Introduction by Agatino Rizzo
Qatar is characterized by an extreme tendency to urban primacy, that is the concentration of the majority of country's population in one city (the capital city). This tendency has led to, amongst others, a shortage of affordable housing, land value inflation, and localised environmental impacts.
A polycentric approach to urban planning in Qatar could be sought by considering the implementation of a new-town/urban-densification program along the future railway fro Doha-Education City to Bahrain, thus directing growth to interior of the country. Along this railway axis vast government owned land could serve the critical provision of affordable housing which would be directly connected to rail-based commuting transport, thus reducing both Qatar’s CO emissions and traffic congestion in the capital region. New “Food”, “Logistics”, “Energy”, ”Tourist”, and “R&D” cities could be created along this high speed/high capacity transit axis.
Within the Master in Urban Planning and Design based at Qatar University we are exploring polycentric development options along the Doha-Bahrain rail axis which could be part of the future QNMP. Thanks to the collaboration with the MMUP graduate students are developing interesting planning hypotheses which will be further investigated and made them publicly available with future graduates’ theses.
We present the result of our first investigation on polycentric urban development in Qatar by displaying the work of the students of the Regional and Urban Land Use Planning Course (2011). More results will be published in future blog posts and articles.
Gateway City
