The 15-Min City is a proposed new way of re-assessing and upgrading the liveability of our cities. Put forward by Professor Carlos Moreno, it is becoming a prevalent discussion among policymakers and urbanists across many cities. At its core is a belief that cities should be planned for walking and biking and all daily essentials should be located within fifteen minutes of one’s residence. In this chapter, we use the 15-Min concept as a lens to discuss Doha’s potential of adapting itself to the new notion of chrono-urbanism, poised by recent shifts in people’ mobility patterns, their proximity needs, and their own perceptions and experiences in the city, and considering post-pandemic reflections on strengths and weaknesses of cities to remain malleable, less car-dependent and to continuously synchronize with the needs of their residents.
14.1 Life Per Minute, or How Much Is Our Time Worth?
Imagine that you escort your kids to their school as part of your early morning neighborhood run, ride, or walk. Imagine then, that your kids can remain on the school grounds, which by early afternoon are publicly open and flocked by neighborhood kids and a few parents, passersby, and dog walkers. The latter watch their impromptu games with what Jane Jacobs describes as the ‘eyes of the proprietors’ as they subconsciously and naturally police the neighborhood streets and open spaces (Jacobs, 1961). As early afternoon approaches, a few mobile kiosks have moved onto the now empty school parking lots to offer snacks, ice cream, and juices. Crowds spill out from the adjacent mosque and majlises and converge on the shared grounds during prayer time. In the late afternoon, children run in and out of neighboring households to visit friends and acquaintances and have a snack. Outside, perhaps a few more kiosks with local produce appear offering fruits and vegetables or a hot meal for the evening. As you pick up a meal and head home with your kids, you walk along familiar neighborhood streets, buzzing with other kids telling their parents about their day at school.
In a few hours the city has transformed, catering to one’s needs within a space-time frame that diminishes passive experiences and expands on self-enriching activity and essential provisions—places for education, worship, access to open space, recreational diversity, pop-up food and beverage, daily essentials, and community and family connections. Within such a scenario of the malleable city (Gwiazdzinski, 2007), displacement car-based time is contracted or eliminated, and traversable spaces shrunk; the social and economic offer at play fits a spatio-temporal frame, which is optimized around one’s carless reach. The city itself becomes the active agent that depreciates the car and adapts itself to a human-centric needs bounded by space and time. Our life per minute is not only increased but multiplied exponentially via the convergence of otherwise singular experiences and destinations.
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This convergence or hybridization is what is currently underpinning the notion of chrono-urbanism, which not only recognizes the agency of time in the planning and shaping of urban activity but further argues that time-based planning needs to disassociate from the linear notion of distance to a destination and the speed of travel and instead needs to warp into space-time proximity module, where time, in and of itself, becomes almost insignificant or inconsequential as a singular decisive metric. The unraveling of the concept is similar to our dismissal of the archaic view that cities exist in some kind of an equilibrium, a system of destinations and infrastructure that only accommodate planned or otherwise formally recognized change. We now understand that all cities are social products and as such they have rhythms, chaos, informalities, and reciprocities—qualities that ignite our fascination with discovering them, identifying with them, and testing them. Our relationship with them is much like our relationship with the universe, redefined only in 1915 by the general theory of relativity, which dismissed the idea that space and time were a fixed stage onto which events simply took place without a reciprocal effect on the whole system (Hawking, 1998). Since time and space are not fixed, but relational, then neither should our cities be. Spaces within the cities should be flexible, convertible, and reusable—at different times, for varied duration and with assorted rhythms. This would allow for the convergence of our lifetimes and our urban space—lifetimes being the sum of our life per minute measure—thus, seeding time across a multitude of simultaneous or nearby experiences to the point that a singular measure of any event becomes inconsequential.
The concept of chronotopia as an arm of chrono-urbanism, relates to the alternating uses of spaces or buildings through different time periods. The weekend market is a prime example of chronotopian space. Campo dei Fiori in Rome transforms completely throughout a single day on the weekend—morning markets densely occupy the piazza while the restaurants and bars are closed and outside chairs put away to make space; in the afternoon, the market goers recede, stalls are taken away and after the cleaning crew leaves, a new wave of visitors arrives, and bars and restaurant re-activate the perimeter while the central space transforms from service space to leisure one in just few hours.
The chronotopian urban planning is the way to achieve the ‘malleable city’—a sustainable city that is able to bend, reshape, and respond to our space-time frames without breaking (Gwiazdzinski, 2007). Such an approach to city shaping can be an answer to our deepening urban crisis, rooted in menacing climate change, environmental degradation, overconsumption, hustling and anxiety from an ever-accelerating urban lifestyle, traffic fatigue, unpredictable pandemic, and other aspects of daily life that have blurred our vision and have cornered us to think there must be a global solution to these issues. On the contrary, the solutions are local and often in front of our eyes. If we follow principles of cultural norms and habits, proximity, multi-level scalability, horizontal and vertical alternating usage, versatility, convertibility, adaptability, and diversity—we can begin to optimize and thus limit the passive consumption of space and time, achieve urban sustainability, address spatial and social justice, mitigate pandemic restrictions, and improve on mental health. If we only ask how much life per minute is our city giving us, we can begin to understand and better address our urban environments.
