An approach to understanding Islamic urban design

Traditional Gulf urban layouts have all gone. Swept aside by the perceived need to produce ‘modern’ developments, their replacements reflect and represent in many ways the new States and their growing importance and self-confidence. In some respects the change from Islamic planning layouts parallels those which were seen in the Ottoman empire in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It is interesting to note that, in Salonica for instance, European socio-political values developed rapidly with increasing prosperity, the town witnessing the concomitant introduction of a burgeoning expatriate community and European urban vocabulary.

Perhaps more significant than this was the change in the make-up or balance of their society. Increasing prosperity and the efforts to draw together the different religious groups saw a widening gap between rich and poor. There, natural economics saw the withdrawal and relocation of the rich to their own developments, leaving the poor to fend for themselves. The parallel exists today in many countries. In Qatar, however, the poor are assisted by the State but there is still a parallel in that a person’s educational status governs the size of the plot of land given for housing and the funding given for its development.

Where a qabila has been able to develop as a whole – such as was the case for the Sulaiti family – then rich and poor continue to live together as they always have done. There is considerable strength to be maintained in the comingling of different income groups, particularly when this reflects a social structure based not just on family, but on Islamic values. I have written elsewhere about the rapid development of the State, the introduction of Western planning to produce the framework for the construction needed, and the organisation and modelling of architectural stereotypes to aid the speed of development thought to be required, so won’t deal with that again here.

In many ways, modern urban developments in the Gulf demonstrate a rather depressing characteristic: virtually all of them are designed as individual projects or groups of projects, and have little or no urban design relationship with each other. There may well be a master plan but there usually is no coherent urban theme in their relationships, even if there is a massing, use and density plan on which they are constructed, usually produced by Western professional consultants.

In this aerial photograph of Doha you can see something of its new character. Not only is it very different in layout and density from the character of the old Doha which was essentially pedestrian and unstructured in terms of of its street pattern, it is very different from New Doha where a different set of planning requirements were established prior to any development taking place there. Of course, in an existing city land ownership and its size and shape, are some of the chief factors determining the type of development on a plot and its density, together with the existing or amended road structure. The reason I have included this photograph is to demonstrate that it could have been taken almost anywhere. It is certainly true that it is not possible to see architectural detail at this scale, but the massing of buildings, their articulation and orientation tell us little about the character of the city and its people. Oddly enough, I could only spot a single mosque in the original photograph.

The West has seen much written on the development of urban layouts, and this may have relevance in the Gulf. For instance, Gehl has described four types of city, the first of which perfectly describes Doha prior to the nineteen seventies:

• The traditional city – where meeting place, marketplace and traffic continue to coexist in balance, more or less,
• The invaded city – where a single use, usually car traffic, has usurped territory at the expense of the other uses of city space,
• The abandoned city – where public space and public life have disappeared, and
• The reconquered city – where strong efforts are being made to find a new, workable balance between the uses of the city as meeting place, marketplace and traffic space.

In a sense the four types describe a sequence commonly found in the West, the difference with the Gulf generally is that the capital cities have been completely lost and redesigned, and these types are no longer applicable.

One of the best known Western urban critics, Christopher Alexander has been influential in describing forms of urban morphology. This, with similar writings, has helped to mould analysis of urban forms. One of his theses is that ‘natural’ cities – those which have evolved naturally over a period of time – have a degree of social interaction missing in ‘artificial’ cities – those which have been deliberately planned and created. He likens the latter to a tree, not in the natural, arboreal sense, but in the structural formality of its arrangement. The ‘natural’ city, he points out, has a variety of relationships encompassed within it that are more lattice-like than tree-like and, in this, he sees the reflection of our social systems and arrangements more closely defined. It follows that, when a city is re-structured or reconstructed, then the social relationships are broken and re-assembled. But in their re-assembling it doesn’t follow that previous relationships will continue, nor that relationships will use the same mechanisms to establish or continue themselves.

Perhaps as bad as the relationship problem is the likelihood that there will be no chance in the design of the larger developments to incorporate environmental engineering in clients’ buildings. This is a direct reflection of the presence of oil and gas as the basis for the State’s wealth, and the artificially low cost of fuel to power heating and ventilation systems. Certainly there is an attempt being made in some buildings to reduce the effect of the harsh environment on the occupants of those buildings. This tends to deal with many of the problems of solar gain and ventilation, but so far has not resolved the difficulties which wind-blown sand brings to the occupants. I hope to develop this with a section on utilities. However, first there is another issue which has to be considered.

Virtually all building history has been lost with the total and indiscriminate redevelopment of the old urban conurbations. The tabula rasa, or clean slate approach, might be thought to have benefits, but I believe this is only likely when there is a record and understanding of the past and a willingness to embark upon a cohesive socio-cultural programme incorporating the built environment.

Having said that, I have to admit that many of the Gulf States are attempting to do what I suggest but, looking at what is happening, I’m concerned that this is not coming about.

A number of differences illustrate the manner in which Islamic urban design has evolved, compared with the West. There are also similarities, of course, but in order to understand the forces which established Islamic urban developments it is imperative to have some comprehension of Islam and the social forces it generated. A general explanation of the importance of tradition is given in the approach page of these notes.

Essentially it should be borne in mind that Islamic traditions are incorporated in shari’a, and that security in Islam is intrinsically bound up with not only the relationship a Muslim enjoys with divine revelation, but to also with his neighbours and wider society. These are, in effect, a series of responsibilities.

There is considerable discussion in the Gulf on what should or shouldn’t happen, but change has been so rapid, and the perceived need to modernise so quickly, that development has only been possible using new materials and different building techniques – essentially those employed in the West, and utilising that expertise and management.

Criticism of this approach has, in effect, accepted the need to obliterate the old urban structures with its concomitant benefit to nationals with grants of land and funds for development, but has only been able to ask that urban structures should be ‘Islamic’ in character. To this end some extraordinary buildings have been designed and constructed responding, it is argued, to traditional Islamic values. Much of this has been pastiche, little has been truly innovative, and I’m sure the debate will continue. Regrettably, new development has been based on new planning models, many of them ported in from the West with little understanding of tradition and its position as a backbone to society.

A secondary criticism, but one which has much to do with the essence of Islamic values, is that no advances have been made in improving environmental control, and that clients have missed the opportunity to advance the arts and sciences as, it is argued, did the Renaissance in Italy.

Much of the above two paragraphs can be seen to be political or socio-political in essence, and it is not my intention to argue the case here for or against, other than to suggest opportunities for ameliorating the present situation.

I should also have said that there is a body of thought which argues that it is not possible to make change without introducing influences from outside or, perhaps better stated, that external influences might not necessarily be bad for a society that finds itself in a changing world and requires models upon which to progress rapidly.

The difficulty I have with the latter position is that it does not allow the society to participate fully in its own future. Certainly, in Qatar, there was debate in the majalis about how development might or should proceed. Professional advice was given based on some understanding of traditions, but the pace of development was so immediate, and the desire to leave their old houses so pressing, that there was no desire to delay any new development – quite the contrary; there was an insistence on knocking down their old houses as soon as practicable. My own experience is that people, seeing me looking at old houses, came to ask me to ensure that a road was taken through their property so that they could benefit in various ways.

