RECONCEPTUALISING MECCA : The Hajj in the Era of Hyper-Mobility

Today, after many centuries of urban development in one of Saudi Arabia’s most primitive cities, the City of Mecca has revolutionised religious tourism through the expansion of intercity and regional transportation. The historic city centre has always served as a thriving gateway for trading and linking the Mediterranean worlds with East Africa and South Asia. Its spatial geography is located in the Sirat Mountains of central Saudi Arabia and nearly 80 kilometres from the Red Sea port of Jeddah. The compact built-up of Mecca comprises Masjid al-Haram (‘the Great Mosque’) and in its centre lies a 13-metre tall by 11-metre wide cube known as the Kaaba, which serves as the point of direction for every Muslim to pray towards.

Urban thinkers have always been captivated by the city’s historical significance and as one of Islam’s holiest cities in the Middle East, the phenomenon of the Hajj pilgrimage draws a unique pattern of pedestrian mobility. During the commencement of Zilhaj al-Haraam – the 12th month of the Islamic calendar year – a sea of nearly two million Muslims travel from different parts of the world to unite for the annual Hajj pilgrimage. The Hajj is a strenuous journey that requires a tremendous movement of pilgrims to site-specific places.

Consequently, the journey often challenges the management of pilgrims resulting in dire situations such as entrapment, stampedes and overcrowding. In 1990, more than 1,400 pilgrims were trampled to death. Between 1991 and 2005, nearly 700 pilgrims were killed in crowd crushing. In 2006, a stampede on the Jamarat Bridge in Mina killed 364 pilgrims. The largest incident occurred in 2015 killing more than 2,400 pilgrims by overcrowding during a roadblock in Mina (Source: Ghaffar, 2018).

While the city continues to celebrate its holy centre, the issue of capacity, visibility and movement in an extremely urbanising world has been a great matter of concern for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Among numerous solutions, the Mayor of Mecca and the Saudi Arabian government have invested more than $100 billion in transportation and urban development initiatives, including the expansion of Masjid al-Haram, the new King Abdulaziz International Airport and its Hajj Terminal and the Haramain High-Speed Rail System project. On a global purview – from accommodating Muslims worldwide to gather at these site-specific spaces – the country has invested efforts to expand, manage and improve the movement of pilgrims during Hajj from one place to another.

Transportation and Urban Development Initiatives in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Until the advent of modern transportation, thousands of pilgrims travelled to Mecca in large caravans across the desert from Damascus, Cairo and other major cities in Arabia, Yemen and Iraq. The journey often took two years by camel or sea (Source: Davies, 2012). Today, the increasing number of pilgrims has resulted in traffic jams challenging the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to simplify travel procedures and tourism without altering the city’s holy centre.

The Mayor of Mecca and the Saudi Arabian government have invested more than $100 billion in transportation and urban development initiatives

The Expansion of Masjid al-Haram

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, there have been a series of expansions to the Masjid al-Haram. The most current expansion will be designed to accommodate 2.2 million worshippers, up from the 600,000 at present and enable up to 400,000 pilgrims (per hour) to perform the tawaf or ‘walk around’ the Kaaba (Source: Nehme, 2016). Its state-of-the-art facilities with multi-levels and interconnected network of pedestrian routes will help alleviate traffic. The construction of a pedestrian highway such as the Jamarat Bridge, where pilgrims throw stones at pillars believed to represent the Devil, will be able to handle more than three million pilgrims during Hajj. The surrounding development, including residences, has been replaced with open spaces and wide streets with underground walkways to enable pedestrian circulation (Source: Nehme, 2016).

Towards the south of the mosque, a 2012-built multi-tower skyscraper complex, the Abraj al-Bait (Makkah Royal Clock Tower) rises 95 stories high with six towers composed of luxury hotels, shopping centres, prayer areas and residential apartments. Complementary to the hotel, the proposed world’s largest clock tower – the Abraj Kudai-Makkah – will consist of 12 towers spanning 45 storeys, 10,000 bedrooms, 70 restaurants and 5 rooftop helipads with a total of 1,400,000 square metres of floor area.  These expansion projects are to be completed in 2020 (Source: Aswad, 2017).