14.2 What Is the 15-Minute City?—A New Lens for Sustainable Urbanism
Using time as a metric to measure qualitative urban planning and livability within our cities and towns is not a new concept. In the predominantly urbanized world we live in today, time-distance relationships between home, work, school, daily amenity, and leisure activities have become an increasingly critical factor in measuring urban livability and quality of life. There have been many iterations of time and space scales for measuring cities. Most notably the 30-min city concept used in many world cities today or the 20-min neighborhood concept made famous by Portland, Oregon’s city planning team in the early 2000s. Most recently, however, Carlos Moreno’s 15-Min City (Moreno et al., 2021) has drawn the international attention of politicians, planners, and the media largely owing to Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s public endorsement of the concept in her 2020 re-election campaign.
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While earlier versions of time-bound urban planning measured the distance one could travel between various destinations using multiple-modes of mobility (e.g., walking, cycling, mass transit, car), the most current iteration of the 15-Min City concept conceived by Professor Carlos Moreno has more rigorous parameters for modes of mobility. Moreno’s definition excludes more energy-intensive modes of transport such as mass transit or automobiles to a planning framework where ‘residents will be able to enjoy a higher quality of life where they will be able to effectively fulfill six essential urban social functions to sustain a decent urban life’ all within a 15-min walk or bike ride. These functions include (a) living, (b) working, (c) commerce, (d) healthcare, (e) education, and (f) entertainment (Moreno et al., 2021). In their 2021 paper Introducing the ‘15-min City’: Sustainability, Resilience and Place Identity in Future Post-Pandemic, Moreno and co-authors introduce a modified version of the original 15-Min City concept which incorporates four critical urban dimensions premised on observations to the urban challenges presented by the COVID-19 global pandemic. These are (a) density, (b) proximity, (c) diversity, and (d) digitalization (Fig. 14.1; Moreno et al., 2021). These four dimensions are explored in sub-sections that follow.
Fig. 14.1
The 15-Minute City framework (Moreno et al., 2021)
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14.2.1 Density
Urban density is a critical aspect of sustainable urbanism and livability. It is a concept used in city planning to describe the concentration of people, jobs, housing units, total floor area of buildings, or some other measures of human occupation, activity, and development across a defined unit of area (Hess, 2014). In general terms, urban density describes the degree of concentration or compactness of people or development in a city. The density of cities is relevant to a broad range of issues related to the quality of urban life including ‘environmental quality, transportation systems, physical infrastructure and urban form, social factors, and economic factors’ (Churchman, 1999, p. 398).
It is accepted that the lower the urban density, the greater the environmental burdens and the more dramatic the societal impact. There are countless scholarly articles about the ills of suburban sprawl and low-density development (see Habibi & Asadi, 2011; Polidoro et al., 2012; Russell-Evans & Hacker, 2011). When people are spread out, public transportation systems lose their effectiveness, private vehicle use rises, pollution increases, and the citizens’ interconnectedness and cultural connections suffer (Al-Kodmany, 2018; McLennan, 2009). This is very evident in the recent development of Qatar’s urban landscape, where families that would have otherwise been co-located in the same area are now living in different regions of the country for a variety of reasons such as work proximity, school access, and cost of living.
In conventional planning, density is viewed in terms of building heights, urban form, block dimensions, and compactness, but in the 15-Min City concept, density is viewed more from a human perspective in terms of people per kilometer squared (Moreno et al., 2021). The authors’ rationale for measuring density in terms of human-centric metrics in lieu of more traditional density measures is that by focusing on people you can better analyze the balance between demand on resources in the form of urban amenity (i.e., energy, water, food, services, etc.) that support a minimum standard quality of life against the biological carrying capacity of the land and region upon which the urban population resides.
By combining urban morphology with population density, Moreno and others further argue that planners may better solve for ‘optimal density’ whereby it is possible to ‘effectively plan the available space such that all the essentials could be accessible to residents without the need for time- and energy-consuming automobiles’ (Moreno et al., 2021; Salingaros, 2006).
In our 15-Min City assessment of Doha, we link density and urban form and space and showcase what their relationship means within the built landscape of the city.
14.2.2 Proximity
Proximity is another core dimension of the 15-Min City concept as it considers time-distance relationships between one’s home and place of work as well as other basic services and amenities such as entertainment and recreational offerings. The scale, speed, and spatial distribution of urban growth are typically major concerns for urban policymakers. Indeed, urban accessibility, neighborhood scale, ability for social interactions, and spatial-driven policies are argued to be the most influential factors on contemporary land-use change (Verburg et al., 2004).
In Moreno’s 15-Min City context, the only two modes of mobility are again walking and biking as these modes not only help cities reduce the amount of time lost in commuting but have the add-on benefits of reduced environmental and economic impacts and increased social interaction among urban residents (Alexander et al., 1977; Duany et al., 2000; Jacobs, 1961). Moreno further argues that good proximity allows residents to transition from residential areas, work, commercial areas, education centers, health facilities, and other basic institutions in a reduced timespan (Moreno et al., 2021).
More recently, and where available, indicators such as Walk Score™ and Bike Score™ have become useful tools for urban planners and policymakers to measure and improve upon urban proximity. These tools provide a numerical index score to define how good the access to a neighborhood is on foot or by bike.
In the discussion on Doha that follows, we elaborate on the concept of proximity in the sense of carless reach around the city and the urban templates that promote it.
