Kuwait’s Public Authority for Housing Welfare (PAHW) will be awarding within a month the project management consultancy (PMC) contract for the state’s first smart city development, the 104-square-kilometre South Al-Mutlaa City.

The PMC firms that have submitted a bid for the South Al-Mutlaa City include:

• Aecom (US)
• CH2M (US)
• Fluor (US)
• Hill International (US)
• Louis Berger (US)
• WSP Parsons Brinckerhoff (Canada)

The winning PMC firm, along with the team of consultancies overseeing the project led by Canada’s WSP/Parsons Brinkerhoff, will be planning, along with the client, the smart city elements that will be incorporated into the development.

”Once the PMC is awarded, we will begin discussions on whether South Al-Mutlaa will be going for full-throttle smart city or whether we will be incorporating only the most integral smart city and sustainability elements into the development,” says Naser Khraibut, PAHW director of planning.

South Al-Mutlaa City be located in Kuwait’s Jahra governorate, to the west of the capital Kuwait City.

Once completed in 2019, the development will have 30,000 housing units with population projected to reach 400,000. This would comprise about 9 per cent of the state’s projected population of nearly 4.6 million by 2019, based on the Washington-headquartered IMF’s population forecast data.