The King Abdulaziz International Airport

The 30-year master plan expansion of the King Abdulaziz International Airport (KAIA) and the Hajj Terminal will address the congestion and operational problems at the airport. Initially inaugurated in 1981, the KAIA serves as the gateway for pilgrims to enter the City of Mecca and Medina. Beginning in 2005, the Saudi Arabian General Authority of Civil Aviation (GACA) initialised the master plan in three phases. Phase I is expected to be complete this year and will accommodate 30 million passengers per year from the current 17 million. The remaining phases are targeted to handle up to 80 million passengers by 2035 (Source: www.jed-airport.com).

The Hajj Terminal is solely used during the Hajj season. While accommodating a mosque at the terminal, future expansion will provide a capacity of 300,000 pilgrims from the current 80,000 at a single time. The airport master plan also includes a 36.5-kilometre mass transit centre to link the ‘Haramain Express’ High Speed Rail System to the city. The GACA’s mission is to create an “intermodal hub to promote the economic spirit of the country, to support the national air transportation system and to enhance service as the gateway to the region” (Source: RMD Kwikform, 2013).

Phase I will accommodate 30 million passengers per year from the current 17 million

The ‘Haramain Express’ High-Speed Rail Project

Currently, Mecca does not offer many public transportation options for citizens and travellers who are often forced to use personal vehicles, private taxis or buses. In 2009, the Saudi Arabia Railway Organisation introduced a $16 billion mass transit infrastructure to accommodate the growing number of pilgrims each year. The ‘Haramain Express’ High-Speed Rail System serves as a catalyser for public transportation to redefine the urban landscape. ‘Haramain,’ which means two holy places in Arabic, will span 453-kilometres in length and connect to Mecca and Medina via Jeddah, King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) and Jeddah’s KAIA. Like its competing predecessors such as China’s ‘Shanghai Maglev’ and ‘Fuxing Hoa’, and the ‘Shinkansen bullet-train’ in Japan, the Haramain Express is designed to reach up to 360 kilometres per hour with a reduction of travel time from six hours to two hours from Mecca to Medina. It will also reduce the travel time between Jeddah and Mecca from over an hour to 21 minutes. The high-speed rail can accommodate up to 160,000 passengers a day and more than 60 million passengers a year, becoming one of the largest public transport systems in the Middle East (Source: Railway Technology, 2018). As part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 plan, it serves as a resolution for safety from other modes of transport, relieves commercial traffic and air pollution and boosts economic activity for local businesses and tourism. It is scheduled to operate for the public by end of 2018.

A Brief History of Mecca: Origins and Synchronicities

The City of Mecca has always served as a locus of civic activity for travellers and pilgrims. Unlike many other cities today, Mecca is homogenous: it is a place that caters to only Muslims for all urban activity. It is spectacular to witness Hajj as an event that influences the shaping of geographies and opening new operative scales of compound spatialities in an effort to unify Muslims throughout the world. The pilgrimage teaches us that its ritual is not one-dimensional. Rather, a nexus that succeeds in temporal dimensions of its sanctity: a rich spatial legacy, a narration of historical occurrences and a sequence of predefined routes.

Reconceptualising Mecca in the 21st Century

While the beauty of the Hajj’s orchestration provides an understanding of ‘how people move’ and ‘for what purpose’, from a mobility standpoint, it presents an underpinning of spatial and emerging transitions characterised by chaotic and persistent disturbance of movement. According to the Ministry of Hajj, pilgrims are expected to increase to more than 3 million and those visiting during non-Hajj period will increase from two million to more than 11 million in the next 25 years (Source: Railway Technology, 2018).

Consequently, as religious tourism increases, it becomes imperative to adopt nascent scales of urban networks and systems. As such, Saudi Arabia’s demand for a renewed interest in traffic woes signals how we spatially identify our cities. The result has become a varied dimension to the sacred and profound, with proliferating skyscrapers, pedestrian highways and mass 
transit systems to reconceptualise the city as more connected.