14.2.3 Diversity
The third dimension of Moreno’s 15-Min City model considers diversity. Many urban theorists and practitioners have long argued that mixed-use, socio-economic, and culturally diverse urban communities are foundational elements that underpin healthy and vibrant cities as they have a positive bearing on economic competitiveness, employment, tourism, heritage offerings, and place identity (see Rodríguez-Pose, 2019; Rose, 2016; Whyte, 2012). Another essential component to urban diversity is ensuring that housing is affordable and accessible for all ages, abilities, and income levels and located in close proximity to workplaces and other basic services.
Diversity in the context of Moreno’s 15-Min City model is considered from two critical perspectives: (i) the need for mixed-use neighborhoods which are primary in providing a healthy mix of residential, commercial, and entertainment components and (ii) diversity in culture and people. Moreno and his co-authors further emphasize the inter-dependency of the various dimensions by stating that in the pursuit of a 15-min City model, the adoption of mixed-use neighborhoods is paramount in ensuring that an optimal density and proximity of essential amenities are achieved, while also providing for development of walkable streets and bicycle lanes. This approach ensures that residents can benefit from essentials within their residential areas, thus reducing the need for them to travel to access them (Moreno et al., 2021).
Building scale, particularly at the street level, also plays a vital role in ensuring mixed-use and diverse urban communities. Active street frontages and spatial diversity of urban retail floor spaces all work together to support affordable rents, services, and products for local business owners and consumers alike (Jacobs, 1961).
Coupling diversity with convertibility makes a good pair to discuss in relation to Doha’s built environment and its dynamics. Our subsequent discussion on Doha emplaces these with relevant examples.
14.2.4 Digitalization
The final dimension of Moreno’s 15-Min City model focuses on the role of digitalization in cities and how technology can enable and support the actualization of the three other dimensions. Largely drawing on elements from the Smart Cities’ movement, Moreno and colleagues discuss various ways that technology and digitalization can improve livability, inclusiveness, and sustainability objectives for urban planners, government, and citizens alike.
From a livability perspective, the digital age in information technology, communications, and mobile applications has had a profound impact on modern urban life in our cities (see Menon, 2017; McKinsey & Company, 2018). From on-demand mobility and delivery services to healthcare management and remote working capabilities, our lives have been transformed by technological developments over the past several decades. This too has coincided with the rise of the sharing economy and digital platforms and tools to improve urban life such as bike sharing, car sharing, and platform cooperatives that not only provide citizens with greater ease and access to urban amenity but also support more equitable access to these services and products through peer-to-peer enabled technologies (Enochsson et al., 2021).
In support of the proximity dimensions, digitalization has proven effective where services such as online shopping, cashless transactions, and virtual communications and interactions among others are implemented and promoted (Cohen et al., 2020; Han et al., 2019; Reinartz et al., 2019). From a diversity and inclusivity perspective, technology use has demonstrated an increase in citizen participation. Recent studies have shown that digital tools such as crowd sourcing platforms properly designed and used by government can empower citizens, create legitimacy for the government with the people, and enhance the effectiveness of public services and goods (Liu, 2017). Lastly, through a sustainability lens, the amalgamation of digital solutions within our cities and effective use of big data is leading to greater efficacy in urban decarbonization programs through reduced automobile use and more optimal consumption patterns of materials and resources (Enochsson et al., 2021).
There is much Doha can acquire from cities like Toronto, Amsterdam, Milan, and Seoul on how smart city solutions and digitization strategies can be applied and adapted within the dry arid climate and resource constraints within the Gulf region. Here, in the subsequent discussion on Doha, we emphasize that digitalization needs to be ubiquitous to support equal access to services among societal and income strata.
14.3 Doha in 15 Minutes
The premise of the 15-Min City concept is that it can work for any city, that the concept is adjustable to the unique conditions of the city at play, and that the 15-min radius can be a 10- or a 20-min one, even a 30-min one in relation to density or location (edge cities or suburbs would be more suitable to the bigger spatio-temporal scale). The 15-Min City concept also posits itself as a ubiquitous solution to the failures of modernist planning, of which Gulf Cities have consistently fallen victims. In the past century, the latter has transformed at an alarming pace, evolving to cause a rapid socio-economic rupture of the traditional fabric in the khaleej. Large corporations—in order to attract the talent and labor required to build those oil states—have had to move swiftly and create multinational microcosms to accommodate foreigners into the desert. The result was a quick shift from the traditional way of life in the Gulf to a more fragmented, destination-based planning—cities within cities, dependent on expansive infrastructure. This phenomenon has had deep implications for the distribution of density, proximity, and accessibility, environmental sustainability, infrastructure loads, and social cohesion.
It is time, as Moreno says, to ‘repair urban and social fragments, largely fueled by modernist approaches’ (Moreno et al., 2021). The way out is to look inward and adapt the resulted spatial and physical capital into a new timeframe, tailored to the individual carless reach and rights to equal access to services. Can Doha become a 15-Min city? Yes, although many would argue that one cannot walk for fifteen minutes in the scorching summer sun and that this number needs to be adjusted for the climatic reality of Qatar. But in fact, this number is only a starting point, a north star to adjust a planning trajectory toward a human-centric urban design. Each city needs to assess its own needs and create its own measures, according to its own rhythms and demographics. The frequency of prayer far exceeds the frequency of grocery shopping, for instance, and so these two services necessitate a varied temporal urban location—the former perhaps within a 5-min reach, while the latter within a 10- or a 15-min reach. Whatever the case might be, building upon the principles of chrono-urbanism requires establishing some core relationships, whose spatio-temporal balance ameliorates our urban experience, diminishes our environmental impact, fosters our social and economic relations, and brings about physical and mental wellbeing.
