Long term vision

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Michael Sandford.

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Corniche Beach, Abu Dhabi.

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Corniche Beach, Abu Dhabi.

From a vantage point of several years' experience in the UAE, Hyder Consulting's Michael Sandford tells COD why he thinks the economic slowdown could be good for regional designers, and why the public realm is the key to successful outdoor design.

Originally established in the Gulf as an infrastructure engineering consulting firm, Hyder Consulting is now one of the region's largest multi-disciplinary design and advisory businesses.

The firm set up a landscape and urban design division some five years ago as a means for its Abu Dhabi office to provide a landscape service to the local municipality and has grown ever since.

The collaboration with Abu Dhabi municipality proved fruitful with Hyder later securing a contract with the municipality to provide landscape design and construction supervision service for all public realm on Abu Dhabi island.

Outside of Abu Dhabi, the firm's projects in the GCC include work on the landscape masterplan of the new city development of Lusail in Qatar.

Hyder Consulting operates three offices in the region: Abu Dhabi, its first and central office, where it employs 20 people; Bahrain, where it has seven staff, and Dubai, where it has five.

The company's GCC design unit is supported by a team of 27 employees in Manila.

The company's Dubai office includes staff integrated from ACLA, which Hyder acquired approximately three years ago in a bid to expand its landscape and urban design services in the region on the back of the boom for landscape design services.

Changing times

One of the biggest changes long-timers at the firm have seen over the years in the region, according to Hyder landscape design discipline director Michael Sandford, is the fast pace at which the market for landscaping design services has developed.

"The biggest real change has been in the speed things had been progressing up until three to six months ago," says Sandford.

"I had never seen anything like it. Things were just progressing at an Olympian pace. There was a lot of urgency and projects of extraordinary vision were being proposed."

This fast pace recently slowed, of course, with the onset in the Gulf of the global economic downturn.

But while the landscape and urban design division of Hyder, along with others, has had to adjust to the suspension of some projects in Dubai, Abu Dhabi has proved a much more robust market, says Sandford.

"We are less affected in Abu Dhabi although delivery of one or two of our projects has slowed," he says, adding, however, that the effect of the slowdown in Dubai means that the market in Abu Dhabi has become a lot more competitive than it was previously.

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