The result of the pressures was that rapid development took place based on orthogonal plans and Western concepts and principles. From the nationals’ point of view there was discontinuity with tradition and an alienation reinforced not only by the breaking and scattering of established socio-physical relationships, but by the massive change in the numbers of population and the percentage of nationals to expatriates referred to in the addenda on old Qatar and population.

In many parts of Europe where there was wholescale uprooting following the damage caused by the Second World War, the cohesion and social stability of whole neighbourhoods was destroyed as the individual families moved away from their established but damaged homes. Not only did this destroy the neighbourhood societies, it transplanted them into new areas where they now had improved homes, but different urban forms and scattered relationships. Worse, they were swept along by the promises that the government and consumer advertising made them. Without the ability to see friends and relations readily as had been their custom, they resorted to speaking to their parents and children by telephone, buying and washing the car on Sundays, spending their increased income on televisions and ‘going out’, and generally aspiring to the better things promised them. Does any of this sound familiar?

It seems to me that the main reason development has gone the way it has owes much to the character of this population. Nationals are a minority in their own country, its social development affected in large part by an expanding, mobile, ever-changing ex-patriate population together with commercial pressures. As a result of this much of the residential development has a lot in common with transient architecture – hotels and hostels and, as Rem Koolhaas argues, airports. This implies flux and change in the character of those using the facilities, giving them a sense of theatre which I think is not out of place in the Arab world. But, more than that, it produces structures which cater specifically for consumerism.

In particular there is a feeling that developments such as these have no identity and no quality other than those imposed by advertising and branding. There may be oases of traditional character preserved around the city or, as is so in many cases, re-invented out of context, but the majority of people are occupying and using a series of anonymous spaces temporarily. They work hard, but they are consumers of a system based on advertisement and consumerism to an extent that is considerably greater than in most of the countries they come from. This gives an edge to the experience of living; something that is very much in contrast to the stability of the Qataris and their family and social life – despite the changes they’ve been through, and continue to go through, in the development of their country.

This photograph might illustrate the point. There is really no way in which the observer could guess in which country this mall might be located. It is theatrical set design. A vaguely Italianate design under an unnaturally designed sky combine with international branding to produce a shopping experience that has absolutely nothing to do with Qatar.

It is noticeable that many ex-patriates spend part of their day enjoying the air-conditioned malls with their families in a similar manner to the Italian passeggiata. This seems always to have been the case. I can recall the airport being packed with people in the seventies waiting to see passengers arrive and to watch the movements of the aircraft. In those days there were no malls, the main shopping being in the centre of Doha and along and off the Rayyan Road, the street with the first street lighting in Doha. Here people would walk but it was noticeable that it was mainly the male element of the population. My point here is that the malls are recreational as well as commercial, perhaps more so as I have argued elsewhere that the square meterage of commercial operations is larger than the population can sustain.

One of the points that interests me is the similarity visitors found in Qatar compared with Western visitors to Arabic/Islamic cities in the past: there was, in both circumstances, a lack of understanding of the structure of the city. As you read through this site – and if you have visited the area or have anything better than a superficial knowledge of the area – you will be aware that little is left of the past urban developments. My purpose here is to let people know that the present is very much coloured by the past, and that this past was relatively recent. My experience is that few designers, despite what they claim, really understand the context within which they are designing.

This is one of the chief reasons that new developments in the Gulf tend to be simplistic, iconic and based on Western designs. Other reasons would include, but not be limited to, client pressure and the lack of a traditional building record and understanding of designers.

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Architectural thinking changes over time

Not every architect thinks in terms of finished buildings in this way. There are some, for instance, who are more concerned with process and who characterise buildings such as those being constructed on the New District of Doha as cake decoration. In many ways this type of architecture is being left behind by a number of developments that are based on both environmental improvements as well as a more intellectual understanding of the benefits to urban experience that can be brought about by well-considered buildings.

Thom Mayne, for instance, develops the random accretion of experiences to produce architecture, linking the urban design experience more directly to the buildings which comprise it. In his case there is the use of transparency with light used as a medium, where the skin of a building is a transition between the land and the intrinsic uses of buildings, and where the body of the building is seen to be distinct from the skin whereas, in most modern buildings, the skin of the building is the building. The structure of a building is seen to be a visible and interesting part of the building as he argues that architecture is more interesting when separated from function.

The importance of this approach, it is claimed, is that it leads to improved performance criteria both for the buildings in environmental terms as well in their use. More importantly, it enervates and activates the city in a manner that ordinary modern buildings do not. Mayne believes that this redifines how buildings work both within themselves and within their environment. Just as important, it creates architecture which is intrinsically linked to the city.

The reason I mention this type of architecture here is to introduce the argument that architecture moves continually, but that the type of architecture which is being constructed in the Gulf – which is based to a large extent on commercial values – has itself been left behind by modern architectural thinking which hopes to benefit the citizen more. I also want to raise the issues which relate to the intrinsic values of traditional Arab and Islamic design and their relevance to modern architecture.

The argument that more attention should be paid to those using our cities has been made by many people. It has been written about and taught for decades, particularly in urban design and planning schools. Regrettably commercial interest, the need to make a living and the designers’ urge to create ‘architecture’ seem to have combined to exclude citizens or at least their enjoyment of cities. There is even a complicating factor nowadays with the urge for security prompting both private and public bodies to install security systems – usually CCTV systems – and prohibit the taking of photographs of some buildings, which inhibits some people. But that’s another issue which should be discussed elsewhere.

The Danish architect, Jan Gehl, is another architect who has written about the need to make the spaces between buildings attractive, in its proper sense, to people. He has proposed twelve simple points which, if mostly fulfilled, will produce vibrant and enjoyable spaces for people moving around buildings:

Protection against

• traffic and accidents,
• crime and violence – a feeling of safety, and
• unpleasant sense experience;

Comfort – possibilities for

• walking,
• standing around,
• sitting,
• seeing and looking,
• hearing and talking, and
• play and unfolding activities;

Environmental

• scale,
• possibilities for enjoying positive aspects of the climate, and
• aesthetic quality and positive sense experience.

The important thing to notice here is that architecture, or the treatment of the adjacent buildings, are the last items on the list. It may be thought that they are unnecessary if an external space is to be enjoyed. There is some evidence that this might be so when considering old but dilapidated areas of cities, but it is fair to say that he believes buildings should be well designed, detailed and finished and that the better they are the more likely they will add positively to the enjoyment of an external space.

There are many people who have written about the manner in which urban spaces can be thought to be successful. Generally the writings focus on the benefits to be gained from a rich mix of land uses, pedestrian enjoyment and twenty-four hour activity. Malls in Qatar attempt to reproduce the experience but have only a limited range of activities, nearly all of them retail. Commercial, recreation and residential activities need to be added to the mix in order to produce the fully-rounded urban experience, and this is what many new developments attempt to replicate. But those which seem to work best are those having a long history of development, changing with time and in response to a variety of events and issues. It is very difficult to reproduce this in a new development, particularly with the need to recoup development expenses, and also with an artificially balanced society or community.

More to be written…

Looking through literature relating to the visits of Western travellers to Islamic countries in the past, it is notable that there was a real culture shock experienced by those visitors eager for cultural, if not economic improvement. Bear in mind that, in the eighteenth century, the Ottoman empire was considered the prime example of civilisation. But its urban developments were impenetrable to the visitors. Perhaps indecipherable would be a better description because none of the urban vocabularies those visitors understood were in evidence. There were none of the elements they understood; no public squares, boulevards, street names or numbers. There was no apparent structure other than amorphous housing, aswaq, fortresses and the palaces and offices of the ruling elite.