14.3.1 Density and Urban Space and Form in Doha
Optimizing urban density optimizes the vitality of a place. Density is not height; it is not the image of Al Dafna and its high rises. In a people-centric urbanism, it is people per unit area. The densest areas of Doha are Fereej Abdel Aziz, Doha Al Jadeed, and Old Al Ghanem (according to the author’s calculations based on GIS data and the 2015 mini census). The Qatar National Master Plan and Municipal Spatial Development Plans rightfully set targets for people-based densities across the country. Centering density on people centers the service delivery and resource consumption on people as well. Linking then the density of people to their mobility patterns measured in time for walking or biking—not driving or distance traveled—would begin to adjust urban spaces and forms toward a more people-centric scale.
Let us consider a comparison between Al Dafna’s high-rise density and the mid-rise one of Old Al Ghanem (Zone 16). With mostly zero front setbacks, greater plot coverage and continuous ground floor retail on many streets, along the 300-m-long Tariq Bin Ziyad Street in Old Al Ghanem one can reach 78 establishments, or 1 in every 4 m—restaurants, mini markets, corner bakeries with earth ovens, hotels, numerous daily essential services, as well as a park and a library. In Al Dafna, in 4 m one has not overcome a setback distance or moved past the lonely standing high rise. Buildings that line up Tariq Bin Ziyad Street have residential tops and retail ground floors, offering great opportunities for live-work spaces. The density of people is clearly noticeable as the streets in Zone 16 are always buzzing with people, many on their bikes, many walking around, including children walking to nearby schools. With the right kind of intervention to repair the degrading urban fabric in downtown areas, the car can start being expunged and surface car parking space recuperated, appealing to the walker and biker to occupy these lively areas with easy 5-min access to all daily essentials, not ignoring the tremendous role of the metro in this equation as a way to transcend the 15-min scale, dispersing people out, and bringing people into the area in a carless, more sustainable way (Fig. 14.2).
Fig. 14.2
(Left) Density of active frontages along Tariq bin Ziyad Street; (Right) An illustrative study by Makower Architects for the Ministry of Municipality (Makower Architects)
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To work toward chrono-urbanism based on walking and biking times, we must recognize the relationship between people density, urban space, and form, as seen in our example. Cervero and Kockelman (1997) find that density, diversity, and pedestrian-oriented designs are in fact linked to reduced trip rates and do in fact encourage non-auto travel, in statistically significant ways. Salingaros (2006) even pushes the idea of replacing both the high-rise, ultra-high-density megacity model and the low-rise suburban sprawling model with a compact city model, following New Urbanist and Smart Growth ideas. The compact city mode, to borrow Lehmann's definition (2016), is ‘a mixed-use spatial urban form characterized by compactness, which defines a relatively dense urban area linked by easy access to public transport systems and designed to have minimal environmental impact by supporting walking and cycling…The compact city with four- to eight-story urban perimeter blocks represents the optimum use of space’ (3). This would put Old Al Ghanem exactly in line with the compact mid-rise city (of the same exact density in fact as the Eixample district in Barcelona—360 pph), and with far greater accessibility to services and walkability than Al Dafna.
The greatest advantage of the balanced compact city is its more intimate relationships with urban spaces and the ability to localize solutions, in tune with local daily rhythms that prioritize walking and biking. In 2016, a winning entry to the Doha Unlimited Design Prize was a vision for Doha Al Jadeeda and Old Al Ghanem as flexible child-centric neighborhoods, where streets are converted to safe play areas at certain times; where spaces adopted multiple functions; and where essentially new chronotopes were introduced, tailored to the nature of the neighborhoods and its demographic. More than anything, this project was praised for recognizing the true nature of these downtown neighborhoods, their spirits, their demographic, and their multi-layered nature, and for proposing a humanizing solution which is centered around the most vulnerable demographic—children. Having the flexibility to adapt a neighborhood to the rhythm of a child during specific periods means having the flexibility to alter the spatio-temporal frames around children and bend the city, make it more flexible, adaptable to change, and resilient (Fig. 14.3).
Fig. 14.3
The winning entry from the Unlimited Doha Design Prize on regenerative strategies for Doha Al Jadeeda (Zone 15) and Old Al Ghanem (Zone 16) (Alex Scott-Whitby and Cherng-Min Teong from the UK; and Omer Can Aksoy, Gizem Kahraman and Deena Al Terawi)
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Although each city tailors its density differently according to their demographic—Asian cities are on the upper scales of density, followed by European cities and last American cities—there is a desired balance to be achieved between density of people, urban space, and form and the provision of services, to avoid overconsumption of resources and infrastructure. Proponents of compact cities do warn of over-densifying where the latter can contribute to reduction in the access to renewable energy (i.e., sunlight and wind). Too much clustering can reduce daylight, access to solar energy, and increase air pollution. Hence, the benefits of the compact city need to be balanced according to ‘climate, land use type, culture and latitude’ (Edwards, 2014, p. 144).
