is expected to begin in early 2026. On the surface that is another big Dubai announcement. Underneath, it proposes a different starting point for a city, and that is what makes it worth a closer look.
Turning the city inside out
To see what is new here, it helps to picture the usual model.
The default Dubai development starts with the objects. You place the towers, you draw the roads that connect them, and whatever green survives ends up as landscaping between the buildings, a strip here, a verge there, decorative and secondary. It has produced a spectacular skyline and a city that is, for much of the year, difficult to cross on foot.
BIG’s plan begins from the other end. It starts with the green, treating the whole site as a continuous landscape, and then sets the built neighbourhoods into it like islands. Each island connects to the one beside it, and the density rises as the islands converge on the central park at the heart of the plan. Crucially, in Ingels’s own description, the park “does not stop at the centre.” It bleeds out between the islands, weaving nature through the whole district and reaching into the communities around it. Green is not the leftover here. It is the foundation everything else sits in.
That is a meaningful shift. A masterplan that treats parkland as the connective tissue rather than the decoration is making a statement about what the city is for. The buildings serve the landscape and the people moving through it, rather than the other way round.
Eight neighbourhoods you can walk
Flowing from that idea is the plan’s central commitment, which is walkability.
The eight neighbourhoods are conceived as interconnected micro-communities, each with its own character, amenities and public spaces, and each designed at human scale rather than highway scale. Streets are planned for low-speed traffic to make walking and cycling the natural choice. Communal plazas are shaded, which in this climate is the difference between a public space that gets used and one that bakes empty. Automated shuttles and public transport links are meant to let people move across the district and beyond it without reaching for a car.
This is the same lesson now surfacing across Dubai’s most thoughtful new planning, that the measure of a place is whether people will choose to walk it, and that in the desert this depends on shade and on keeping cars in their place. It is worth noting how closely this echoes Meraas’s expanded plan for Dubai Design District, with its shaded pedestrian spine. Two of the city’s most prominent new masterplans are arriving at the same conclusion at the same time, both under the umbrella of the Dubai 2040 Urban Master Plan and its emphasis on pedestrian mobility. Something is shifting in how Dubai imagines itself.
Keeping the horses
The most charming decision in the plan is also a serious one, and it concerns the site’s own history.
The Jebel Ali Racecourse is a genuine Dubai landmark, and the easy path would have been to clear it and start fresh. BIG has chosen instead to preserve and integrate the equestrian heritage, keeping riding venues and horse culture woven into the new district rather than erasing them. The racecourse becomes a living focal point for leisure and community life instead of a memory paved over.
There is real value in that continuity. A brand new district built from nothing has no roots, and roots are exactly what young cities struggle to grow. By keeping the horses at the centre of the story, the plan gives the place an identity it did not have to invent, a thread running from what the site was to what it will become.
Culture, sustainability and the sensible caveats
Around the neighbourhoods and the park, the plan promises the full mix of a modern district: cultural institutions, schools and innovation centres, and mixed-use development combining homes, retail, hospitality and workspace, so that people can live, work and spend their leisure time within the same walkable area.
The sustainability ambitions are stated in the language of contemporary planning. The project is guided by 17 measurable targets covering wellbeing, sustainability, identity and innovation, and it leans on smart energy systems, green infrastructure for stormwater and biodiversity, pedestrian networks and efficient materials, with even the promise of AI-assisted planning tools to optimise traffic and services. It is worth keeping a level head about some of this. KPIs and predictive modelling are easy to announce and hard to deliver, and every masterplan of this scale arrives clad in similar language. What matters is whether the finished district actually feels like the renders, walkable, green and human. On that measure, the strength of BIG’s plan is not the technology. It is the simplicity of the core idea, and simple ideas tend to survive contact with reality better than complicated ones.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Jebel Ali Racecourse masterplan? A 5 square kilometre urban district designed by Bjarke Ingels Group for developer A.R.M. Holding, transforming Dubai’s historic Jebel Ali Racecourse into eight walkable neighbourhoods around a large central park. Construction is expected to begin in early 2026.
Who designed it? Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), the Danish practice led by Bjarke Ingels, commissioned by A.R.M. Holding. It aligns with the Dubai 2040 Urban Master Plan.
What is the main idea? An “archipelago of urban islands in a sea of green,” where built neighbourhoods sit as islands within a continuous landscape, growing denser towards a central park that weaves out between them.
What happens to the racecourse? Its equestrian heritage is preserved and integrated into the new district rather than removed, keeping riding venues and horse culture at the heart of the community.
How does it relate to the rest of Dubai’s planning? It shares the walkable, green, pedestrian-first ambitions of the Dubai 2040 Urban Master Plan, and closely echoes Meraas’s expanded Dubai Design District plan.
Final thoughts
It is easy to grow numb to Dubai masterplans, which arrive often and speak loudly. This one earns attention because its central idea is genuinely good and genuinely simple. Start with the green, set the city into it as islands, let a park run through the whole thing, keep cars slow and people walking, and hold on to the horses that gave the place its name.
If it is built with the conviction of the concept, BIG’s plan for Jebel Ali could become one of the clearest expressions yet of where Dubai is heading as it looks towards 2040, away from the isolated tower and towards the connected, green, walkable neighbourhood. Alongside the reinvention of Dubai Design District, it suggests that the next chapter of this city may be measured less by how high it can build and more by how well it can bring people together at ground level, in the shade, among the trees. Meraas is testing the same idea at d3, as is SOM with its Blue Line metro stations.
Leave a Reply