7     AN URBAN SPATIAL DISCOURSE

The Unit of Urban Development

To repeat, the urban spatial discourse that I describe can be first apprehended in the prototypical unit of urban development by which the city grows (see figure 11). That unit of urban development can be illuminated via a few emblematic examples. The Msheireb Project provides a quintessential first example. The urban renewal project is the first effort of Msheireb Properties, the real estate development company that, as a subsidiary of the Qatar Foundation, characteristically blurs the threshold between the public and private spheres in Qatar (Pollalis and Ardalan 2018). In the words of the project’s architectural language advisor Tim Makower (2012, 4), the project will result in a “high-density, medium-rise, mixed use, sustainable and pedestrian-friendly urban quarter” built atop a razed central neighborhood abandoned by Qatari homeowners several decades ago. This suburban migration was briefly described in the fourth chapter: as oil profits first began to accrue after World War II, the city began to expand. Although the twenty-first century finds it located squarely in the city’s aging urban center, the original Msheireb neighborhood was the city’s first suburban development. In the 1970s and 1980s, as citizens departed these residences for tony suburbs further afield in the sprawling urban landscape, Msheireb became one of the numerous neighborhoods in the city’s aging center in which properties were rented to the burgeoning transnational workforce from abroad and, in that era, a workforce increasingly drawn from South Asia. With the city’s central districts also drifting into abandonment and disrepair, the successful reconstruction and revitalization of the adjacent Souk Waqif—an emblematic urban regeneration project heralded both regionally and globally—reverberated with Qatar’s urban planners and power holders. It was in these conditions that the Msheireb Project commenced.

The Msheireb Project occupies a thirty-one-hectare (seventy-seven-acre) parcel in the city’s historic center. The project commenced in 2010, and although construction is continuing, the total cost of the project has been estimated at $5.5 billion. The urban tract is conceptually and spatially divided into four quarters: the Diwan Amiri Quarter is a combined civic and heritage area; the Heritage Quarter is the region of the urban redevelopment in which several historic courtyard houses have been preserved and converted into museums; the Retail Quarter, and the Residential (Mixed-Use) Quarter, need no further explanation beyond their titles. Although mathematically impossible, the development’s master plan describes a fifth quarter as the “Business Gateway,” an area that offers “premium business amenities, supported by a mix of banking, personal and civic services, and ease of access through its convenient location” (Msheireb Properties 2021). The five quarters are intended to accommodate some fifteen thousand residents, and those quarters, already connected by an internal light rail system, also contain numerous LEED-certified buildings. As a result, the whole of the development is framed as an emblematic example of urban sustainability, and advertisements suggest that in addition to tourists and visitors, the luxurious urban redevelopment might entice Qatari citizens to again reside in the city’s dense urban center. In the promoter’s words: “Msheireb Properties’ mission is to change the way people think about urban living and improve their overall quality of life, through innovations that encourage social interaction, respect for culture, and greater care for the environment … Once complete, it will see the oldest part of Doha transformed into a thriving community, offering residents and visitors all the comforts of a modern lifestyle while incorporating the architectural techniques of the past to deliver a long-term sustainable environment that celebrates the rich Qatari culture and values” (Pollalis and Ardalan 2018, xii).²

A second illustrative example of this urban spatial discourse, and one that is arguably the result of the Msheireb Project and urban redevelopments like it, is Asian City. Located some fourteen kilometers from the city center, Asian City is one of seven planned residential “cities” constructed on the outer periphery of Doha. Altogether, those seven developments will accommodate some 258,000 transnational labor migrants during their time on the Qatari Peninsula. Asian City consists of 55 residential buildings, each with 312 dormitory rooms designed to accommodate four men. Residential facilities include, at no cost to workers, both water and electricity. Housekeeping, pest control, maintenance, and a gym are also described as free to migrant residents. Asian City includes both a police station and a help desk, and broadcasts the additional benefit of full-time CCTV surveillance. In addition to the accommodations located in Asian City, the adjacent Asian Town comprises a constellation of facilities that, as one official noted, are “meant to provide affordable amenities and services to the country’s low-income workforce close to where they live” (Kovessy 2015). Those facilities include a cricket stadium, the largest amphitheater in Qatar, a shopping mall with more than 230 shop spaces, a multiscreen movie theater, and a large supermarket. These active and bustling commercial spaces essentially replicate the areas of the center city that had previously been important commercial districts for migrant entrepreneurs and their citizen-sponsors.