14.3.2 On Proximity and Carless Reach in Doha
The recent COVID-19 pandemic has motivated an overdue debate on proximity, access to services, and social equality. It showed us that while some people had access to basic services and products within a kilometer of their house (an imposed COVID-19 movement restriction radius in some cities), others did not and had to rely on a car to supply daily essentials. Many cities—Berlin, Vienna, Rotterdam, Turin, Edinburgh, Denver, Dallas, Bogota, and Vancouver—reacted to this disparity by launching temporary and permanent urban initiatives, such as bike lanes, hyperlocal markers, shipping container hospitals, or pop-up stores (Moreno et al., 2021). The most obvious measure introduced in many cities as a pandemic response was new or temporary bike lanes and the promotion of shared rides, such as electric scooters. Doha was among the many cities that saw a tremendous spike in bike ownership, with people of all ages and demographic taking to the streets to ride a bike, along the newly built bike lanes or overtaking existing roads and sidewalks. Suddenly, a whole new culture was born, a bike demographic that not only used the bike to get some fresh air, but also wanted to now reach a destination—light shopping at the local store, meet a friend at a local coffee shop, and organize a bike ride on a weekend to a further off destination. Whoever was not on their bikes, walked and looked for the same nearby services, reachable via the relative safety of the outdoor fresh air during the pandemic.
Another important legacy of the pandemic is that people appreciated the time saved in working from home and many have not gone back to working in an office. Companies like Airbnb, Zillow, and PwC have moved to a 100% remote work scenario (Airbnb Tells Employees They Can Work Remotely Forever—The New York Times, n.d.), and there are now numerous vacated office buildings being converted into apartments across a myriad of cities (Liu, 2021; Mekouar, n.d.). Working from home allowed people to save the time in driving or traffic and instead invest that same time in outdoor activities—they have the time to walk or bike to the store; they experimented with reaching a friend’s house via a free scooter rental, rather than driving; and they liberated their minds from the default choice of the car and became experimental, invigorated, and curious by what else does the city have to offer. Recognizing the health benefits of the outdoor, people connected with it on a daily level, they changed their rhythm, and that changed the rhythm of their city.
Doha felt these new rhythms and now, more than any other time, it is fundamentally important to carry this momentum and introduce the right mechanisms to alter our urban landscapes toward a proximity-based dynamic.
The Pearl Qatar offers several urban proximity-based templates that are quite successful. Firstly, the way Porto Arabia is configured allows for the car to be quickly tucked away in resident or visitor multi-story parking—nestled behind the commercial clusters and within the residential towers; people are quickly liberated from it and channeled along the pedestrian-only commercially led promenade connecting all towers. Residents, once home and parked away, walk to the grocery stores or barber shops or ice cream shop ‘downstairs’ and do not generally resort to using their cars once inside the Pearl. Many residents choose to walk even to distances beyond a comfortable 15 min to reach a movie theater or a further-away restaurant.
Qanat Quartier also hosts a spatial template that tucks away the car in multi-story car parks and structures most movement along pedestrian-only waterfronts. Different in that area is the vertical land-use mix, with many non-residential units located on top of podium parking. The mix of commercial land use allows for small businesses, such as real estate offices, business centers, or travel bureaus, to co-exist among fitness centers, cafes, yoga studios, pet stores, and pharmacies. In this proximity-based urban template, both residents and visitors have an immediate access to a host of daily essentials in a spatial proximity that also fosters a sense of community, belonging, and at the same time intrigue in the random and diverse encounters.
Finally, one must mention Medina Centrale (at the Pearl Qatar) as a third urban template, where both cars and pedestrians co-exist on ground level; where on-street parking and multi-story parking have found space; where streets are always buzzing with people who are more than willing to park their car and join the urban dynamic—be it for leisure or while running an errand (Fig. 14.4).
Fig. 14.4
Pedestrian-friendly environment at Medina Central, The Pearl Qatar (Authors)
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All these proximity-based templates create spatio-temporal frames, centered on the pedestrian experience. To a large extent, they are very successful and have offered several models to separate cars from pedestrians and from back-of-house servicing, so that priority is given to the walker or biker.
In downtown Doha, Msheireb has also achieved a proximity-based urbanism, where the car is forced underground, and pedestrian movement is encouraged along narrow shaded streets with zero setback and active ground floors. Residents within this 35-ha development have a 15-min access to daily essentials, including places of employment, school, cultural facilities, food and beverage services (F&B), and retail outlets. What Msheireb is doing in a dense downtown setting is what proximity-based urbanism was in the past in the khaleej—climatically sensitive urbanism that was pedestrian oriented and community building via opportunities for random encounters and easy access to daily essentials; it is a model of the compact neighborhood with presumably the right kind of density to allow for optimum resource consumption per capita and a more sustainable way of living (Fig. 14.5).
Fig. 14.5
Pedestrian-friendly environments at Msheireb, Doha (Deepthi John)
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14.3.3 Diversity and Convertibility in Doha
Moreno speaks of a twofold diversity: that of the mixed-use neighborhood—with a healthy mix of residential, commercial, and entertainment components, as well as that of cultures and people. The vitality, resilience, and sustainability of places have a strong dependence on the right mix of uses that residents have proximal access to. For Moreno’s 15-Min urban framework, this mix needs to include residential, employment, commerce, health care, education, and entertainment (Moreno et al., 2021). These need to exist in spatio-temporal dynamic that elevates the quality of life and makes life per minute ‘inversely proportional to the amount invested in transportation’ (100). Gehl (2010) further posits that compact urbanism, based on walking and biking will inspire the creation of more public spaces—most importantly neighborhood parks—thus creating an equal opportunity among all demographics to access green and public space, regardless of car ownership, which has been a marginalizing force of modernist car-led planning.
