12.06.2025
From data to daily life: How SLIM helped design 104 parks for Abu Dhabi
How do you design 104 distinctive, community-based parks in one of the world’s most arid climates – under tight timeframes, limited budgets, and a mandate to improve the everyday lives of several hundred thousand residents in Abu Dhabi?
At SLA, we built our own solution: SLIM – SLA Landscaping Information Modelling.
(Read more after the video)
SLIM – a transformative digital design tool
SLIM is our custom-built computational design platform. It merges over a decade of on-the-ground experience in the Middle East with our deep interdisciplinary expertise across landscape architecture, planting design, anthropology, ecology, and data science.
The result is a powerful digital tool that enables us to model, test, and refine complex nature-based designs at unprecedented speed and precision.
SLIM integrates real-time 3D modelling with data-driven feedback on key performance factors such as biodiversity impact, irrigation needs, carbon sequestration, plant viability, social programming, and lifecycle cost. It allows us to simulate and optimize each park design early in the process and across multiple parameters simultaneously – without sacrificing creativity or local sensitivity.
“With SLIM, we have consolidated a decade-long experience of working in the Middle East into a comprehensive modelling tool with an efficient system of design and feedback. This enables us to develop designs that are both unique and responsive to the Middle East's social and natural context. ”
— Nihit Borpujari, Computational Designer, SLA
A hyperlocal network of City Nature
With SLIM, we can develop designs that are both unique and responsive to the Middle East’s social and natural context.
The result is 104 vibrant neighbourhood parks that are ecologically robust, socially inclusive, and economically efficient. Each one a hyperlocal expression of Abu Dhabi’s unique nature, culture, and community.
Watch the video to see how SLIM helped transform barren sand sites into a thriving network of City Nature across Abu Dhabi.
Perspectives
Nature is our origin. The city is our forgetting
What if the city isn’t broken because of noise or pollution – but because it has lost its meaning? And what if the true green transition doesn’t start with energy systems but with our senses?
In his new op-ed in Byrummonitor, SLA’s founder Stig L. Andersson argues that the current crisis of civilization – from climate breakdown to mental health — is rooted in how we’ve designed our cities to disconnect us from nature.
Cities are bad for us. Let's fix them
Cities can be inspiring places that bring out the best in us. But they’re often concrete jungles that make us ill and are still designed around the automobile. What if they were places in which you could thrive rather than simply survive? Another model is possible, writes Rasmus Astrup in the December 2024 issue of Monocle.