Originally owned by the Jassim Bin Mohammed Al Thani Social Welfare Fund, the Asian City project was subsequently passed to Ibn Ajayan Projects for operation and management. Furthermore, Asian City and the six other “bachelor cities” were constructed to accommodate the transnational migrant workforce that would be needed for the spate of construction projects stemming foremost from the 2022 World Cup. But other forces were also embroiled in these urban projects. These other forces and pressures included the citizenry’s growing concern about foreign men dwelling in rented villas interspersed in neighborhoods otherwise occupied by Qatari citizens. Additionally, the capital-intensive redevelopment of neighborhoods like Msheireb—neighborhoods that had formerly been abandoned by Qataris to transnational workers—pushed the growing legion of working-class foreigners out of the city’s center. Moreover, Qatar and all the Gulf states continue to face an incessant global critique aimed directly at the experiences of migrant workers on the peninsula. This critique periodically turns its gaze to the sometimes-decrepit accommodations found in the older Industrial Area and elsewhere in Doha. Many of these factors are subtly encapsulated in the promotional materials that advertise these facilities: “IAP Real Estate is proud to take part in the operation and management of Asian City to ensure the delivery of high quality and standard accommodation that is especially intended for residing workers to live in harmony and experience the highest levels of both comfort and convenience. At IAP, we continue our best to emphasize and value workers’ efforts for taking a big part in building the country and make 2022 World Cup a success story, while staying on course with 2030 Qatar Vision.”

The final example is the development known as The Pearl, which is the Qatari example of the offshore residential developments for which the Gulf states are renowned. Developments like The Pearl have a symbolic resonance that is unprecedented, for they are visible from outer space. In local parlance, and as is often repeated in writing, these developments have been “reclaimed from the sea.” In this case, The Pearl is a man-made island that occupies the shallow coastal waters once vital to the pearl industry and of great environmental importance (Burt 2014). Construction of The Pearl commenced in 2003. Altogether, the island development contains some 18,831 dwellings intended to accommodate an estimated 45,000 residents. The 400 hectares (985 acres) of reclaimed land are built and arranged to provide more than thirty-two kilometers of new beachfront, and the retail and commercial offerings that suffuse the island development reach for a stylistically cosmopolitan and culturally diverse tenor. Costs for the project were initially estimated at $2.5 billion, but estimates have now ballooned to nearly $15 billion.

The development is connected to the mainland via a two-way, four-lane boulevard, and both its residential and commercial offerings are advertised as elegant, luxurious, and exclusive (Rizzo 2019; Rizzo and Mandal 2021). Like Msheireb, The Pearl is subdivided into districts, or precincts. Porto Arabia, for example, contains the primary harbor and marina as well as many of the development’s luxurious restaurants. Qanat Quartier, another of the island’s precincts, is replete with canals and various flourishes that reach for a Venetian architectural vernacular. The project was designed and planned by an architectural firm based in Seattle, Washington, and was the flagship project of Qatar’s United Development Company (UDC). The UDC is Qatar’s leading construction firm, and although described as both a private investment firm and a core listing on Qatar’s stock exchange, the UDC remains interconnected with the Qatari state. For example, as a result of the prolonged financial downturn that commenced in 2008, and in combination with the enduring absence of sufficient resident-investors, the Qatari state was left to bail out the UDC in 2011 (Rizzo 2019, 7–8; Rizzo and Mandal 2021, 81). Perhaps most important, The Pearl was also the first development in Qatar to allow foreigners to purchase and own property.

In addition to these three examples, there are numerous other urban developments that might have also been included here. Education City is a twelve-square-kilometer urban parcel that contains an array of different educational institutions, including numerous American and European satellite university campuses, and some accommodations for students. Lusail, still under construction, is a planned city occupying over thirty-eight square kilometers north of the city, and is being built to accommodate 450,000 people. Its price tag has been estimated at $45 billion dollars. The Aspire Zone is a 2.5 square kilometer development established as an international sports destination. In addition to the Aspire Tower (currently the tallest structure in Qatar) and the adjacent Villaggio Mall and Hyatt Plaza Mall, the Aspire Zone includes stadiums and ancillary sports venues, a sports academy, a sports medicine hospital, significant parkland, various cafes, and a miscellany of other facilities. As yet another example, the Katara Cultural Village is a beachfront elaboration occupying a square kilometer of prime coastal real estate north of Doha. The village includes a beachfront, restaurants, galleries, and other cultural institutions, all arranged in a pedestrian-friendly commercial environment. As a “destination for art, culture, and cuisine,” Katara claims to be the “most multidimensional cultural project in Qatar.”