This renewed interest in the compact, mixed-use walkable neighborhood as an integral part of the sustainable resilient, socially equitable city is being echoed in current regeneration and activation schemes around Doha. A recent study by Neighbourlytics™ for Qatar Foundation builds an evidence-based analytical data pond around five main ingredients for placemaking—volume of activity, variety of activity, vitality, relevance, and character (Neighbourlytics, 2022).
If we take vitality as an example of improving the proximity dynamics, we can use the data analytics images to pinpoint the heavy activity clusters shown in red in the visual below. These clusters indicate the critical mass of activity in the precinct and can support addressing spatial distribution opportunities to connect these clusters and enrich the precinct experience through activities, programs, services provided, and events. By strengthening the connectivity of these clusters, we also strengthen the walkability, diversity, and convertibility of the area (Fig. 14.6).
Fig. 14.6
Education City: Vitality—linkages between place activity (Neighbourlytics, 2022)
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The compact city template in Doha—where all five factors are at play—seems to exist only in the historic downtown districts of Doha. On a global scale, however, it seems that the pendulum of chrono-urbanism swings between the very dense, 5-min downtown city dynamic, with activity at every few meters, and the low density, low activity, overly spaced out, car-dependent destinations, which depend on vast parking lots and only activate after work hour or on weekends.
But the reborn post-pandemic consciousness is ready to borrow the best of both worlds and establish its compact, chrono-based neighborhoods with balanced density and range of goods and services along the six main areas of daily essentials by Moreno. At the core of this initiative needs to be the residential community—the one that echoes the past where rich and poor lived side by side in Najma, for instance, with access to the same services and opportunities, where equality, family, and community were the building bricks of the physical and non-physical landscape. Building social circularity rather than fueling speculative real estate would ease the risks of sudden gentrification and ground the communities in long-term commitments and generational resilience. Increasing density in both people and culture would cross-pollinate mono-cultured developments and start bringing up those placemaking indicators as tested in Education City by Neighbourlytics.
The Pearl Qatar can very well exist as a compact, proximity-based neighborhood. Since it is mostly active at night and on weekends, an opportunity exists to add vitality and variety through diversification of its economic ecosystems and the addition of a metro line extension to allow additional footfall. An added employment component will enrich the daily critical mass and add day-time footfall to the restaurants in Medina Central. Al Dafna, on the other hand, has a large employment component, but lacks dense activation via small F&B ground outlets. It also requires additional variety of office sizes to welcome small, medium, and large businesses side by side and foster a corporate urban buzz. And most importantly, the Al Dafna area can improve its pedestrian permeability and become even a 5-Min district. Education City, through the data analytics findings, shows that it rates high on the community pillar, but requires critical residential mass to enliven its premises and engender more activation, easier linkages, and greater density of people and assets. Finally, downtown Doha aligns best with the compact city model, having most ingredients in place, but still not able to expunge the car significantly and regain its walking and biking proximity dynamic. Whenever this happens, sidewalk space will be liberated, restaurants and shops will spill out, and frontages will be crafted so neighbors greet each other and have a chat on a datcha seat and watch over the kids walking back from school.
This is our city, our vision for a slower-pace, compact neighborhood living, where our reach to daily essentials is not measured in car ownership and parking capacity, but in the enriching experience of walking, biking, and engaging with the outdoors. To help us get there, it is essential that we allow flexibility and convertibility play its role in adapting our environment from the car dynamic to the people dynamic. Many spaces in our neighborhoods are left unused, unplanned, and empty. These need to be lent to informal community use, which can help shape their future. Onaiza, for instance, hosts an incredible amount of SLOAPS (Spaces Left Over After Planning). The same can be activated in variety of ways throughout the day or the year—improvised kids’ playgrounds, private functions areas, weekend outdoor markets, mobile kiosks spaces, board games areas for the elderly, Ramadan tents, charity location points, recycling points, community fruit and veggie gardens, planting tree grounds as part of the million tree Doha initiative, etc. The Onaiza community boasts a favorable mixed-use offer peppered around its premises—the Furjan Markets are an essential recent ingredient, the various schools and nurseries that are within a walking reach, embassies provide employment opportunities, and Katara across the highway offers a variety of leisure activities. To strengthen even further this community, residents need to be given flexibility to shape their community spaces, craft their frontages, engage with public land in their vicinity, and tighten up their spatio-temporal dynamics around their places of residence and work (Fig. 14.7).
Fig. 14.7
The linear park in Al-Hilal is a brilliant example of turning left-over spaces into green areas with rest areas, for the recreational enjoyment of residents (Deepthi John)
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People tend to indicate their spatial needs in various ways. The informal cricket plays on vacant lots around F- and G-Ring Roads in the Al Thumama areas, or even in Al Dafna are begging the city for space, telling it there is a communal bond that needs its space-time bubble to thrive. Can more open space be shared between schools and the community, so that play (football, cricket, etc.) spills between the generations and within the same space? Communal open space is the most easily accessible leisure space which does not marginalize the carless residents, yet it is currently still scarce in Doha. Even the Pearl Qatar, who boasts a communal living and recently introduced a school and a hospital, is largely deprived of small communal flexi spaces where random play occurs, or a birthday party or a yoga session, without having to book in advance formal and fenced spaces or ask permission. We have learned the importance of such spaces, especially having lived through a pandemic which made us acutely aware of our urban pre-existing condition—a temporal crisis and preoccupation with speed, wide streets for cars, and remote destinations. It is time to look next to our homes and shape the spaces within our 5- to 15-min reach by foot or bike (Fig. 14.8).
