Doha tries to become more “sustainable”

I spent the third week of January in Doha, Qatar. I’d been there only once before, on a one-day trip from Dubai in 2010.

On the earlier trip, I’d been extremely impressed by the Corniche—and wasn’t much taken by anything else. The little bit of Doha I saw then seemed as spread-out and automobile-oriented as any city in the world.

The current, much longer trip confirmed some of my earlier impressions, but I was fascinated by the government’s efforts over the last decade and a half to make Doha a more “sustainable” city.

Let me explain.¹

The Corniche is a pedestrian path between the old downtown (and the I.M.-Pei-designed Museum of Islamic Art) at its southeast end and Doha’s stunning business district, West Bay, at its northeast end. The path curves around a bay, so that, at any point on the path, you can see the whole length of the Corniche.

 

The central part of the path is approximately 5 km long, but there are formal and informal extensions at both ends, and the Corniche’s length is usually given as 7 km. If you include the paths in the gardens behind the Museum of Islamic Art in the southeast and in the Hotel Park in the northeast, the distance you can walk along the bay is actually longer than 7 km.

The Corniche attracts quite a number of users, apparently from all of Qatar’s ethnic groups and economic strata, although, as is the case with many pedestrian paths, the composition of people using it changes over the course of a day. Early in the morning and at midday, runners and more or less serious walkers are common, and Western expatriates and tourists seem to be represented out of all proportion to their share of the population. Later in the afternoon and on weekends, many more people use the path simply for sitting around and socializing, and the proportion of native Qataris as well as of ethnic South Asians, Filipinos, and others (many of whom are service and construction workers) rises. The Corniche appears to be an enormously successful place.

The Corniche is not, however, perfect. There is little shade, especially in its middle reaches, and it’s awfully close to a busy highway, which isn’t easy to cross. There’s a single tunnel at Suq Waqif, near the southeast end; elsewhere, you need to find one of the few traffic lights and will likely have to wait a long time for it to change.

But, still, there is something about the openness of the Corniche and the views of the Gulf and of West Bay’s skyscrapers and of the much more modest skyline of the old downtown that is deeply attractive. I’d go so far as to say that Doha’s Corniche is one of the world’s most distinctive—and appealing—urban pedestrian paths.

The rest of the city is not quite so special. As is the case with the other big cities of the Gulf, Doha’s speedy growth from the 1970s on has until recently been based more or less completely on the assumption that everyone would get around by automobile, even though few members of the subaltern labor force have access to a car. The environment for pedestrians is hostile. Major roads away from the old city center tend to be wide. Traffic moves quickly. The most desirable housing has traditionally consisted in large measure of single-family structures surrounded by walls. It’s not much fun to walk in neighborhoods consisting of such houses, even when sidewalks are available, which they’re often not. Sidewalks that do exist are fair game for parking, even in West Bay.

Walking any kind of distance in the city is difficult, even aside from the problems caused by summer heat. Many intersections feature roundabouts, just about the most pedestrian-hostile of all non-limited-access road forms. There are occasional traffic lights, and they’re usually obeyed, but they just about never provide a moment when pedestrians have priority. Since drivers do not feel they ever have to cede to pedestrians, even when making turns, it can be quite difficult to cross streets safely. There are crosswalks here and there, but they appear to have no effect at all on drivers.

Of course, it’s not surprising that a country whose wealth is based almost entirely on the export of oil and natural gas would become car-dependent, especially when its only large city did not begin to grow substantially until the 1970s. Gas is cheap and is never likely to run out. Pollution is not a major problem in a city consisting of a narrow strip of settlement between the Gulf and mostly flat, nearly uninhabited desert. It’s also certainly the case that the automobile fits Doha and the other new cities of the Gulf very well. Cars are just about always air-conditioned, thus providing some shelter from summer heat. They’re also an important consumer item in a society where shopping and owning things are important both in themselves and as a way to establish status. And, of course, since just about everything in the city was built to accommodate the automobile, doing without one creates constant problems.