In the past this was due to a number of factors dealt with elsewhere on this page; essentially relating to the manner in which housing developed outward, from the private to the public domain, and the character of the public elements of the city – suq, masjid, madrassa, etc. But modern development moves from the public, commercial sector to the private sector where there isn’t the perceived requirement for privacy in a shifting population. Instead market forces, governing the location of developable land – loosely within the planning framework – have seen a variety of structures built out of sync with related development. In fact there is no related development, at least not in the socio-cultural sense. This has encouraged the use of transport, particularly taxis there being, only now, the beginnings of a bus system in the country, and with many workers being unable to afford a car.

There is one other point to make and that relates to the character of buildings in the Arab world. Where there are anonymous walls masking private residences, there seems to be a characteristic which produced larger buildings behind the surrounding wall than is guessed from the outside. Whereas this is the result of a psychological effect relating to the scarce knowledge received by the brain relating to the clues the walls give, modern buildings, particularly public ones appear to be larger on the outside than they are on the inside in terms of usable spaces. The reason for this is the larger than average use of circulation spaces, for which there appear to be three main reasons:

• with more disposable wealth to spend on buildings, ordinary circulation spaces tend to be automatically larger than they would be in the West. There may be an element of ostentation in it, but mostly there is just a desire to produce more comfortable spaces;
• there is a psychological requirement of Gulf Arabs, in particular Bedu, to have space around them, and for this to be greatest above them, in order for them to feel unrestricted. With this comes a requirement for good lighting to support the feeling of space; and
• perhaps most important, is the commercialism that requires iconic buildings, nearly all of which have major spatial volumes within them as a focus for the building and a setting for the activities which take place within it.

Curiously, to my mind, there seems not to be a great need to see outside the building. I would have anticipated a requirement to see the sky at least. I have never noticed a problem for Arabs within buildings, nor has this been stated as a problem in conversation with them. Most importantly, I have never seen them unable to relate immediately to the direction of Mecca, one of the most important issues for a Muslim.

The point of this little discursion seems to be that modern buildings appear to be larger outside than they appear to be inside.

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Socio-cultural traditions

The societies that gave themselves to Islam had developed over thousands of years within Greek and Judaeo-Christian traditions. As such, they shared a variety of socio-religious characteristics, but which, in many respects, were readily subsumed within Islam in the seventh century and beyond.

Greek democracy had established a society based not only on shared community and standards, but particularly on responsibilities. Citizens knew their rights and understood that they were required to participate and contribute to the direction of their own lives as well as those of the community. Certainly there was a hierarchy, but there was a sense of responsibility and engagement in the development and operation of that society, even though there was also a strong commercial ethic. Democracy wasn’t the right that many in the West now think of it as being; it was a duty.

Rome developed this society, though moved away from it in several significant ways, particularly in the development of its hierarchical society which catered for its citizens without giving them concomitant opportunities. Essentially this was through appeasement and was one of the contributing factors to its decline and eventual fall.

Classical western conurbations reflected the life of the people within them. These traditional, spatially defined communities carried out their activities not only within buildings but also in the spaces associated with and around them. These spaces and buildings were the setting for commerce and socialising, eating and drinking, as well as political, cultural or religious assembly. The buildings and spaces provided not only assembly points but came to be visible representations of the institutions reflecting the society. In the West these communal or public elements tended to be in the centre of the town not just because of ease of access, but also for representative focus.

The Western societies’ socio-political requirements were for warehouses, markets, temples, amphitheatres, cemeteries, agorae, theatres, stadia and thermae and these were reflected in the development of buildings in the round – buildings which, while serving a useful purpose within the society, also demonstrated their importance to the society through the skills used on their design. This architecture, originally founded in the structural rationalism of trabeated construction, was developed into a powerful series of building types representing the presence, power and extent of the State and its operations at home and abroad. Islam did not have this fascination with itself and generally avoided ostentatious demonstration epitomised in the external decoration of buildings as objects. There is a general belief that this reflects the importance of nomad Arab thought and the relationship between desert and tranquil oasis – the desert being austere and forbidding: the oasis attractive and reflective.

There is a more important reason for this introversion of development, though, and that is intrinsic to the nature of Islam. Islam is a very private religion conjoining the Muslim with God and requiring of the Muslim standards of behaviour and attitude set out in the Quran and amplified in the hadith. The house is defined quite clearly as a sanctuary from which the Muslim sets out to fulfil his public obligations. This notion demonstrates the key to an understanding of the planning of Islamic towns.

In contradistinction to Western planning hierarchy, the hierarchy of spaces begins with the privacy of the interior of the house and moves out through the districts as the need for access to other areas requires it. Within the house and, more particularly, behind the wall, the Muslim enjoys a privacy dependent upon his own predispositions and requirements, and it is impossible in an Islamic town to tell from cursory inspection who lives behind any particular wall.

In a sense this is similar to the way spatial domain can be characterised though, of course, in earlier Islamic conurbations the ordering of space was much simpler than is characterised by modern Western planners. Chermayeff and Alexander in their ‘Community and Privacy: Towards a new architecture of humanism’ suggest the following ranking:

• Urban public. Those places and facilities that are in public ownership, such as highways, roads and paths, squares and parks,
• Urban-semi-public. Places of public use under government and institutional controls, such as city halls, courts of justice, public schools, post offices, hospitals, transportation exchanges, parking areas, garages, service stations, stadia and theatres,
• Group-public. The interface between public services and utilities and private property requiring joint access and responsibility, such as places requiring mail delivery, garbage collection, utilities control, access to fire-fighting equipment or other emergency rescue services,
• Group-private. A variety of secondary areas under control of management acting on behalf of private or public interest for the benefit of tenants or other legal occupants such as reception, circulation, and services spaces, community gardens, playgrounds, laundries, storage, etc.
• Family private. Those spaces within the private domain controlled by a single family that are devoted to communal family activities such as eating, entertainment, hygiene, and maintenance, and
• Individual-private. The space of one’s own.

From an Islamic perspective the list makes more sense reversed, the emphasis being on the individual with his direct relationship to God, and flowing out from that through his family, neighbours and the wider society.

Conversely, in the Islamic city – without the public oriented façades of the West – the viewer has only the perspectives of the street scenes or the occasional view of the mosques and minarets which mark the place from which the faithful are called to prayer five times a day. In a city with little apparent design variation in the street, the impact of the mosque and minaret on a viewer is heightened by the fact that they are exceptional in a city of one or two storey buildings; and this would be thought quite proper both from a Western and, particularly, from an Islamic perspective. More than this, however, in a city such as Isphahan the viewer is distanced from his role as a street-using member of society when he uses the roof of his property and this perspective both reinforces his privacy and personal relationship with God, isolates and dramatically emphasises the elements of architecture of the town and, thus, the meaning of the mosque to the Muslim.

The above example of Western planning related to the hierarchy of spaces, and theories such as those developed to demonstrate the user’s attitude to his environment, point to more general principles which must be recognised as suspect. There are basically two points to make:

• firstly, the West has long held a fascination for Orientalism, and this has created a viewpoint of Arabs and Islam where the Orient has been considered as a romantic periphery to the cultural focus and civilising progress of events in Europe, and
• secondly, and more important, the definitions of culture and the structure of world historiography as we now understand and practise them are both of Western definition. Many societies and civilisations have seen themselves as the centre of their world. An Islamic view places the Western world on the periphery of its own physical and cultural development at least up to about the end of the eighteenth century. For many Arabs, this is still the case, particularly in the assessment of the West as being predatory.

