Egypt Real Estate: Engineer Amr Soliman Presents Mountain View iCity, the First Happy City in the World
What are the main competitive advantages of Mountain View? How does it distinguish itself from other places and what sets it apart?
Around six years ago, we asked ourselves what made us different and what our higher purpose was. We wanted to know why we started and if what we offered was unique. We realized that we wanted to bring happiness into people’s lives, since our goal is to simplify life and make people happy.
We’ve begun to understand how to bring happiness to people, we took a look on Disney and Delivering Happiness Company, a company founded by Tony Hsieh, the Co-Founder of Zappos, which is owned by Amazon Robotics. Delivering Happiness is known for its expertise in implementing the “science of happiness”, and they have worked with many big international companies. While Disney is all about entertainment, we wanted to learn how to make people happy, even when they are facing difficulties. We partnered with Delivering Happiness and embarked on a two- to three-year journey with our employees. As to start bringing happiness to your clients, you have to make your employees happy first. It was a challenging and deep process, but we were committed to it. After this journey, we built new headquarters, which we believe are one of the best in the world, incorporating the science of happiness.
We’ve also developed 16 projects including 2 cities named “iCity”, with the goal of creating a small City on 500 acres each where people can go anywhere without crossing a street and it is the first of its kind. We took this goal seriously and worked hard to make it a reality, with the help of many operators. Our efforts paid off, and we did develop it.
The hardware of “iCity” is built on the 4D concept structure, with a cross-section that allows for normal access and a separate dimension for services, such as garbage, fire control and parking, creating an underground city full of services which is the first level/dimension. This approach allowed us to separate the parks and pedestrian areas, reducing coordination issues which is the second level/dimension. Our city spans a Cornish length of 15 kilometers, which enables us to process everything without crossing any streets, which is the third level/dimension. Talking about the fourth level/dimension, it is of course the buildings.
The result was that in most cities, around 25% of the area is taken up by roads, as planners typically prioritize road development. However, we took a different approach that yielded a city with only 1% of the area being roads and the rest being parks. This approach allowed us to create a road network that provided access to all areas of the city by car, without diverging from our central idea. As a result, we managed to reduce the percentage of car road spaces to have people enjoy walking together and live their lives.
So, our approach to city planning has also led us to develop new software. While software is typically associated with technology and not the real estate industry, we’ve realized that people now are living in their own bubbles and the mobile usage percentage is very high, which leads them to not having any activities nor doing any communication with each other. Hence, we created a Matrix Model with operators who are specialized in different age groups and interests to organize activities for our residents. Additionally, we also incorporated a new approach into our new retail project, where every shop offers not just food and beverage, but also hands-on learning experiences, like jewelry-making and business planning for development. This has created a unique and immersive experience for families and individuals in our community of residents.
Our software not only helps manage facilities and properties, but also promotes happiness management. We measure people’s happiness index by assessing their hobbies, skills, teamwork, socialization, and well-being. That is why we decided to create organized activities to encourage people to socialize and form new friendships without sitting in their bubble, and we followed this by a huge campaign to let people listen to our voice.