Muscat Capital Area
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The Muscat Capital Area is an agglomeration around the Omani capital Muscat . It is the economic, social and cultural center that has formed around the small capital and is often equated with Muscat. In the Muscat Capital Area and the surrounding area, 56% of the population of Oman lived in an area that comprises only 5.3% of the country in 2010.
geography
The Muscat Capital Area stretches in the northeast of the country between the coast of the Gulf of Oman and the Hajar Mountains . It is about 50 kilometers long and five to eight kilometers wide between Muscat in the east and Sib in the west.
The mountains reach the coast in the east of the area. In this way, they prevented the port of Muscat from expanding significantly. The capital remained a small town with around 20,000 inhabitants, a good part of which is also spread across the surrounding areas in the southeast as far as Al-Bustan (2010). The place itself does not include much more than the Sultan's Palace , the National Museum and a few other smaller museums, some old town houses and walls, two historic forts and a naval base , the Treasury and some small residential areas with schools and small shops - large parts of the old town had streets and new administration buildings. The growth of the past decades has therefore occurred in the surrounding towns in particular.
Administrative structure
The Muscat Capital Area essentially comprises the Muscat Governorate (2017: 1,459,249 inhabitants). However, not all six Wilayet and of these not all areas can be included. So one Quriat not sure about this: (55,792 inhabitants in 2017).
Cities
The Muscat Capital Area includes the following cities:
- Muscat - city approx. 20,000 inhabitants, Wilaya 290,873 inhabitants (2017)
- Matrah - Wilaya 237,731 inhabitants (2017)
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Bawschar - Wilaya 394,631 inhabitants (2017)
- Sultan Qaboos City
- al-Ghubra
- al-Khuwair
- al-Amarat - city approx. 50,000 inhabitants, Wilaya 75,943 inhabitants (2017)
- Sib - Wilaya 404,279 inhabitants (2017)
history
When modernization and rapid economic progress occurred in Oman after Sultan Qaboos ibn Said came to power in 1970, urbanization also increased rapidly. A large urban landscape emerged from small port cities and farming villages, the Muscat Capital Area - a development that accelerated particularly after 1990, but reached saturation around 2012. The importance of the old center receded more and more to the busy suburbs: the entire Muscat Capital Area was included in the town planning.
traffic
The main thoroughfares in the Muscat Capital Area are Sultan Qaboos Street as part of Route 1 and the Muscat Expressway . Route 1 begins in Muscat as a coastal road, leaves the bank in Matrah, bears the name Sultan Qaboos Street from Qurum and runs parallel to the coast at a distance of more or less one kilometer to the west, past the airport and SIb and continues along the coast to the northwest The newer Muscat Expressway serves as a relief for Route 1, starts in Qurum and runs south parallel to Sultan Qaboos Street at a distance of about one kilometer. The Route 17 connects Ruwi with al-Amarat.
Muscat Airport is located southeast of Sib . Important ports in the country are the Sultan Qaboos port in Matrah and the oil terminals of al-Fahl a little further to the west.
economy
The financial and business district of Oman is the Ruwi district, in Matrah is the great old souq and the modern port, many government buildings, shopping malls, hotels and services can be found primarily in Qurum and al-Khuwair, the infrastructure center of the country is Sib .
culture and education
In the central areas of the Muscat Capital Area, far west of Muscat, are the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque , the Royal Opera House Muscat and the Sultan Qaboos Sports Center .
The Sultan Qaboos University , the first and only state university in the country, is located near Sib. Likewise the private German University of Technology in Oman .
literature
- Sonja Nebel, Aurel von Richthofen (Ed.): Urban Oman. Trends and Perspectives of Urbanization in Muscat Capital Area (= Habitat - International: Schriften zur Internationale Stadtentwicklung . Volume 21 ). LIT, Münster 2016, ISBN 978-3-643-90714-1 .
- Aurel von Richthofen, Sebastian Langer: Evaluating the Urban Development and Determining the “Peak Space” of the Muscat Capital Area . In: Trialog . tape 114 , no. 3/2013 , June 2015, ISSN 0724-6234 , p. 4-8 , doi : 10.3929 / ethz-a-010637970 .
- Fred Scholz: Muscat, Sultanate of Oman: geographical sketch of a unique Arab city . Das Arabisches Buch, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-923446-58-6 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Sonja Nebel: Tourism and Urbanization in Oman: Sustainable and Socially Inclusive? In: Steffen Wippel, Katrin Bromber, Christian Steiner, Birgit Krawietz (Eds.): Under construction: logics of urbanism in the Gulf Region . Ashgate, Farnham, Surrey 2014, ISBN 978-1-4724-1289-8 , pp. 78 .
- ↑ Muscat (Masqaţ, Muscat Governorate, Oman). In: citypopulation.de. December 12, 2010, accessed January 12, 2019 .
- ^ Muscat, Capital Area. In: Discover Arabia. Retrieved January 13, 2019 .
- ↑ a b c d e f g National Center for Statistics and Information. Sultanate of Oman (Ed.): Statistical Year Book 2018 . No. 46 . Bawschar 2018, p. 78 f . ( gov.om [accessed January 13, 2019]).
- ↑ Aurel von Richthofen, Sebastian Langer (2016), p. 4 (map)
- ↑ Al-Amrat (Al-'Āmrāt, Muscat Governorate, Oman). In: citypopulation.de. Retrieved January 12, 2019 .
- ↑ Aurel von Richthofen, Sebastian Langer (2016), p. 4
- ↑ Aurel von Richthofen: No urban desert! Emergence and transformation of extended urban landscapes in Oman . In: Vanessa Miriam Carlow (Ed.): Ruralism - The Future of Villages and Small Towns in an Urbanizing World . Jovis, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-86859-430-0 , pp. 256 ff . ( urbanoman.org [PDF; accessed January 13, 2019]).