Complicating this is the fact that, to my knowledge, there has been no Arabic writing on the aesthetics of design as we see it in the West. There have certainly been treatises on geometry and decoration but not on the way Arabs perceive their environment. All the information on this subject has been taken from Western writings.

In establishing themselves and developing their civilisations Islamic towns developed a more informal response to the lives of their citizens, balancing their public and private lives in an unplanned morphology which continually changed with time in response to the needs of its citizens, whilst maintaining its original vocabulary.

To understand this better you should bear in mind that urban morphology is a reflection of the socio-cultural requirements of the society, particularly its institutions. Islamic societies, to a far greater extent than Western societies, internalised their administrative functions. The effect of this is that a number of the urban elements we are familiar with in the West did not occur in Islamic societies.

In this sense they were, perhaps, less at risk from fulfilling Ibn Khaldun’s theory of the cycle of civilisations than in the West illustrated here. The Western concept of the street as a traffic artery, a zone for public and private architectural display and a place for social intercourse does not obtain in the Islamic town, and it is interesting to note that some Western planners are moving a little way towards the Islamic viewpoint in their writings. In Islamic planning there are certainly thoroughfares, and there are areas where business is carried out, but the primary unit of the town is the introverted, undistinguished residential area where it is wrong to distinguish your house from your neighbour. The more modern approaches to planning have created the setting in which individuals display themselves and their wealth to their neighbours. This can not be a healthy trend and detracts from the ownership that was enjoyed in traditional towns. Our experience of space is established and moulded by our culture – those ‘deep, common, unstated experiences which members of a given culture share, communicate without knowing, and which form the backdrop against which all other events re-judged’.

In well-developed Islamic towns not only did the hierarchy of spaces develop with time, but a legal attitude to them was established. This gave individuals rights to their enjoyment of the spaces and established an inspectorate who were responsible, among other things, for ensuring that consideration was given by the inhabitants of the town to others in the development and use of the town. For example codes were drawn up which established the manner in which individuals were permitted to install windows and doorways onto the street; the privacy of rooftops, which people were accustomed to use, was protected, and so on. These codes were extremely complex and were subject to adjudication in the courts. This enabled the populace to vary the built conditions within the town in response to the requirements or attitudes of each neighbourhood, there being no law of precedent in Islamic jurisprudence.

It follows from this that planning, in the modern Western understanding of the word, was quite foreign to the Islamic town. With a lack of formal institutions there was a consequent lack of public buildings other than the mosque which catered for a number of activities – more than it does nowadays. This tendency for a society’s activities to be separated and placed into discrete buildings is a characteristic of the West which is now being emulated in the Middle East and elsewhere.

With regard to public spaces there were no concepts of two-dimensional geometries incorporating grand avenues, public foci and areas for society’s displays. An exception to this was a requirement of shi’ites for spaces associated with their rituals. However, although a desire for privacy is not restricted to Islam, the character of the Islamic town was close confined, pedestrian, private, and personal. In this it was a reflection of the Muslim’s personal relationship with Islam.

Nevertheless, it can be seen that there are a number of elements governing the manner in which Islamic urban developments were monitored and developed:

• the physical building form,
• actual and potential social conflict,
• a regulatory system – the court – which relied on precedent, and the
• idealised system, based on Islam, against which the foregoing elements were adjudged.

Hence the shari’a can be seen to be the driving force behind the use and appearance of the Islamic house. Essentially it created the framework of

• land use and issues relating to nuisance,
• road hierarchy and widths,
• building height,
• roof treatment,
• window openings,
• door positioning, and the
• use of the space immediately outside the house,

within which urban architecture developed.

Although the Islamic town can be described visually as a cohesive texture of housing with the occasional mosque giving vertical emphasis to the overall layout, it should be seen that towns developed in response to the specific requirements for Islamic life. Essentially, the suq, mosque and residential areas are the quintessential elements of the Gulf Muslim town. In other areas of the Muslim world this would have been compounded by the hammam or public bath where the citizens’ activities would revolve around ritual and cleanliness. In the Gulf this role was carried out by the mosque.

The different districts of the town were usually associated with families, tribes or type of trade with the developments of the Rulers, cemeteries, special buildings for religious gatherings and those associated with noxious industries such as pottery or and tanning located outside the town. In small towns such as most of those in the Gulf, this distinction was not as clear as in the larger cities with many of these uses being located in the town as the scale of trading was not as great.

Trade developed along trading routes with other towns and in the suq or bazaar where the trading routes entered the town, the suq representing the commercial heart of the town. Where the trading routes met the town there would be the uses necessary for those supplying or assisting the trading caravans. Blacksmiths, ironmongers and the vendors with goods for the caravan trade would all be located in the region of the entrance to the town.

The suq was commonly a network of streets covered by temporary awnings of barasti and, more rarely, cloth or canvas. In more settled developments this would have been replaced by more permanent constructions such as vaults, but this form of construction was not common to the Gulf. In Qatar there were a small number of covered bridges at first floor level linking buildings in common ownership, but this was relatively unusual and didn’t create the character that can be seen in larger settled developments.

The narrow streets permitted light to penetrate and air to circulate affording some degree of coolness to those using them. In some parts of the Gulf badgheers were used to bring air down by channelling air from above the buildings down to ground level in the hot, humid environment of the littoral. In Doha there was only a single example of this though there were a number in Wakra – though all of them associated with private residences.

Housing in the main towns of Qatar was of the courtyard type. Elsewhere in the Arab world two other types developed, the

• qa’a, and the
• mushrabiya

types of house. The former comprised a small, covered internal courtyard – the qa’a, surrounded by covered spaces, essentially a developed courtyard design, and the latter tended to be seen in row developments having mushrabiya on the public or street side of the house and openings on the other side to give light and ventilation while preserving privacy. Neither of these were to be found in Qatar but are more common in larger Arab towns.

It has to be borne in mind that the towns in Qatar were not heavily urbanised and did not have the degree of physical development to be found in other parts of the Arab world. When I say that the streets were narrow, I mean it in a relative sense as in cities such as Fez, Morocco, Cairo, Egypt and Baghdad, Iraq, the proportions of the narrow streets are far greater. Nevertheless there were, in Doha and Wakrah at least, relatively deep and shallow distinctions where there is a noticeable difference in temperatures.

Research in other areas has demonstrated that there is a significant difference between the deep and shallow ‘canyons’ of this old street configuration. As you might expect, this work in Fez demonstrated that the

• deep ‘canyons’ have relatively stable temperatures compared with shallow ‘canyons’,
• the absolute temperatures of shallow ‘canyons’ are higher in both summer and winter;
• deep ‘canyons’ are warmer at night;
• deep ‘canyons’ are comfortable in summer but a little cold in winter; and
• shallow ‘canyons’ are too hot in summer but comfortable in winter.

While this relates to a hot, dry climate – compared with Doha’s hot, maritime climate – the basic principles are still valid:

• the temperatures of deep ‘canyons’ are more stable than shallow ‘canyons’, and
• they are cooler during the summer months.

