A survey of recent projects in Qatar reveals a particular brand of "instant urbanism": while by 2022 more luxury hotels will be opened to cater for Westerns and westernised Arabs who can afford to enjoy exclusive services, issues such as spatial segregation, sustainable urban development, and affordable housing remain unsolved. An op-ed from Doha by Agatino Rizzo.
"Instant" & "Petro-Urbanism" in Doha
Several terms have been used to label the recent extraordinary urban growth of Arab capitals of the Persian Gulf. For instance, Bagaeen [1] has described Gulf cities in terms of their "Instant Urbanism" to differentiate it from Western, long-term urban evolution. Twenty decades earlier, Riad [2] theorized of a "Petro-Urbanism" which "... undermined, with unparalleled suddenness, the roots of an ecosystem [the Gulf's one] which reflected a perfect adaptation to an environment many generations old".
