How smart city growth principles can be adopted in the UAE to solve the local housing problems?

Shaikh Zayed Housing Program “SZHP” is the governmental program that is responsible for local housing in the UAE. The program’s main aim is to offer a variety of housing services such as loans, grants, and ready-to-move houses. However, both the continuously growing urban population and liveability challenges are impeding the program to meet its goal. As mentioned on SZHP’s official website “We should continue to explore new ways to establish informed dialogue with different groups of society and to ensure adequate housing for national families, in achieving stability and community development by meeting future needs” (SZHP, 2022 ). Accordingly, this research highlights some of the major challenges that face the local housing program in the UAE specially SZHP by analyzing the current housing practices and policies in the country and using the smart city growth principles to understand the new smart urbanization principles that can be adopted and applied in the UAE to reduce and minimize some of the housing challenges. Moreover, a study case for one of the recently developed local neighborhoods “Al Raqaib-2” will be done to address the area of development and study the possibilities to apply some of the smart urban planning principles in the area to enhance the neighborhood liveability and reduce the housing challenges.