New developments in Qatar are based on principles which do not take this into consideration.

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Social spaces

Before continuing with planning influences I’d like to note three issues relating to the work of Hillier and his approach to social space. Professor Hillier has developed this work under the general description of space syntax at London University where the discipline is academically pursued. A professional consultancy has also been established and which has made significant improvements to urban developments.

• The first issue relates to the theoretical and actual importance of the boundary of a property to the characterisation and arrangement of spaces within and outside it,
• the second relates to the manner in which properties coalesce to create a settlement, and
• the third is an attempt to describe the problem of traditional architectural and planning design approaches and their conflict with social arrangements.

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The boundary and its importance in social terms

We are familiar with the concept of a property having a legal boundary, a theoretical line within which a person or entity has certain rights of enjoyment. For the purpose of these notes this will relate to constructions inside and outside of which people carry out a variety of activities within the property boundary.

Outside a property people go about their daily business, moving around as they want or have need to, meeting each other by accident or design, and coming together in formal arrangements such as at schools, mosques or hospitals. In these essentially public spaces created as architecture or urban design, it is understood that these disciplines both reflect our perceptions of our social requirements as well as influence our social behaviour; the structures are designed as the formal backdrops to our social lives.

Architects and planners generally believe that they can – and should – influence the behaviour of individuals and social groups through their designs. I have written elsewhere about efforts to design out crime which, to some extent, have seen some success, but it is being promoted by the police and planners to the extent that it must be considered in design work. This kind of approach has resonance in the professions in that architectural determinism is a popular approach where it is believed that spatial organisation will affect social relations.

Bearing this in mind it is interesting to see that there is a large proportion of housing in the United Kingdom that is lifeless and, in many cases, unpleasant to use. Paradoxically, traditional external spaces in Qatar have been described as lifeless by foreign observers, yet this accords with Arab preferences. I’ll return to this later.

Legally, the boundary wall is a line. In real terms it is the line along which somebody erects a structure, either a wall for privacy or one that forms a part of a building.

space outside the wall.

space inside the wall.

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The development of settlements

rhubarb.

the mathematical way in which properties can join.

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Society and design briefs

essential differences between the inside and outside of a boundary in social terms.

rhubarb.

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Western planning influences

In the early nineteen seventies the first of a number of Western planning consultancies was invited to Qatar in order to plan for the development which had started a decade or so earlier. That company was sensible enough to bring with them a mixed professional team including socio-anthropologists in order to obtain a better understanding of the people for whom they would be planning. Other companies didn’t do this and I believe planning suffered in that it replicated Western patterns of development without real consideration for the different ways of life enjoyed by nationals. Certainly I saw a number of plans for projects which were unsuitable in a variety of ways. Luckily, many of them weren’t built.

The key difference – apart from orthogonal road patterns on clean sites – was in the establishing of regulations governing the house and its relationship with the street and neighbours. Essentially the regulations were prescriptive. They established

• the house as a central unit on its plot, with
• stated set-backs for the house from its boundary walls,
• restricted floor heights, and
• a limit to the floor areas on each plot.

The house designs were developed within a framework of statistics with suggestions on how this might be accomplished. In many ways this follows the codes of a number of Western countries where a significant amount of development has materials, design and construction specified in order to be classified as ‘permitted development’.

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Prescriptive regulations

Prescriptive regulations have developed over the past four hundred years in the West driven, particularly, by fears relating to fire and poor drainage and the threats they represented. Military and police interventions increased these regulations and often did not drop regulations which were no longer valid. Hence, in one European country, until recently it was illegal – as a building regulation – to drive more than one vehicle at the same time…

Essentially, it is argued that poor building standards produce poor buildings. They

• reduce protection and opportunity to their users,
• represent poor value for clients’ money,
• are a waste of scarce resources, and require
• more intensive maintenance than is warranted.

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European Union and its regulations

Because of this, the European Union and United Nations looked separately at the problem of development and its regulation, taking a holistic view. The 1985 Treaty of Rome, which established the European Union premised the free movement of

• persons,
• services, and
• capital within it.

Essentially, the EU’s concerns were for:

• general well-being,
• safety,
• health,
• durability,
• energy conservation, and the
• removal of barriers to trade.

Bear in mind that, within the European Union, the construction industry is second only in size to agriculture and, of particular relevance to the construction industry were the goals that,

• not only would this produce a single market for the free traffic of goods and services,
• but that it would also create minimum standards for the protection of health and safety,

Remember – industry, commerce and building regulations are inextricably bound together.

I don’t want to go into details in this paper on the meanings and importance of the Technical Harmonisation, Essential Requirements, Construction Products Directive, and the Health and Safety Directive of the European Union, nor the difficulties caused by different national approaches which bring Detailed Building Regulations, Mandatory Product Specifications, National Specifications, Public Client Body Specifications and the like, into potential conflict. But it is worth considering that the drive for development in the Arab world is likely to create similar difficulties with time. It will be interesting to see how the problem is approached.

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United Nations’ regulations

In addition to the work of the European Community, the United Nations have, since the early 1970s, been working on the harmonisation of the technical content of national building standards. To this end they produced a document containing significant provisions: The Economic Commission for Europe, or ECE Compendium of Model Provisions for Building Regulations, 1991. The concerns are similar to the Essential Requirements of the European Community although the structure differs slightly:

• safety,
• hygiene,
• comfort,
• energy conservation, and the
• dimensions and equipment of buildings.

Like the European Community’s Essential Requirements, the ECE Compendium set out a framework which defined the requirements a building has to satisfy, thereby facilitating the production of prescriptive regulations. The essential concept is one that defines which physical properties a building and its components should have regardless of the type of materials out of which it is made. They considered that emphasis of this approach is paramount to a better understanding by designers of their role in the creation of the spaces within and around which people carry out the functions of their daily lives.

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Islamic approach

But in some parts of the Arab world, planning went ahead with significant differences. Those more in tune with Islamic thought specify actions or behaviours which are permitted or are disallowed, giving designers significant scope for invention and creativity, a process which might also benefit the West. Interestingly, in Riyadh where there are prescriptive building regulations, and where first floor development is permitted and might overlook neighbours, owners have either gone to court to ask for openings to be blocked, or have raised their fences with a variety of materials in order to block the nuisance they feel. I believe this has not yet happened in Qatar, but will not be surprised if or when it does.

Also in Riyadh in the mid-eighties, the Municipality held a competition to produce novel solutions to their housing requirements in a part of the old town. Perhaps because of this the designers were able to produce work established on three principles:

• efficient and full use of all spaces,
• protection of the inhabitants’ privacy, and
• a more responsive micro-climate within each housing unit.

This is an excellent start for the development of a truly modern Islamic house, based on tradition and traditional values.

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Modern layouts and traditional life

I have written elsewhere about the way in which the progress of planning should be from the interior of the house to the public areas of the urban development; and I have also mentioned the manner in which development has brought larger house plots serviced by an orthogonal, hierarchical road system for the increasing number of vehicles. But, additionally, I believe in the need for pedestrian systems linking houses and public facilities. With the increase in reliance on vehicles for movement, you would anticipate that there must be a reduction in the use of pedestrian systems. This would certainly be true in the West but it is not necessarily so in Qatar where there continue to be a number of functions which are inescapable, particularly related to religion, where pedestrian systems are needed. Specifically, this is the link between the house and mosque.