Numerous additional examples could readily continue this list. But even with these three examples and the attenuated additions, we might begin to ascertain some of the common threads woven through these projects and the plans behind them, as those threads might help discern the key qualities of the urban spatial discourse I perceive here. Foremost, most of these projects occupy vast parcels of land. The spatial dimensions of these projects are both noteworthy and characteristic. The estimated price tags of these projects are massive, and for the residential projects on this list, the size of the populations they envision serving are equally gargantuan; these projects speak in terms of tens of thousands of humans, even hundreds of thousands of humans. Both the size and the scope of these plans are defining features of the urban spatial discourse I seek to delineate here. Additionally, all of the examples presented here are mixed-use by design; most include residential space, and all of these examples include commercial space as a central feature of their design. From the smattering of promotional descriptions quoted in the examples, one can also perceive that these mixed-use designs often seek to engineer a particular sort of social life—plans and aspirations oftentimes speak directly to the style and the emotional tenor of the lives that designers and promoters envision for residents and visitors. Finally, in these examples one might note the recurring and explicit syncopation of these projects with the state itself: projects oftentimes frame their existence in tandem with the state’s Vision 2030 plan, or otherwise highlight fealty to national interests, aspirations, and goals. Altogether, these are at least some of the most significant—and perhaps most obvious—threads that I perceive woven into the fabric of these projects.

Archaeology of an Urban Spatial Discourse

In the Foucauldian sense, an archaeology of the urban spatial discourse I describe in this chapter calls for a historical analysis attentive to the systems of thought or other structural forces by which that discourse came into existence. In that vein, I suggest three distinct, interrelated preconditions that explain much about the emergence of this urban spatial discourse. Together, these three preconditions—as an attempt at Foucauldian archaeology—encapsulate many of the characteristics and variables woven through the examples presented in the previous section of this chapter.

The first of those preconditions is perhaps obvious: this particular urban spatial discourse and the expansive unit of urban development by which the city grows is foremost a result of the massive reservoirs of surplus capital that fuel the contemporary Qatari state (Hanieh 2018).³ The price tags of the individual units of urban development previously described (or “statements” in the linguistically tethered Foucauldian form of discourse analysis) reach well into the billions of dollars—and in some cases, even tens of billions of dollars. The flow of wealth from the state into society typifies the rentier economic system, a much-debated feature of the GCC states: in the rentier arrangement, “the state becomes the origin of all significant economic and social developments, and the determinant of how resources are spread around the population” (Niblock and Malik 2007, 15). In Qatar, the three largest real estate developers—Qatari Diar, Barwa Real Estate, and the United Development Company—are entirely or partially owned by the state (Hanieh 2018, 83–84).⁴ These arrangements are not only integral features of the authoritarian rentier arrangements but also evince the blurry thresholds between the public and private economic spheres typical of all the Gulf states.

In his renowned analyses of the city, David Harvey made more insightful claims about the complicated relationship between capital, urbanization, and social relations. In his analysis, Harvey suggests the architecture of spectacle is a gambit for attracting capital in a world comprising neoliberal flows of that capital. Harvey also portrays the city as a mechanism for the absorption of the surpluses that capitalists perpetually generate (Harvey 1989, 90–91; 2008, 25). It is difficult to imagine a more emblematic example of Harvey’s assertions than Doha: mostly empty skyscrapers glisten in the skyline, while state-controlled wealth is directed to additional projects like those described above—an island development to accommodate 45,000; seven “bachelor cities” to accommodate the 258,000 workers needed to help construct even more of the city; an entirely new adjacent city that can accommodate nearly half a million people. Perhaps these developments will remain the mostly empty “five-star ghost towns” that Iskander (2021, 91) and Günel (2019) observe. In the subsequent chapter, I will provide a more incisive explanation of these political economic relations in an analysis that suggests the city must continue to grow to appease the key political, economic, and social relations found in Qatari society. Here, however, these details are meant merely to affirm and illustrate the connection between the vast reservoirs of surplus capital and the expansive parcels by which the city grows. Those reservoirs of capital are the first important feature in the archaeology of this urban spatial discourse.