Fig. 14.8
Informal cricket play on empty grounds between F- and G-Ring Road (Subash Kumar)
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That flexibility needs to extend to both spaces and buildings. Historic Doha is full of derelict buildings of great value—for their heritage character, but also because they exist at the right place and are deeply relevant. The recent conversion by Qatar Museums of the historic building of the first officially recognized school for girls—now called the Liwan Design Studios and Labs, ‘a space dedicated to supporting and connecting design professionals who are integral to Qatar’s burgeoning creative community’ (Qatar Tribune)—is a brilliant example of adaptive reuse where it is most relevant, at the heart of Doha. A place of creative employment in the vicinity of other opportunities to convert courtyard houses to living quarters for staff and creative professionals, with easy access to all daily essentials within a short walking distance—a regeneration toward chrono-urbanism that is founded on flexibility, malleability, and creative solutions (Fig. 14.9).
Fig. 14.9
Liwan building, by Qatar Museums (Qatar Museums)
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The compact downtown living is by no means a thing from the past in Doha, and the walking and biking culture exists in historic Doha by all means. Daily, residents cycle or walk around while running errands or while taking a stroll. It is the car that seems at odds with the context, not the other way around. There are local families that have not moved away to new typologies in the outskirts. The Al Naama family and house in Old Al Ghanem is one of many to stand its ground and keep its doors open to its neighbors to remind us that there is a place for both a courtyard house, as well as a mid-rise residential block or a higher-rise corner block. The gradation of density, activation, and convertibility can all manifest themselves simultaneously without victimizing or gentrifying, but with a common desire to make the neighborhood more walkable, more breathable, more resilient, and where residents actively participate in its livelihood and are given the right incentive to preserve and cherish its nature. We cannot speak of equal rights to the city, unless we make our cities malleable, bendable, and adaptable—via an intense and proliferous mixing of uses—both horizontally and vertically—and via the flexibility of new chronotopes that ensure a more continuous, more sustainable use of buildings and spaces.
14.3.4 Ubiquity and Digitalization in Doha
Another offspring of our pandemic life has been an intensified technological innovation in work-from-home solutions and service and product delivery. Digital solutions for online shopping and delivery, online communication platforms, and online social media have contributed greatly to reduction of car usage and hence, emissions. Working from home has also taken the car off the street and has recuperated that commuting time to serve other, more socially enriching experiences. Hence, our temporal frames have been warped to our advantage, helped by the rise in digital solutions and the imposed distancing restrictions. This new post-pandemic paradigm prompts a new urban digital consciousness that looks to optimize the Smart City model to work for the purposes of the proximity-based urbanism, and away from its negative impacts, such as centralization, hyper-urbanization, and resource consumption (Allam, 2020). The ‘malleable’ 15-Min City would be a digital city, which knows and follows its human-centric evolution—collectively and intelligently—so that building uses, spaces, furnishing, and signage are amendable and even experimental, coordinated with temporal scales that go from the day to the year (Gwiazdzinski, 2015). Then we can subserve the Smart City concept to the needs of chrono-urbanism where ‘the ensemble of plans, schedules and agendas…coherently act upon space and time, enabling the optimal organization of technical, social and aesthetic functions in the city, in an attempt to create a more human, more accessible, welcoming city’ (Gwiazdzinski, 2015, p. 1).
The recent introduction of Falcon e-scouters is a fitting example of Smart City technologies working to improve proximity-based urbanism. Residents download an app and upon registering with their Qatar identification card, are able to unlock and hop on a scouter to travel around the island. Such micro-mobility solutions create opportunities to replace short car trips significantly within the 15-min temporal frame. A study in Cardiff, Wales, finds that half of daily trips for residents were less than 3 miles long; hence, taking into account personal habits and constraints, active travel was found to be able to realistically substitute 41% of short car trips, saving nearly 5% of CO2 emissions, in addition to the 5% of ‘avoided’ emissions from cars due to the presence of residents who already walk and cycle regularly (Neves & Brand, 2019) (Fig. 14.10).
Fig. 14.10
Scooters can be a way to reduce congestion in downtown areas of Doha. This photo is taken at the Mansoura intersection in Najma (Deepthi John)
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Elsewhere in Doha, the Loop e-scooters cover West Bay, Corniche, Al Waab, Lusail, Legtaifiya, QNCC (Qatar National Convention Centre), and Al Bayt Stadium, working on the same principle. But are these mostly leisure-oriented luxuries for the paying customer? Do they have the ability to replace car trips, where it is most needed—in dense urban areas with air pollution and congestion problems? The cycling and walking culture in Doha is certainly begging for more affordable options, better connectivity, and safety. The e-scooter and cycle usage needs to become ubiquitous if Doha is to become a cycling and scooter capital and raise up its livability standard. The expansion of the cycling lanes brings us one step closer to satisfying the need for more active mobility corridors, but the inability to bring a bike on the metro, for instance, draws us one step back.
Beyond the ride-sharing ability to bring the city closer to us via sustainable active mobility, the power of the Smart City concept needs to be harnessed for measuring the overall performance of the built environment across all sectors—energy consumption in buildings and infrastructure, emissions, air quality, waste disposal, etc. Measuring performability against benchmarks of proximity-based urbanism with time-saving mechanisms that increase our life per minute will ensure the economic, social, and environmental resilience of our cities. Smart Technologies need to be deployed with a great amount of social responsibility, so they do not become exclusive vehicles of revenue pursuit but are used to bridge the social inequalities that exist too ubiquitously in our cities. Smart Cities, for example, are often a marketing tool to drive up real estate values, thus marginalizing whole communities. Thus, local governments have a responsibility to recognize that ‘tech-driven solutions are as important to the poor as they are to the affluent’ (Remes & Kharas, 2018).