Increasingly in the West there are efforts being made to increase the use of pedestrian systems. There are two strands to the argument:

• first, it is progressively more expensive to the environment to use vehicles both to gather and distribute a growing selection of goods to centralised markets in response to increasing consumer demand and for the consumers to go to the markets to purchase the items. The expense arises in
  • satisfying demand for products out of season,
  • providing for more sophisticated and greater consumer requirements,
  • packaging and waste,
  • the commercial development of centralising and distributing goods; essentially their double-handling, and
  • providing the vehicles, fuel, personnel, systems and infrastructure to transport these goods to the consumer – together with the increased use by consumers of vehicles to travel to markets to purchase the goods.
• secondly, the lack of pedestrian contact – both formally and informally – leads to the destruction of social intercourse. Conversely, the more chances people have to meet as pedestrians, the more opportunities they have to continue and develop relationships.

I don’t want to discuss the first issue here as I can’t quantify and compare the costs of the distribution system in Qatar, but the second might be usefully developed.

It can be argued that people, using vehicles to travel from home to large markets in order to buy their daily and longer term consumables, might be brought together as pedestrians while, at the same time, improving the privacy of the housing from which they travelled by removing any need for strangers to visit. But in the West there is a backlash against out of town centres necessitating vehicular travel. It is argued that increasing pedestrian movements in the area of housing reduces crime, eases social isolation, shapes community identity and promotes local businesses.

Planning theory suggests that shopping centres should preferably be established as a hierarchy of scales of centre, each dealing with a range of goods suited to, for instance, daily, weekly and long term purchases. The corner shop, local centre, district centre and city centre might characterise this hierarchy.

The old suq in the centre of Doha used to be an interesting place. The main part of it was covered though little of it was properly paved. Its expansion to the east, generally known as the vegetable suq by expatriates, was covered in corrugated iron, canvas and plastic and sold far more than vegetables. It was an interesting place both to shop and to sit and watch others.

Up to fifty years ago, the main suq provided for most of the needs of those living in Doha. This would, of course, have been supplemented both by smaller centres around town as well as by the itinerant merchants, men and women, who moved around the neighbourhoods on foot or with their goods on donkeys. Here is a partial selection of the kind of things found there but there are also tools, cloths, household goods and a gold suq to be found in the old suq.

This photograph shows the outside of the old suq very near the sea, but with other shops covered in an arcade parallel to and behind the main street. To the left of the photograph there was a large graveyard constraining expansion of the suq; to the right of the photograph was the main mosque for the suq with, outside it, the traditional sellers of mosque-related goods, scribes with their typewriters, shoe menders and the like, together with a taxi stand.

The suq provided not only the goods required for the house but it also was a place to stop and talk with friends while tea was drunk. Many of these places were within the shops themselves where the owner would entertain friends and customers. But there were also formal cafés. This photograph – taken adjacent to the old suq round the corner from the photo above – shows a scene replicated all over the town both then and now. One thing to note is the mix of local and ex-patriates.

At the other end of the spectrum there are a number of centres being opened all over the city usually, of course, on the outskirts where there are sites big enough to accommodate these larger developments. The photograph to the right is of the entrance to one of these district centres to the south of the city. As you can see, it is spacious and of high quality selling a range of up-market goods, but the impression I have from such centres is that not much is actually changing hands.

At present the largest of the shopping complexes is situated in the New District of Doha where the government reclaimed land from the sea, provided all the servicing, and is establishing modern development there with the intent of developing new standards which might be transferred to the rest of the country. To the right there are a number of photos showing the scale and character of the development compared with the old suq. In the first photograph, the scale of the centre can be seen from the size of the cars alongside it. As you should be able to see, the multi-level development is large and contains some major European names including a French supermarket and English chain store. There are a large proportion of up-market retail units, an ice rink, fast food outlets on all three levels together with a large car park at ground level with overflow designated on the surrounding – as yet unbuilt on – land. It is by any account, a major development.

However, it faces competition; in Qatar the market structure is unusual. Entrepreneurs open centres where they have land; their development costs appear to be impossible to amortise within a sensible period of time; the centres attempt to cater for all scales of purchase in order to optimise if not maximise financial return; and there is considerable redundancy of choice in the numbers of centres competing with similar ranges of products. Moreover, the road hierarchy enables access to any part of the city, encouraged by high vehicle ownership, the low cost of vehicle usage and the enjoyment people obtain from driving around the system.

Main roads have seen the opening of shops along them, in effect taking on the rôle of the more traditional local centres. This has been a reflection of land ownership and was, until recently, relatively unplanned. It has also been an expression of the manner in which merchants have operated in Qatar, taking on agencies for products known or thought to be necessary or saleable and, in a sense, permitted by the State as a method of distributing the increasing wealth.

The character of these local centres is, then, essentially linear. This photo illustrates one of the earlier developments, the paucity of design, lack of controls and a general air of neglect which does little to reflect the pace of development in the country. The shopping units contain the goods for which the merchant is the agent – often a peculiar mix – and vehicles park outside. Sometimes there are small units such as juice bars mixed with the units and, often, there is living accommodation directly above the units, though this housing is used by employees of the owner and never has nationals living there. The character of these local centres is unusual in that they reflect the goods of the agencies rather than a cross-section of goods required by the local population. The outcome of this is that many people have to move between centres to obtain what they want.

Local centres are, however, well organised. Most, if not all, housing areas have small shops within them. Garages are commonly converted to sell the locally required goods or, even, the shop will have just begun as a hole in a property’s wall – though I should say that those days have mostly gone. Often the shop will have a person living on site, perhaps doubling as a watchman or gatekeeper, employed by the house owner. There will be a number of such shops, some competing, but with the units serving most domestic requirements as well as puncture repair and vehicle maintenance.

These local centres are all within walking distance of housing and are commonly used by the young, women and servants of the area. The shops reflect the needs of the local community in their opening hours and thus are very useful. Traditionally men did the shopping as women used not to leave the house. Nowadays this is not always the case though social codes of behaviour prefer to see women mixing together and not being seen publically. This is perhaps more so nowadays with the large proportion of foreign workers in the State, though I have heard the argument made more from the personal safety point of view than from those relating to family honour or the function of the haramlik.

All housing areas in the country have musajid associated with them. As I have written elsewhere, muslimeen pray five times a day, some of those prayers being more important than others in that they are made in public. Commonly, the men of the household will walk to the masjid to pray before moving on to work or back to their house.

Musajid are provided within easy walking distance of all housing usually on the basis of about one masjid to sixty or seventy houses. The salat al-maghrib prayers, particularly, are an important marking of the day and are usually followed by the men of the area moving off to their majalis to talk over the matters of the day, issues related to their family and other business. At this time of night the masjid forms an attractive focus to the community.

I have written elsewhere about majalis and their operation. In the context of pedestrian circulation there is a very strong link between the masjid and the home, particularly with the majlis. When the latter is a baraha – an external majlis – there is an even stronger link. Usually people use them in the evenings and so there is an increase in activities around the periphery of the house, in particular, movement. Televisions are brought out, tea, coffee and cold drinks served, and people come and go – neighbours on foot, other friends perhaps by car. But all this increases pedestrian activity, reinforces social cohesion and improves security.

