Amal Hajjam
Section Head – Corporate Strategy and Performance,, UAE
Amal is a Mobility & Infrastructure Strategist known for transforming complex urban and mobility challenges into measurable, people-centered outcomes. She operates at the intersection of mobility, sustainability, and governance, where long-term strategy meets day-to-day execution, and where innovation must translate into efficiency and impact.
With over 12 years of experience in consulting and engineering, Amal has worked across the full lifecycle of mobility projects, from planning and feasibility to financing, operations, and performance management. Her career spans public transport, multimodal integration, urban infrastructure, and technological transformation, including major projects in the GCC, Europe, and Africa.
In her current role, she leads corporate strategy, performance, and cross-sector governance while staying at the heart of urban mobility innovation and the digitalisation challenges reshaping the sector.
Outside the mobility world, Amal’s heart lies in education, mentorship and capacity-building where she actively supports young talent and helps open pathways for the next generation of female leaders in urban infrastructure. She contributes to the learning program at L’École des Ingénieurs de la Ville de Paris and is increasingly involved in EdTech and early-learning initiatives, driven by her belief that resilient cities start with empowered people.
1. What innovations are helping cities reduce carbon emissions, improve energy efficiency, and optimize urban mobility worldwide?
Cities that achieve the strongest sustainability outcomes are combining two aspects:
a. Treating mobility as a cross-sector challenge, aligning transport authorities, urban designers, regulators, and service providers around a shared long-term vision of streets, land use, and accessibility. Cities that fail these two aspects often face duplicated capex, slower transitions to clean transport, and equity gaps in access. Embedding multi-stakeholder governance early reduces lifecycle cost, accelerates emissions reduction, and ensures that affordability and inclusion are designed into the system rather than retrofitted at higher cost. Coordinated planning, across transport, housing, utilities etc… helped balance the modal share of sustainable mobility. “City of proximity” initiatives such as “Zurich mini-centers”, 15min walk or cycle city in Paris illustrates how multi-agency governance reshapes mobility patterns.
b. Managing mobility as an integrated system rather than a collection of independent assets. The most effective models combine demand-responsive services, and network-wide data integration, unlocking capacity and reducing emissions without heavy capex. The real challenge is institutional: fragmented data ownership, disconnected regulatory mandates, and inconsistent operating models remain the biggest barriers to integrated mobility.
For fast-growing or resource-constrained cities, modular and frugal mobility solutions offer the most resilient and cost-effective path forward. Modular systems, such as BRT corridors, scalable electric-bus networks, and flexible charging infrastructure, can be deployed in months, expanded incrementally, and adapted to new technologies. The underlying insight is strategic: modularity avoids locking cities into rigid, capital-heavy rail systems when demand, budget, or land-use realities do not support them. The challenge is mindset, many cities still default to high-capex rail even when flexible, road-based systems deliver stronger economic and environmental returns.
2. How can technology, such as IoT, AI, and smart grids, enhance sustainability while maintaining affordability for residents?
● Technology only drives sustainability and affordability when it is incorporated as a foundational element of the mobility ecosystem, shaping how systems are governed, maintained, and optimised end-to-end, not as a stand-alone upgrade.
○ In mobility, IoT sensors and AI models turn legacy infrastructure into active operational intelligence powering both emissions and operating costs. These technologies also integrate seamlessly into both greenfield and brownfield contexts, enabling cities to modernise without heavy capex.
● Ultimately, affordability is preserved when efficiency gains flow through shared platforms - mobility data hubs - ensuring savings are captured at the system level and redirected toward lower fares, equitable access, and expanded service coverage rather than remaining within isolated departments.
● Because IoT and AI integrate seamlessly into both greenfield and brownfield contexts, they allow cities to modernise legacy assets and scale new services without heavy capex, making sustainability not only achievable but financially viable for residents.
That said, mobility authorities must take a holistic approach to guide and enable a responsible, efficient, and sustainable use of technology.
3. What global partnerships, standards, or policies are needed to promote sustainable and resilient urban development?
● Sustainability in mobility now advances through three levers: standardized governance systems, regulatory sandboxes that accelerate innovation, and financial frameworks that reward measurable impact.
● Cities that lead (like Singapore, Copenhagen, Dubai) do so because they pair policy experimentation with open regulatory sandboxes that allow public-private innovation without bureaucratic lag.
The next global compact must position urban sustainability as a long-term value driver, encouraging financial stakeholders to view it not just as a reporting requirement but as a rewarding investment strategy that aligns capital markets, international financial institutions, and mobility stakeholders around measurable impact returns.
4. How can MENA cities implement smart urban solutions that address water scarcity, extreme temperatures, and rapid population growth?
● Data-driven water management can transform water security into a measurable social and economic KPI, especially when smart metering, behavioral insights, and tariff design are integrated into a single demand-management strategy.
● MENA cities have a unique opportunity to leapfrog legacy infrastructure through decentralized micro-solutions -from district cooling and solar micro-grids to adaptive shading systems- that scale faster and at lower cost than traditional mega-projects.
● With the right policy and investment mix, heat resilience can emerge as a new regional capability, as Gulf cities advance climate-adaptive architecture and AI-enabled energy optimization that can be exported to other high-heat markets globally.
5. What role can local startups, tech companies, and urban developers play innovative and sustainable infrastructure projects?
Local startups, tech firms, and urban developers are critical to accelerating sustainable infrastructure because they bring the agility, digital capabilities, and operational scale that traditional systems often lack.
a. Startups act as innovation engines, translating global technologies into solutions tailored to regional challenges.
b. Tech companies provide the digital backbone, integrating data, IoT, and AI into platforms that make infrastructure more predictive, efficient, and financially viable.
c. Urban developers, in turn, must shift from pure construction to operating living systems, embedding renewable energy, digital monitoring, and community engagement into their development models.
The strongest results emerge when these actors collaborate directly with city regulators, forming tripartite partnerships where innovators, digital integrators, and policymakers co-create solutions anchored in measurable ESG outcomes and clear accountability. This alignment not only accelerates deployment but also ensures innovations scale in ways that are affordable, resilient, and context-specific.
6. How can governments and private sectors collaborate to ensure sustainable, climate-resilient, and economically viable urban development in the region?
Governments and the private sector can only deliver climate-resilient, economically viable urban development when the relationship shifts from transactional procurement to outcome-driven partnerships. We’re already seeing this in the MENA region, where PPP models are evolving into performance-based concessions that link private returns to measurable sustainability KPIs such as energy efficiency, emissions reduction, and lifecycle performance.
The second piece is innovation de-risking. Governments can accelerate the uptake of new mobility and urban-infrastructure solutions by creating regulatory sandboxes and deploying green-impact bonds or structured climate-finance tools. These mechanisms attract capital while preserving accountability and fiscal discipline, which is essential for long-term credibility.
But the biggest unlock is integrated governance. When ministries, municipalities, utilities, and private operators work from shared data platforms and outcome dashboards, you create real-time visibility on environmental performance. That transparency is what convinces financiers to treat sustainability as a bankable asset class. And once incentives, data, and responsibilities are aligned across the ecosystem, cities can scale climate-resilient infrastructure faster, at lower cost, and with far greater certainty of impact.