In my estimation, the second feature that helps explain the expansive unit of urban development, and the urban spatial discourse that it indexes, is the largely empty desert surroundings onto which the city continues to grow and expand. In the urban planning and architectural vernacular, the open and mostly empty peripheral lands are referred to as a blank slate—a tabula rasa. This precondition indicates that there was no preexisting patchwork of intricate land tenure or ownership around which the visions of the architects and planners might need to be navigated. In the landscape surrounding Doha, there was no preexisting urban milieu that might shape those plans, or to which those plans might need to be adjusted. Instead, with only the vagaries of tribally conceived tenure and the absence of private property, the expansion of the city faced few social and historical limits. There are exceptions, of course: Msheireb was planned on a mostly razed tract of the city’s central business district.⁵ Conversely, The Pearl and developments like it elsewhere on the Arabian Peninsula are quintessentially emblematic of the tabula rasa, built as they are on land conjured from the sea. In summary, I suggest that the expansive parcels by which the city’s growth is conceived and manifested—the urban spatial discourse that I seek to identify here—are a result of the absence of a preexisting capitalist matrix of private property in Qatar.

There is perhaps more to this aspect of the archaeology of this urban spatial discourse than suggested here. In tandem with the reservoirs of surplus capital, the tabula rasa upon which the expansion of the city was imagined, parcel by parcel, and then manifested in material reality, is a magnetic combination of elements in the realm of architecture and urban planning. These two elements are recurring features in what James Scott (1999) has called authoritarian high modernism, the strain of twentieth-century modernism responsible for some of the largest and, in Scott’s estimation, most problematic attempts by those in power to engineer society via the built form. As Scott further notes, modernist icon Le Corbusier frequently sought projects and commissions from authoritarians and despots who were almost always insulated from the din of populist tumult. As Le Corbusier exclaimed, reverence to the planner’s vision required the sustained conviction these political arrangements allowed: “The despot is not a man. It is the Plan. The correct, realistic, exact plan, the one that will provide your solution once the problem has been posited clearly, in its entirety, in its indispensable harmony. This plan has been drawn up well away from the frenzy of the mayor’s office or the town hall, from the cries of the electorate or the laments of society’s victims. It has been drawn up by serene and lucid minds. It has taken account of nothing but human truths. It has ignored all current regulations, all existing usages, and channels. It has not considered whether or not it could be carried out with the constitution now in force. It is a biological creation destined for human beings and capable of realization by modern techniques” (Le Corbusier 1967, 154).

In this statement, we can see the importance of the tabula rasa as a precondition that might ensure the inconveniences of reality do not sully the purity of the designer’s vision. In the context of Qatar and the wealthy Arabian Peninsula, that same combination of elements draws the world’s leading starchitects to the region. In the conditions they encounter there, those starchitects’ visions can be actualized in the purest form.⁶ Similarly, the enduring reverence for the visionary architect and planner, first developed in the Modernist era of the twentieth century with urban planners like Frederick Law Olmsted, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright, remains a central feature of urban development in Qatar and on the Arabian Peninsula.

The third and final element in the archaeology of this urban spatial discourse is equally visible in Le Corbusier’s sentiments: the recurring aspirations for a totalistic form of social engineering.⁷ These aspirations are evident in many of the plans and their descriptions, and are existentially interwoven with the vast parcels in which those plans are initially envisioned. Consider, for example, just the nomenclature for some of these urban developments—Asian City and Education City are titularly described as cities within the city of Doha itself. Drawing inspiration from the New Urbanist movement that galvanized urban planning over the past three decades, these planned spaces also reject the functional separation that typified twentieth-century modernist urban planning. Instead, these spaces are replete with commercial enterprises, recreational facilities, workplaces, and are oftentimes built foremost to accommodate residents. The tenor of these aspirations to socially engineer the future is perhaps most clearly visible in the computer-generated visions of the forthcoming future that pepper the urban landscape itself (Melhuish, Degen, and Rose 2016; Degen, Melhuish, and Rose 2017; Natasi 2019).