The photographs to the right were all taken in ordinary housing areas around Doha and are representative of the kind of inexpensive solutions to the baraha found in many areas. They show how necessary this element of the socio-cultural tradition is for both residents and visitors. The most traditional is the dikka, shown top left. In the evenings it will usually be supplemented by having a zuli thrown over it and masaanid added both for tradition as well as comfort.

The same is true for this more up-market example. Marble clad, it is built into the wall as were many in the old centre of Doha and has the same quadrant-shaped stop at the end – albeit a bit small – against which to lean. The window surround is also a bit awkward, but the principle in use is exactly the same as those above.

In complete contrast, but capable of fulfilling the same traditional function, here is an isolated group of seats at Al Khor. I assume they are there more for tourists than for locals and, as such, don’t need to have exactly the same form as a traditional wooden dikka which tends to have longer legs. The curious aspect of this seating is that it appears almost to be sculptural, the seats being introverted and apparently taking no account of the views to be had from them.

Simply constructed from teak with mortise and tenon joints, these dikka were relatively common as they are easily fabricated and used to be one of the normal products of the carpentry factories all over Doha. Many houses have them outside where they become part of the informal majalis which are a feature of everyday life. Here, in the centre of Doha, there is no cover to it, but they are often draped with a kilim and may also have a misnad or two for additional comfort.

In addition to the activities above, it is common to see people moving between houses either visiting, going to the local shops to buy items needed for the next meal or, after meals, taking food to other houses. Families often eat together but it is the custom for guests and the men of the house to eat first, then the women and children, followed by the servants and then those in need. The latter often sees the moving of food between houses.

Young children play in and around the periphery of their house, but not as much as they used to now that there are so many diversions as there are in the West. It seems to me that the difference in play between the Gulf and the West is that there is less because the children are Muslims and follow the socio-religious habits of their parents. This no longer happens in the West nor did it, I believe, to a similar extent. From the age of about seven, boys tend to carry out their religious duties with their fathers, daughters with their mothers within the house. This pattern dictates to some extent their play habits though there is, as there is in the West, a trend towards passive at the expense of active play. In terms of children’s play around the house, this inhibits play outside the curtilage of the property though it is not uncommon to see children playing on the pedestrian systems around the property, albeit usually with relatively expensive aids – bicycles, sports equipment and the like.

Thirty-five years ago it was not uncommon to see kerosene and water sellers with their donkey-drawn carts and itinerant traders carrying massive sacks over their shoulders knocking on doors and selling to the women of the house as part of the street scene. These traders have now gone but, in their place there are a number of additional types of person to be seen in the vicinity of housing. These include, but are not limited to:

• municipality employees dealing with refuse, street cleaning and landscaping,
• utility employees working on the electricity, potable water, sewerage, watering, street lighting and telecommunications systems,
• ex-patriate servants moving to and from the main roads in order to catch taxis, and
• private maintenance contractors.

So, there is still pedestrian movement around housing. It replicates, to some extent, the patterns of the past. But two things are different. First, the density of housing is lower as plots are either thirty or thirty-five metres square, considerably larger than previous urban densities. Secondly, this decrease in density is, to some extent, compensated for in terms of pedestrian activity, by the increase in the numbers of people having legitimate business in the housing areas.

What I have described here is a pattern which, in its essence, has not changed in centuries. What has changed is the use of the roads and motor vehicles to take the pedestrian movement on a wider tour. It’s not quite the same as in the West; the movement of men in terms of their daily mix of work, chores and play are very similar to what they have always been. They just range further, though they also behave as pedestrians in the area of their house.

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Land uses complementary to housing

The main mosque would normally form the focus of the suq and, around it would be the vendors associated with its use. Scribes, booksellers and small leather goods would be grouped in the immediate area of the mosque along with prayer beads, shoe repairs, cleaning materials and traditional wooden tooth brushes. Then there would be the cloth and textile sellers – commonly the province of the richer merchants – followed by the gold suq – perhaps to give it some distance from the mosque – domestic goods and utensils and the more ordinary artefacts joining those associated with the trade routes, with noisy industries farthest away.

From about the tenth century, Islamic towns were normally enclosed by walls as were many of their European counterparts. The entrance gates on the enclosing walls took on a symbolic value as the places where the inhabitants met the visitors, and it is here, more often than not, that business and entertainment was developed. This very much reflects the manner in which public and semi-public spaces are organised within residences or residential areas, and parallels the symbolic values of the residential portal to the street and the public room.

The funduq was also located on the outskirts of larger Muslim towns. Here visitors to the town would be accommodated in a development consisting of a courtyard surrounded by units in which a variety of traveller-related uses would be contained, the travellers generally being accommodated on the first floor.

A significant point which should be noted is that the basic house has developed from one type of building to another: from a free-standing shelter to a sheltered open space incorporating rooms. This distinction is reflected in the names of the two types of house, respectively, bayt and dar. In Arabic bayt has its roots in a covered shelter with an implication of a temporary – hence moveable – chief characteristic. The term dar has its roots in the enclosure of a space by a wall and carries the implication of protection. At its simplest this might be seen as a defensive wall but in the Maghrib a bedu encampment is termed a duwwar.

Perhaps, more importantly, the dar is also the symbolic Islamic house as it is based on the type of house which the Prophet Muhammad built for himself when he established himself in Medina.

The surrounding wall had a protective screen along the side nearest Mecca to protect the faithful at prayer, there were entrances on the other three sides, and one wall had a series of rooms along it for the Prophet’s wives. A particular characteristic of these rooms was that there was a porch of palm branches in front of them with the possibility of giving privacy by the addition of curtains of camels’ hair. This porch, or riwak, acts both as a visual link with the more public activities of the courtyard as well as a semi-private lobby to the rooms and their activities.

The importance of this is that Islamic social and ethical issues can be addressed:

• visual privacy is assured and structured with members of the household being able to maintain two degrees of privacy while keeping them in touch with the outside world of the courtyard;
• the need for interdependence between neighbouring courtyards is required, and the
• Islamic values of batin and zahir are introduced and resolved.

Batin is the inner aspect of self or a thing, and zahir its external expression. The courtyard and its aggregated development resolves this in permitting a neutral expression of construction outside but permitting owners to express themselves inside where only the family and a small group of friends will experience it.

In Qatar the main towns which grew up were established initially on the coast. They were located there and developed mainly in response to the demands of commerce, fishing and pearling. There appear to have been four main prerequisites for the establishment of these settlements. They had to:

• be situated on or near a good bay, doha, or inlet, khor, so that there would be a natural harbour for the trading, fishing and pearling boats.
• be as near as possible to the sea, where the main activities of the settlement were focussed, and concomitant with good building conditions and safety. Normally this meant a maximum of two hundred metres.
• be capable of parallel expansion along the sea shore, naturally forming a lineal development, and
• have a source of drinking water available a maximum of about four kilometres from the settlement.

It also helped if there was a position which provided good visibility to any approach from the interior. A watch tower would be constructed from which a view of raiders and the return of the fleets could be obtained.

In addition to these requirements there would be two other features which characterised the settlements:

• graveyards, maqbarat, would mark the outskirts of the development, and
• a Friday, juma’a, mosque would mark their centre.

Zubarah, in the north of the country, demonstrated the characteristics described above of Islamic towns, albeit on a much more modest scale, but the town is now completely destroyed. However, the pattern of the town can be seen on the ground, complete with its encircling wall – the only one in Qatar – which locked on to the sea at both ends.