But, as is the case with all the states of the Gulf, elite decision-makers have undergone a major change of heart over the last fifteen or so years. The car-centric city no longer  seems an unalloyed good thing, for a number of familiar overlapping reasons. The realization that the automobile-oriented city causes health problems for its inhabitants may have more resonance on the Gulf than anywhere else; native Gulf residents have higher BMIs and are more likely to have diabetes than any of the world’s other well-off peoples. Arguments that invoke climate change have also seemed particularly strong given that major parts of all the Gulf’s newly substantial cities lie only a few meters above sea level. There is also concern about the area’s future and a strong sense that one must diversify the economy. Thus, all the Gulf countries have done what they could to build tourist and financial-services industries. To do this, they’ve had to become attractive to tourists and skilled expatriates, which has involved becoming less car-oriented. Closely related to this is a desire on the part of essentially defenseless states to be well thought of. The fact that Qatar sends more carbon into the atmosphere per capita than any other country in the world now seems rather embarrassing. The result of these and other factors is that there’s been a push in the direction of at least reducing the role of oil-based transportation everywhere. One component of this turn has been an effort to rethink the design of cities. (See my earlier posts on Dubai and Abu Dhabi.)²

Doha has arguably been in a better position than any other Gulf city to remake itself. Its chief advantage is its wealth. Qatar by many measures has a per capita income higher than that of any other country in the world. Its wealth is of course not distributed equally. Its expatriate manual and service workers live financially precarious lives, while its citizens (who constitute only something like twelve percent of the population) receive a huge amount of official support. Much of Qatar’s wealth goes to its government, which, even after putting a large portion of its revenues into a sovereign wealth fund, has enormous resources to invest in urban infrastructure—and the political power to spend as it sees fit.

The government has used some of its wealth to make Qatar a more “sustainable” place. Its urban geography has been altered in two major ways: [1] Dense neighborhoods have been created in several places; and [2] New rail infrastructure has been built.

[1] Dense new neighborhoods that encourage walking.

Suq Waqif. When I was in Doha in 2010, I found its old downtown a somewhat unappealing place. There wasn’t much there that was very “downtown”-like. There were few major businesses or government offices. There didn’t appear to be any older buildings. Most of the generally low- or medium-rise structures in the old downtown were post-World-War-II apartment blocks whose inhabitants appeared to be mostly South Asian workers.

I didn’t realize it then, but there had been a major fire at Suq Waqif (properly Sūq Wāqif سوق واقف), an old downtown commercial district, in 2003. I was seeing this area at its nadir.

In the years since the fire—and especially in the years after 2010—the government has completely rebuilt Suq Waqif and has chosen to do so in a kind of traditional Arabian style.

Hardly any of the buildings, however, include genuinely old components. Most were constructed from scratch, using modern materials reworked to look old. Why use mud brick that you’d have to keep repairing when you can make concrete look like mud brick? The result, comparable to, say, Qianmen Pedestrian Street in Beijing, could be ridiculed for being a Disneyfied simulacrum of a traditional city. But I found it all surprisingly appealing. And so do many Qataris and tourists. The restaurants on its main street are full of people from all over the world, including (it appears) numerous local folk. And the shops on the narrow side streets are clearly patronized to a very large extent by Qataris. It’s not likely that tourists would want to buy, say, live rabbits or falcons, or kitchenware, or traditional unrevealing women’s clothing.

The new Suq Waqif has apparently been enormously successful, and it’s been growing continuously. Note that walking is practically the only way you can move around the central part of Suq Waqif. Most of its paths are too narrow for motor vehicles. In this respect, it’s completely different from most of post-1970 Doha.