For Moreno’s proximity urbanism, smart technologies can serve to collect necessary data and deploy innovative solutions that provide equal access to daily essentials for a diverse demographic, combating traffic congestion, poor air quality, overconsumption of non-renewable energy, and passive time, providing equal access to green spaces, close by places of employment, education, health care, and entertainment activities—all accessible via walking and biking and assisted with the calibrating force of smart cities technology.
14.4 Qatar’s Opportunity for Positive Change
The compact, proximity-based versions of our cities are already at play in many cities and many parts of cities. When we think of the densities of London, New York, and Tokyo, we do not imagine ourselves driving through their cores, but rather walking, biking, or taking public transport. Congestion charges minimize car travel to essential and motivate residents to leave their cars at home or use them only on weekends to reach further away destinations. Most do not even own a car. But more than a congestion charge, the reason for minimizing car usage is the urban form and configuration themselves—shaped to balance off pedestrian space and car space—continuous sidewalks, active frontages, traffic-calming measures and frequent crossings, and bike lanes as part of shared car space, to name a few. The residents—on foot, by car, or bike—have been given a more balanced opportunity to use the urban space without necessarily competing for it. Having said that however, we have also become aware that these same cities have become too dense and have begun to cause environmental problems—air and noise pollution from traffic congestion, daylight deficiency from buildings too close to each other, and high non-renewable energy consumption. New Urbanism and Smart Growth proponents are now arguing that the most efficient city model is the compact one, where the built environment is balanced off with nearby agricultural land and where there is a controlled consumption of resources and increased number of ways to replenish them (Salingaros, 2006). This is not to say that ultra-high densities or ultra-low densities cannot exist anymore, but rather than these need to be more balanced and graduated, to avoid both the overpowering and exhausting draw on resources that both hyper-dense downtowns and sprawling suburbia cause, because of their sizes.
Doha is a very suitable candidate for the compact, density-balanced city template, which seems to be topping the Global Liveability Index charts with medium-size cities like Vienna, Melbourne, Sydney, Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto, Copenhagen, and Adelaide taking 8 out of the 10 top spots in pre-COVID-19 rankings (The Global Liveability Index 2019, 2019). Salingaros (2006) argues that the balance in size and density can be achieved with mechanisms such as transect zoning which implies a gradient of height and density from an urban 6-story core toward suburban single-house layout with mechanisms (narrow streets and sharp curb radii) that eliminate the fast car on large roads, or the extensive parking in front of buildings or the large parking lots.
This model can be well suited for Doha outside of the high-rise districts (which are not seen as an urban evil, but rather as opportunities for positive change), as a mechanism to mediate drastic density swings, such as the one in Onaiza 63 between the high rise sitting next to the single-family house.
Transect zoning and form-based codes have already been suggested in documents such as the Qatar Urban Design Compendium and the Regeneration Framework for Zones 15 and 16. The organizing principles of these mechanisms underpin proximity-based urbanism and would be essential for elevating Doha’s liveability standards by connecting, integrating, and bringing parts to a whole via a people-centric set of principles.
Without a doubt, the recent cycle lanes’ additions and beautification works by Ashghal are core engines for positive change. With more people biking in shaded and safe streets, more active streets will surface to offer easy access to daily essentials for bikers. The neighborhoods will shrink in time and space and car journeys will start to be replaced by bike journeys.
Neighborhood commercial streets (high streets) are essential in this transformation. Great examples are already at play—Al Kinana Street in Al Sadd, Al Jazeera Street in Fereej bin Mahmoud, and Environment Street in Al Duhail South, to name just three, are becoming the hearts of their neighborhoods, offering easy access to all daily essentials from Moreno’s framework. Of the same spatial and transformative power are streets, such as Tariq bin Ziyad (mentioned earlier) in Old Al Ghanem, or Abdul Aziz bin Ahmed in Al Asmakh—two neighborhoods that historically have been among the most walkable in Doha and their conservation (both of spatial and physical nature) should be at the forefront of regenerative agendas in the city (Boussaa, 2014, 2021).
It is also worth mentioning Qatar National Open Space Strategy by the Ministry of Municipality, which envisions greater connectivity, quality, and reach to open spaces in Doha and throughout the country. It re-looks at the Green Belt to potentially transform it into agricultural land, which tallies with the concept of the compact city next to natural resources that balances consumption with replenishment. It also equips the recent achievement of Doha and Al Rayyan municipalities as Healthy Cities and Qatar Foundation as Healthy Education City with a spatial framework that improves on access to open space and the health, social, and mental-wellbeing benefits this carries in line with WHO (World Health Organization) criteria.
Qatar’s future in proximity urbanism is visible and attainable. Doha is well suited to become a 15-Min City if a people-centric approach is at play as a core mechanism for urban transformation. The recent pandemic’s silver lining has been a reflection upon pasts, current, and future strategies that better align with people’s shifting perception of what they need from the cities, how they want to maneuver daily and what brings about happiness and wellbeing in their urban lives. Ultimately, it is the people that will drive change and policymakers should be receptive to change, adaptability, temporality, flexibility, and cultural nuances that allow us to experience our cities outside of our cars—in all their sensorial and wonderfully complex natures.
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