Post oil and gas future urban sustainability and relevance of a compact urban form for Doha

The discovery of oil and gas in Qatar has resulted into transformation of its capital Doha in just few decades from a small fishing and pearling town to an international city with diversified economy and Doha transformed from a compact, high-density and walkable traditional Arabic town of 1960s into an expansive car-dependent city with low-density sprawl all around. Qatar’s population of 250k in 1981 grew to 2.4 million in 2015 with 2 million residing in the designated ‘Metropolitan Doha’ covering 1279sqkm area with a density of merely 16pph. Very high cardependency and the policy of ‘car-priority designs’ on roads are rapidly diluting the ‘concept of place’, disconnecting the communities, reducing walkability, increasing carbon emissions and affecting public health. Consequentially, it is increasing infrastructure investments and maintenance costs with ever-expanding infrastructure networks that remain as ‘over-provisions’ disproportionate to the population density. Future consequences of these are detrimental to ‘environmental and economic sustainability’ and are deterrent to development of a compactresilient city with cohesive communities. This paper is firstly assessing the current planning initiatives, secondly, re-evaluating Doha’s urban morphological dynamics through a comparative assessment with four compact and high-density cities and finally suggesting strategies and policies to support a compact urban form.