Msheireb. Msheireb (the spelling approximates the Gulf Arabic pronunciation of Mushayrib مشيرب) is an area just to the west of Suq Waqif. In English it’s sometimes called “Downtown Doha,” and its location indeed corresponds more or less to the center of the old central business district. But this is not a CBD that’s evolved slowly over many decades. It’s essentially a contemporary real-estate development that replaces most of what was there before. It consists largely of medium-sized, more or less modern buildings on narrow streets (sometimes there are some Arab decorative motifs). The buildings mostly house offices of various sorts. The National Archives and some additional government buildings are also part of the mix. In addition, housing is planned.

The claim is that Msheireb is a “sustainable” development. Many buildings are LEED-certified. It’s said to be built in a style that’s appropriate for the climate, and, indeed, because of the narrow streets, there is plenty of shade. One of the streets—Sikkat al-Wadi Msheireb—has some water features that, thanks to evaporation, are supposed to help keep the street cool during the hot season. This is also one of the streets on which a 2.1 km tram line loop runs (more on this below).

I was struck in walking around Msheireb at how many of the people you see there seem to be native Qatari, at least if one can determine ethnicity on the basis of people’s clothing and facial features.

One of the characteristics of Msheireb is that it is walkable. There are several pedestrian-only streets, and there are good sidewalks (sometimes in arcades that provide shade). It is not at all like the areas of Doha that grew up between, roughly, 1970 and 2010.

The Pearl. The Pearl is a real-estate development on made land in northern Doha that was designed in part to appeal to Western expatriates. (It’s one of the only parts of the city where foreign ownership of real estate is allowed.) Much of it is on narrow C- or O-shaped land segments that feature a road on the spine, bordered by buildings that are flush with well-maintained sidewalks. A pedestrian path runs along the water side of the buildings. The ground floor of buildings along the pedestrian path typically contains restaurants and high-end shops. The Pearl is divided into a number of sub-neighborhoods each of which is supposed to be built in a particular theoretically Mediterranean architectural style, Venetian, for example. The Pearl, on the whole, seems designed to suggest a modernized version of a large Mediterranean village, although it’s hard to imagine a real Mediterranean village with expensive Japanese, Indian, and French restaurants and boutiques selling high-end women’s clothing, all side by side.

What is perhaps most striking about The Pearl in the context of Doha is that it’s so pedestrian-oriented. The waterside pedestrian path gets crowded in the evening, and it’s certainly not rare to see pedestrians walking on the sidewalks along the neighborhood’s main roads, where the more utilitarian shops (like a large Monoprix) tend to be located. In many ways, the Pearl is comparable to (although not nearly so high-rise as) the Dubai Marina development in Jumeirah. If you want to appeal to Westerners (or at least Western Europeans) these days, you have to build neighborhoods where walking is possible.

Those who are cynical might say that creating a few islands of walkability in a sea of car-centric urbanism has a limited value, but it’s certainly a beginning.

[2] New non-automotive infrastructure.

Doha Metro. The most expensive and impressive new infrastructure in Doha is its Metro, all three lines of which opened in 2019 (although one station isn’t finished yet). The Metro has approximately 76 km of lines—it’s not a small system—and approximately 85% of the routes are underground—it isn’t a cheaply-built system either. Trains are driverless, and, as is the case with many of the world’s other driverless metros, trains run often (as frequently as every two minutes) and are short, three cars long.

As in the Dubai Metro, one car is divided into an expensive “gold class” compartment and a larger area for women and “families.” The stations have been built so that longer trains (I think five cars) are possible, but, for the moment, longer trains are probably not necessary. Most of the trains I rode were fairly but not extremely full. Few people had to stand.

The stations all have attractive consistent design that’s supposed to suggest the inside of a Bedouin tent. They also have escalators and elevators; excellent signage; platform doors; next-train arrival information; and an amazingly large number of helpful staff members.

Because the last of the three lines only opened in December, it’s too early to get a sense of how many passengers the system is attracting on a “normal” day. Last summer, when only one line was open, there were about 16,000 passengers/day (the population of the Doha Metropolitan area may be something like two and a half million), but on National Day (December 18) there were 333,000.