In his book Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, Marc Augé suggests that our contemporary moment is best apprehended as a permutation of twentieth-century modernism rather than a break from it.⁸ In building his argument, Augé (2009) is adroitly attentive to space, but like others before him, he is primarily concerned with the compression of space and the withering importance of distance in this era of mobility. I generally concur with these assertions; however, the archaeology of the urban spatial discourse that I have pursued here points to a fundamental conundrum. Although space has been compressed in the sense that distance has been rendered less meaningful and important, there is the paradoxical inflation of the unit of urban development. These inflated units of urban development are symptomatic of what I have termed an urban spatial discourse—the coherent system that shapes and constrains what is built in Doha and cities like it. In this section, I have further contended that the preconditions of this urban spatial discourse might be distilled to a set of three interrelated factors: the abundance of surplus capital, the tabula rasa onto which this growth is first imagined and subsequently materialized, and urban planners’ long-standing commitment to socially engineering a particular sort of future. In my estimation, these factors help explain the emergence of that urban spatial discourse and the expansive unit of urban development that it produces.

The City as a Tool of Governance

Here, I want to suggest that the explanation that I have ventured covers some of the necessary ground by which one might explain the emergence of this urban spatial discourse. At the same time, and again somewhat paradoxically, I also think this explanation omits what is perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this urban spatial discourse. In its deployment, this urban spatial discourse satiates the very human need for creating order out of chaos. This is where my analysis diverges from Keller Easterling (2014) and her concern with the contagion of zoning technologies that proliferate in the global urban form today. In my analysis, this urban spatial discourse is, foremost, a tool of governance wielded by the state. While there are economic and political effects to be reckoned with, others seem largely inattentive to the compartmentalization of culture and of difference that results. In the context of Qatar and the city of Doha, that human impetus to create order out of chaos might be most clearly glimpsed in the compartmentalization of the foreign matter that suffuses the Qatari Peninsula in the contemporary era. This impulse to compartmentalize and organize that foreign matter begins with making that matter legible. Let me try to explain.

Many decades ago, the anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966) turned her attention to the categories of food that different cultures either prohibit or deem edible (see also Norbakk 2020, 226–228). In articulating these cultural constructions in terms of a deep structural polarity of purity and danger, Douglas makes perhaps the most compelling argument for a symbolic approach to culture. Sifting through the complexities of prohibitions, commands, and proclamations in the books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus from the Christian Bible, Douglas discerns a fundamental symbolic logic to the ancient Hebrew system for classifying the possibilities of human consumption, or more clearly, for navigating what Michael Pollan (2006) called the omnivore’s dilemma—the dilemma faced by creatures, like us humans, who can eat just about anything. Douglas argues that the camel, the rock badger, the hare, and the pig were forbidden foods to the ancient Hebrews because those creatures possess categorically anomalous characteristics. Perhaps they have cloven hooves but fail to chew the cud, or something like that. For ancient pastoralist Hebrews, therefore, those animals fell out of the categories of creatures culturally defined as edible. Additional details aside, Douglas argues that culture is a symbolic system for making order from chaos, for building coherence from the disorder, and from the blurry boundaries that we humans readily encounter in our world. Categories and classifications are how humans make the world understandable.

