Abu Dhabi Placemaking & Visitor Experience Strategy

Yas Island is Abu Dhabi’s première leisure and entertainment destination with a large 25 km square footprint and multi faceted destination offer that includes hospitality, retail, sports, events and year round attractions. After careful consideration Miral appointed Creative Dialog as part of an extensive and long term engagement to develop a complete placemaking approach for the public realm of this landmark destination with the clear mandate of providing an enhanced visitor experience.

While built around a series of immensely impressive and iconic attractions such as Ferrari World, Warner Bros. World, Sea World and the Yas Marina F1 Circuit, it became clear from the outset that Yas Island as a whole functions as a collection of separate destinations. With this in mind the challenge became clear; how can we reimagine Yas Island's future beyond being a collection of disparate fast fun attractions primarily accessed by private vehicle use?

Destination Dynamics

Using the full breadth of our strategic advisory tools, we conducted extensive site audits and stakeholder engagement workshops to understand the island's operational complexities and challenges along with critical client side feedback and aspirations which revealed the extent of destination's untapped potential. This research uncovered key insights about visitor movement patterns, cultural preferences, and the missed opportunities to leverage Yas Island's unique geography, while also getting to the core of a range of management and governance issues that the wider stakeholder group faced in managing not only the assets but the public realm and it’s infrastructure and ultimately the island itself.

Through extensive demographic and visitor research, interviews and behavioral mapping, we discovered incredible insights around how 34 million annual visitors from over 100 countries navigate and experience the destination. All of these learnings propelled our Island First - Attraction Second strategy to form the basis of what became the Yas Island Vision 2030 Placemaking Program.

Our research uncovered to two distinct things: visitation is predominately undertaken point to point from attraction to attraction by private car and that almost all visitors perceive Yas Island as being about F1 and Ferrari World. This quite well ingrained view point resulted in vast spaces of the island not being frequented or even known by the audience as well as building barriers to visitation where in many instances visitors and potential visitors felt that they could not afford to visit Yas Island.

This led to us redefining our aspirational visitor modalities from being car based to exploration based where the ethos of active lifestyle and cultural engagement sit front and center of the Yas experience. This new paradigm shift was then supported by a multitude of interventions and site programming from public art to cultural events along with the opening up of green spaces and transport routes to reposition the visitor mindset and foster easier accessibility and deeper engagement.

One of the core pillars of our approach was rather than treating individual assets in isolation, we developed a holistic vision that positioned Yas Island as a unified island destination where every element reinforces the distinctive experience of island living. This was achieved by creating numerous opportunities to see and experience the water’s edge through elevated viewpoints and water connections to promote and reinforce the sense of island. This was further embellished by providing the ability to explore the destination as an island across a seamless mobility network that included, water taxis, sky lifts, personal mobility, running, walking and cycling trails and finally ultra light rail mobility pods that all connect to one another to create the game changing Yas Leisure Trail, providing both residents and visitors exciting new ways to explore Yas Island from micro to macro.

Our island wide master planning approach prioritized active lifestyle promotion through strategic reconfiguration of vehicle-dominant spaces, while also serving as the catalyst to broaden the destination offer. This pedestrian-first philosophy guided the reimagining of three critical precincts, Yas Family Park, Yas Plaza and Yas Marina each with own unique mix of amenities and anchors.

Yas Family Park Activation

Located at the terminus of the Leisure Trail, at the center of the site, Yas Family Park is the largest open space in the plan, a civic scale gathering place and focal point within the project.

Our transformation of underutilized open space created the region's premier family destination through a carefully integrated landscape that serves multiple generations simultaneously. The all-new Yas Art Park anchors the experience with repurposed and positioned outdoor sculpture installations that create both wow moments and authentic cultural touchpoints throughout the expanded parkland.

At the heart of this new intervention sits a large-scale biodome and conservatory that showcases both local and international species, providing climate-controlled exploration opportunities year-round while educating visitors about regional ecology.

The Adventure Park extends the family experience through an engaging walking maze and elevated sky deck that offers panoramic views across the entire island, creating Instagram-worthy moments while serving as a natural orientation point and yet another opportunity to emphasize the notion of island through the sight of near by water.

Event-ready spaces within the park supported by the Yas Island Visitor Centre enables flexible programming that supports the new Yas After Dark initiative, hosting everything from moonlight cinema screenings to weekend cultural activations that extend the park's appeal beyond daylight hours. All of these planned interventions also provide sound economic drivers to further diversify the island's appeal.

Yas Plaza Reimagined

The transformation of this previously underutilized and sun exposed dormant space demonstrates how thoughtful infrastructure design can dramatically improve public comfort and programming flexibility. Our bespoke retractable shade structures provide significantly enhanced comfort levels that enable true year-round activation, addressing the fundamental challenge of creating appealing outdoor gathering spaces in Abu Dhabi's climate.

These flexible environmental controls support diverse programming from intimate night markets to large-scale pop-up experiences and daily fitness programs, creating a dynamic event space that adapts to both seasonal preferences and varying group sizes. The plaza's strategic positioning creates direct integration with the island's hospitality hub, establishing a genuine community gathering point where hotel guests, attraction visitors, and local residents can intersect naturally throughout both day and night across a wide range of programs.

Establishing Character Zones

Another intrinsic element of our placemaking approach was develop a flexible character zone framework that allowed for future development of the public realm including hard and softscapes ensuring that all future activations will be not only highly targeted but aligned to the overall site wide placemaking strategy.

Our transformation of the public realm directly addressed the growing consumer demand for authentic, meaningful engagement and higher levels of public amenity expected of flagship destinations. This framework led to numerous upgrade initiatives including a site wide infrastructure decluttering program, revised approaches to HVM deployment and overall urban beatification measures as public space infill projects where sidewalks and transit corridors were all given significant uplifts serving the broader Abu Dhabi community while enhancing the overall destination experience for all stakeholder groups.

Set within Abu Dhabi's ambitious vision to extend cultural and leisure tourism, our future forward placemaking strategy sees Yas Island emerge as more than an entertainment destination, it is a contemporary interpretation of the UAE's enduring relationship with water, movement, and gathering. Our island wide transformation takes it’s world class attractions and hospitality venues, and blends them with carefully crafted recreational spaces underpinned by vastly improved visitor mobility that embraces adaptive connectivity and cultural programming to deliver enhanced economic drivers, a significantly improved public realm and visitor experience that respects and enhances its existing attractions while creating new opportunities for exploration, wow moments and encounters that define memorable travel experiences.

This project was delivered as a part of our strategic advisory services.