Key Points
- Al Khalidiya Park reopened with a 660-metre cooled walkway held at roughly 25°C year-round.
- The design is open to the park, with cool air rising from vents set into the ground.
- It extends Abu Dhabi's push to keep outdoor public space usable through the hot months.
The latest:
A 660-metre cooled walkway is now the centrepiece of Al Khalidiya Park, holding the air at around 25°C while October evenings outside stay hot. The track has walls and a roof but stays open to the lawns, trees and play areas, with cool air pushed up through floor vents. It followed a full redevelopment of the park by the Department of Municipalities and Transport.
Details:
- The design: The walkway is enclosed by walls and a roof yet does not read as an indoor space, according to Gulf News. Lawns, trees and play areas remain in plain view along its length, and the cooling comes from vents set into the ground rather than overhead units.
- The route: The track threads between the play areas, the sports courts and the quieter gardens rather than running along the park’s edge. Benches are placed along the way and lighting has been installed for after dark, making a walk possible at any hour and in any month.
- The redevelopment: Al Khalidiya is one of the capital’s oldest neighbourhood parks, long used for picnics, football matches and children learning to ride bicycles. The Department of Municipalities and Transport rebuilt the entire site, and it reopened this year with refreshed playgrounds, sports courts and upgraded public facilities.
- Accessibility: The walkway is built to be accessible for People of Determination, including wheelchair users, Gulf News reported, so that a walk in the park is open across the community rather than limited to the able-bodied.
- The pilot: Abu Dhabi’s first cooled outdoor corridor was a 70-metre stretch in Al Mamoura, opened in late 2024 as a testing ground for the concept. Its scale was a fraction of what has now been built at Al Khalidiya.
- The scale-up: After Al Mamoura, the idea was expanded to a walkway of roughly 700 metres at the new King Hamad Bin Isa Al Khalifa Park in Al Mushrif, and then to Al Khalidiya. The three sites mark a move from experiment to standard feature in new park design.
- A regular user: Dr. Atef Ebed, a 78-year-old retired scientist, told Gulf News he walks to the park from his home four or five times a day and stays for hours. He said he used to walk along the Corniche, “but when this opened, wow.”
- The temperature gap: The 25°C held inside the corridor sits well below a hot Abu Dhabi October evening, which is the point of the engineering: it converts months that normally push residents indoors into usable outdoor hours.
Background:
Abu Dhabi has invested heavily in neighbourhood parks, but summer heat has long limited how many months of the year they can realistically be used. Cooled corridors are the Department of Municipalities and Transport’s answer, tested first at small scale before being written into full park rebuilds.
Between the lines:
The sequence — 70 metres at Al Mamoura, roughly 700 at Al Mushrif, 660 at Al Khalidiya — suggests the pilot cleared its test and the cooled corridor is becoming a default element of capital park design rather than a showpiece. Building it into an older neighbourhood park, not only new ones, points to retrofitting as the next direction.
What’s next
Whether cooled corridors appear in further Abu Dhabi park rebuilds, and how the Al Khalidiya track performs through the peak summer months, when the gap between indoor and outdoor temperatures is widest.