I see parallels between Douglas’s structural analysis and the urban landscape produced by the spatial discourse I have described in this chapter. In 2014, for example, I contended that we might best understand the Msheireb Project as the spatial repository for both the idea and the practice of sustainability, and that we might understand that rendition of sustainability primarily for its symbolic resonance in a global index of modernity (Gardner 2014). Similarly, consider some of the other instances of the urban spatial discourse described in this chapter, and in doing so, remain attentive to the ideas and practices they seek to spatially consolidate: Energy City will “centralize real estate and services for oil and gas companies,” for example. Education City spatially consolidates many foreign higher education facilities in a single urban parcel and establishes a space where the gender-segregated educational norms of Qatar are excepted. Katara envisions itself as the central hub for institutions and commercial enterprises in the ambit of the arts and congeals a variety of related cultural institutions in a singular urban space. Aspire Zone gathers the state’s spectacular commitment to sports and athletics. Asian City is a totalistic location where portions of the gargantuan foreign workforce necessary to construct and service the growing city can be enclaved in the urban landscape. Similarly, The Pearl is an exceptional space where foreigners can purchase property. The same enclaves are commonplace elsewhere on the Arabian Peninsula. To the south, for example, Dubai Media City advertises itself as the “region’s largest Media and Content Hub,” while Dubai Healthcare City, as the “world’s first enabling healthcare and wellness free zone ecosystem,” spatially consolidates the institutions and enterprises of that ilk. Masdar City, outside of Abu Dhabi, is a zero-carbon enclave that is, as Gökçe Günel (2019) suggests, essentially a “spaceship in the desert.” Indeed, Saudi Arabia established the Economic Cities and Special Zones Authority to govern the ongoing proliferation of these exceptional spaces; that is, spaces that have arisen to govern foreign matter.

To recapitulate, in Doha and elsewhere on the Arabian Peninsula the urban spatial discourse I have sought to delineate in this chapter shapes urban growth and the spatial extrapolation of the urban landscape. The expansive unit of urban development that this urban spatial discourse evokes is a product of the vast reservoirs of capital at hand, of the tabula rasa on which those visions are materialized, and of the totalistic vision of the future those designs seek to engineer. Following Augé (2009), we might also see this urban spatial discourse not as a departure from twentieth-century modernism but rather as an evolutionary permutation of that paradigm. I have further suggested that we might grapple with this urban spatial discourse’s cultural and symbolic utility. Amid the contemporary era of mobility, and with the doors to Qatar flung open to a chaotic blizzard of neoliberal flows, the urban landscape of the city is suffused with foreign matter. That neoliberal chaos is the juncture where I see parallels with Douglas’s symbolic analysis: the urban developments, various enclaves, elite spaces, special zones, and cities within cities are, among other things, tools by which the disordered nature of this neoliberal ecosystem is conceptually ordered and spatially governed.

This line of thinking has been previously broached. I, for example, analyzed the layout of a merchant’s aging house in Manama, Bahrain (Gardner 2010b, 137–140). The spatial separation of the majlis and an altogether separate apartment in which visiting merchants and traders might temporarily reside were central features of my analysis. These were spatial, structural, and historical manifestations of the social capacity to accommodate strangers and outsiders, while simultaneously maintaining a cohesive private, domestic space. The layout of this house was a spatial metaphor for a national identity built around the idea of hospitality: Bahraini society was culturally configured to host a diversity of people from around the world yet did so without the compulsion to integrate and homogenize that difference. I observed the cultural tradition of accommodating difference might be read into the aging structure of the merchant’s house I visited. Similarly, miriam cooke (2014) more eloquently articulates a strikingly similar point. In her book Tribal Modern, cooke revisits the Qur’anic term barzakh, and draws great analytic inspiration from the concept. Tussling with its meaning and connotations, she settles on a definition that balances both togetherness and difference: barzakh “divides and defines differences in mutually constitutive and newly productive ways” (cooke 2014, 76). As she contends, this balanced and comfortable approach to difference and otherness is a key feature of the Arabian cultures one encounters on the peninsula today. I would add that the urban spatial discourse I have described in this chapter is one of the tools by which that tolerance and balance—despite its limitations—have been achieved.

While cooke’s emphasis is on the balance required for differences to coexist, I conclude with one more observation about this urban spatial discourse. As noted in the closing sentiments of the previous chapter, to consign foreign matter to spaces and zones in the urban landscape is, simultaneously, an assertion about the exceptionality of the foreign matter consigned to those spaces. In drawing inspiration from theorists like Giorgio Agamben and Aihwa Ong, I suggested that we might also recognize that the delineation of exceptional urban spaces is dialectically entwined with an assertion of cultural sovereignty, and this mosaic of spatialized difference is integral to the hierarchical multiculturalism that I see in the urban landscape of Doha. That hierarchical multiculturalism incorporates distinction and difference and proffers no impulse for integration or homogenization. That multiculturalism is also hierarchical—in the same sense that, for Longva, Kuwaiti society was most recognizable as an ethnocracy. I have sought to portray how the urban spatial discourse underlying the growth of the city has helped concretize these social relations in the city.