The Jeddah Municipality is drawing up a strategy for city's overhaul. As part of its efforts in that direction, a four-week workshop began here on Monday under the title “Strategic master plan for art on Jeddah.” Dr. Ashraf Al-Turki, head of the planning and designing department at Jeddah Municipality, said under the project of changing the face of Jeddah, monuments, fountains, lighting and sculptures will be installed across the city. He said 48 local young artists and architects have been contracted to design the new artwork. “We have divided them in several teams to find good locations across the city for their artwork to be better displayed publicly,” he added. The teams will also survey the city to relocate the places for the sculptures which were removed due to road work. This workshop will help the municipality to come up with a comprehensive plan to figure out the new face of the city. Dr. Al-Turki said the plans and field studies of the proposed artwork, monuments, sculptures, and paintings have been handed over to the artists who will move around the city to decide where these works of art can fit. The municipality is planning to introduce 12 new types of artistic works including mural, three dimensional paintings, wall paintings, sculptures, colored lighting system installed on bridges, a network of underpasses and flyovers, in addition to new fountains and paintings in the Corniche area and East Jeddah and special Arabic calligraphy artworks on tall buildings across the city, said Dr. Al-Turki. Apart from having new artworks, evaluation of the old ones will also be done, and they will be refurbished, if needed. Open spaces will be turned into parks. Works of local and international artists will be featured in this project. An art center will be opened in Jeddah by the municipality to give a platform to Saudi artists to display their creativity. Each artwork across the city will include background information on the work and its artist, Al
