Practical Thinking
The Idiot Genius
You may well wish you were one.
Here is a theory I have been turning over for years, usually while staring at a masterplan that looks magnificent on a screen, has won one of those Grand International Urban Awards, and looks faintly tragic on the ground.
If you are a genius, inshallah-inshallah (إن شاء الله، إن شاء الله), you are going very far in urban design.
I know how that sounds. We train for years. We learn the rules. We sit in rooms and manufacture, in our tiny brains, every possible human assumption and every situation that may never actually happen, and we decide exactly how the city will behave. The proposal will work. The plaza will fill. The shade will fall exactly where the render promised the little boy and his slightly stretched 3D mother it would. Then we hand the drawing to the world, and the world does what the world always does.
It ignores us.
I've sat in those meetings. Somebody dims the lights, the fly-through begins, and a drone glides over a boulevard so perfect that even the palm trees appear to have been told where to stand. Everyone nods. Nobody asks where the Talabat bikes will wait, where the grandmother will sit, or what happens at two o'clock in August when the shade has gone home for lunch.
Our problem is not that we are stupid. It is that we are far too clever, and the city has no interest in being clever.
Look at any carefully planned park in this country. The architect draws a graceful, curving path, lined with palms and benches, that sweeps around the lawn like a line of calligraphy. Within a month there is a straight brown stripe worn across the grass, from the bus stop to the baqala (بقالة). Planners call it a desire line. I call it the public marking our homework.
Now bring in an idiot.
I mean it kindly, wallah (والله)! Someone who has not spent a decade polishing the logic. Someone who does not know that the corridor must align, or that the node must activate, or that the mixed-use podium must do seventeen things before lunch. That person might, quite by accident, produce better urban planning, because the chaos inside a real city sometimes ties itself together better than any of our tidy diagrams.
Consider the old fareej (فريج). Sikak (سكك) that should not work, do. They are too narrow for a car, too crooked for a diagram, and somehow always in the shade. Corners that look wrong on paper, shy, awkward, introverted little corners that no planning committee would ever approve, somehow hold a whole neighbourhood together. The neighbours stop there. The children race there. A grandmother sits on the step and knows everything.
Nobody designed that. Nobody held a stakeholder workshop. Nobody produced a forty-page report with a sunset on the cover. And yet it works, the way a big family lunch works: nobody plans the seating, everyone talks at once, and somehow every plate is empty by the end.
Because life is not a tidy spreadsheet, or a high-quality specification sheet. It is a beautiful mess that, every now and then, finds its own order.
An urban confusion that creates its own order, and its own character.
But here is the rare bit. The bit that actually makes masterpieces.
If you are an idiot and a genius, if you can see the elegant idea and still leave room for the chaos that people will invent once they move in, that is where the good work lives. Not the clever plan that only works in the meeting room. Not the accidental muddle that only works by luck. The strange middle ground: smart enough to know what matters, humble enough to know the city will finish the sentence without you.
Most of us are one or the other. The lucky few are both. Theirs are the streets that still feel alive twenty years later, long after the award has been moved to a shelf in the corridor.
And me? I'm still working on it. The idiot half, thankfully, came naturally.
Practically speaking,Omran