There has got to be a question, at least in the short term, of how useful a metro system could possibly be in a generally diffuse and low-density city. A few stations—Msheireb, for example; the stations in West Bay; and some suburban stations at shopping malls, for example, al Riffa’—are in locations where it’s possible to walk to significant destinations, but many stations appear to be, well, in the middle of nowhere, although most of these do have bus and van service. The powers-that-be are certainly aware of the problem. At least a couple of new pedestrian bridges between the Metro and useful destinations have been built, and parts of West Bay have received new and better sidewalks.

The system has only 37 stations. That is, it’s on average approximately 2 km between stations, a larger distance than on the majority of older metro systems. The trains can, and, it appears, often do move at 100 km/h, and even the longest rides in the system last well under an hour, but I suspect that car travel is still faster most of the time to most destinations.

The government is serious about moving as much transportation to the Metro as possible, and fares are set quite low, especially considering that Qatar is not, on the whole, a cheap place to live. Fares are 2 QAR (0.55 USD) a ride. It’s 6 QAR (1.65 USD) for a day pass. It’s also possible to get a free connecting bus or van in some places—or to take a 3-km taxi ride for 8 QAR. Bus fares—variable but 5 QAR if you buy two tickets to be used on one day—have been more expensive.

I found the Doha Metro a pretty impressive operation.

Trams. The Metro is not the only rail system in Qatar. One tram system has opened, and two others are under construction.

The open system is the Downtown Doha/Msheireb tram mentioned above, a short (2.1 km) hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered line that’s been making a one-way loop around Msheireb since the beginning of January of this year. It runs on weekdays between 9 to 12 in the morning and 4 to 9 in the evening and on Fridays between 4 and 9. There are nine stations; in other words, it stops frequently. There is no cost to ride. Nonetheless, none of the trams I saw had more than two or three passengers. The trouble with a 2.1 km loop line is that it’s never going to take you further than something like 600 m from your starting point. It’s likely to be faster to walk just about anywhere in Msheireb than to risk waiting six minutes for a tram (the next-tram information at the stops wasn’t working when I was there). Perhaps the Msheireb tram will become a more attractive option during the hot season.

No doubt I’m being a bit cynical, but, for the moment, it seems that the chief advantage of the tram may be that it gives the Msheireb Properties’ some ability to boast about its sustainable tram line. Plenty of publicity about the tram is available on the Internet.

Two larger tram systems are under construction, at Education City and at Lusail.

Education City includes Qatar’s impressive National Library, specialized branches of several American universities, and some Qatari educational institutions as well. I was struck when I visited at the extent to which Education City is laid out like certain American outer suburban university campuses. Buildings are far apart, and there are large surface parking lots. There are few trees. Those uncomfortable in the extreme heat of summer must find getting around a problem, although there are free vans. The tram system is supposed to supplement these.

Lusail is Qatar’s enormous (and enormously ambitious) “sustainable” northern extension. In so far as I could tell looking from the Metro, only a little has actually been built there yet, except for the Metro itself. A huge stadium for the 2022 World Cup games is under construction, as are some parts of a substantial (19 km) network of tram lines, but as yet there is little housing. The goal is that Lusail will not be a car-dependent place. Some of the Gulf Region’s other “sustainable” urban additions (for example, Masdar City in Abu Dhabi) have been the object of a huge amount of publicity but have not gotten very far. It’s too early though to be cynical about Lusail. Doha has a pretty good track record of getting built what it’s set out to build.

Bicycle paths. You don’t see many cyclists in Doha, except along the Corniche (where bicycles are theoretically illegal). But the government has built a few bicycle paths along major highways in the outer city, and the publicity for Msheireb/Downtown Doha suggests that bicycles are welcome there.

I was in general quite struck by Doha’s elaborate plans to transform itself into a less car-dependent city. I have no idea how successful it will be at reaching its goals. Has any car-centric place has ever actually managed to become significantly less so? But I certainly was impressed by the scale of Doha’s efforts.