Within this century the littoral towns of Doha, Wakrah, Khor and Ruweis, together with the inland towns of Rayyan and Umm Salal Muhammad have been the most developed urban settlements in Qatar, with Doha assuming the role as the capital. The first photo of Al Khor was taken in 1972, a little while before the buildings were razed and the occupants moved to new buildings on the outskirts of the town.

It can be compared with the sepia photo taken about twenty years previously. The second photo shows a part of the re-planned area, south of Al Khor, to which the inhabitants moved from their littoral dwellings.

Originally established by a number of families settling on the higher ground some distance from each other, Doha slowly coalesced into a single town by the middle of this century, but the funds provided by post-war oil began the process which led to the destruction of the Islamic town pattern, most dramatically in the nineteen seventies. With the incursion of Western planning and architecture the traditional way of life was irretrievably damaged.

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The road system

By the early seventies the beginnings of the State’s modern engineering had put in place a radial ring road pattern in Doha to accommodate the increasing numbers, character and requirements of motor vehicles. At that time the major elements of development were within the ‘C’ ring road and with very little outside it. Rayyan was a relatively small town to the west of Doha where many of the Royal Family lived but, as you can see from this photograph taken in 2005, there has been outward growth, coalescence and development of the New District of Doha, the NDOD. The above photograph shows the sequence of Corniche, ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, and ‘D’ ring roads.

Where these roads followed existing routes out of Doha they did not require extensive demolition though the road widening did have a significant effect on the number of houses demolished in the region of the straightened road. Where these ‘improvements’ were made within the town they required the destruction of many houses as well as introducing for the first time large scale streets alien to the grain of development within the town, and adversely affected its micro-climate. In retrospect it is easy to blame Western planners for the imposition of their concepts of planning improvement, but not only did the State see demolition and its concomitant compensation as a means of disbursing the increasing income from oil revenues, but there was also considerable pressure by land owners to have their land and buildings taken in order to obtain the significant monies they knew to be available. I am very familiar with being approached by individuals wanting to ensure that their land or buildings were demolished in order to gain compensation.

Between these roads the pattern of the more recently constructed houses was maintained complete with existing families still living in the traditional manner but, by the seventies, this ceased for reasons explained elsewhere.

But now, ten to twenty years later, buildings are being demolished in order to make way for more new buildings. I assume that the previous buildings have been amortised as there are constant complaints about the high cost of accommodation in Qatar. But the process of demolition and reconstruction is fast in Qatar as the government planning system works well and the construction industry operates relatively efficiently with the building types being repetitive and not overly complex. Note, however, that the method of demolition is not very sophisticated and is unlikely to fulfil Health and Safety directives applying in Europe.

Going back to the nineteen-seventies, the State was already building public housing in order to consolidate areas for badu as well as for those who were unable to build for themselves. Later this was extended to Government Senior Staff who were permitted a greater amount of land on which these houses would be developed, the first major housing of this sort being establish on the New District of Doha.

But at the same time the private sector began to build for itself in order both to provide accommodation for its own expatriate employees and, as opportunities became more obvious, for expatriates needed by the government. These ranged from labourers required to carry out the construction works of the burgeoning State as well as middle management and professionals who were required to work on establishing systems, supervise complex works and transfer skills. Much of this housing was constructed as gated estates for which high rents could be charged to government.

Constructed on private or privately acquired land these developments took and continue to take little cognisance of existing land patterns and were, and are, preferably located on desert sites, a typical one being shown in the first photograph.

Generally these developments consist of similar villas – either single or double storey – with an area set aside for recreation which usually accommodates tennis courts and a swimming pool, the basic requirements for ex-patriates. I don’t have that much against this type of development, in fact, under certain circumstances I support it, but it is not easy to plan and organise due to land ownership issues. The development in the upper photo is relatively small – and some may consist of only half a dozen houses – but some of them are much larger as this lower photo of the Al Messilah development on the Rayyan Road illustrates. In this developments the housing is relatively dense but benefits from being well organised in the provision of a hierarchy of external spaces, both semi-public and private. The only problem it might be thought to have is a relatively small amount of public recreational space in its centre which leads to difficulties for residents attempting to use those facilities. It is, in fact, a typical American layout, but was intended to house expatriates.

Here is a layout near the Salwa Road where a number of decisions have been made creating a very different feeling for the layout, which will be reflected in the manner in which the residents will be able to enjoy their housing. The layout has been created with a single access to a main road and an internal distributor giving access to housing on both its sides. The configuration of the distributor is tortuous, but it might be argued that this is in accord with traditional layouts which gave the residents security at the expense of strangers attempting to penetrate them. It can be seen in the photograph below that a wall on each side of the distributor has given it the character of a race track and, while splayed set-backs mark the entrance to each pair of houses, there is both a likelihood of vehicles on the distributor speeding and accidents occuring at those entrances due to poor sight lines. There are other unusual decisions; for instance the two tennis courts are oriented, one north-south, the other east-west.

Each house has a double garage, and each pair of houses shares a semi-public space for set-down in front of the main entrance to the house plot. It appears to be impossible to drive up to the front doors. The decision to create this semi-public space, surrounded by walls and with no landscaping is a curious one, made more unfortunate by the lack of landscaping in public and semi-public areas and the considerable areas of hard flooring which will act as a heat sink, increasing the worse aspects of the micro-climate that the housing will enjoy. This will be exacerbated by the heavily articulated forms of the housing which, again, will maximise heat gain, but this time on their structures. With time, landscaping will ameliorate this slightly, but the layout would have benefited from a more sympathetic treatment.

You can see the equivalent layouts in those I have shown elsewhere of the Government’s public and Senior Staff housing layouts. But the private sector is developing rapidly around the major urban centres as it has done for decades. The chief difficulty with this has been twofold: firstly the apparent urban sprawl with many sites being left undeveloped and, secondly, the need to extend utilities to cater for those houses being developed – a requirement which takes extensive and expensive utility development for a relatively few number of buildings. Here you see the effect of this character of development on the outskirts of Doha with considerable space between buildings, unmade roads and a general air of incompletion. This effect, in some areas, is likely to continue for some time, degrading the urban character of the areas as well as contributing to a lack of social cohesion. It is one of the causes of urban blight.

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Blight

Planning blight is a term we are used to in the West. It occurs when an owner is unable to realise the true market value for his property due to planning proposals being mooted, and potential purchasers being inhibited from offering at that value. I mention it here because I have heard Western planners complain that this affects new and existing owners in Qatar.

To the side you can see two examples of the kind of effect we might think characterises blight. The first photographs shows an old farm awaiting development. I don’t know if the ground has become too damaged by saline inundation – a serious problem near the coast – or if it is just too valuable as building land to retain its original use. The second photo illustrates the look of land as sites await construction to begin, sometimes for years.

However, my understanding is that this has no effect on the value of properties for two reasons. The first is that there isn’t the exchange of land to the extent there is in the West. Certainly some land is bought and sold but much of the residential land has been made available by government, sub-divided and distributed, and some belongs to large families who carry out more or less the same exercise, often leaving spaces for the families to move into. Perhaps this is the case in the second photograph.

The second reason is that there seems to be a lack of concern for what happens outside their own plot, this despite the traditional concept of fina’ where owners have an interest in the area immediately on the periphery of their plot. And this is compounded by the ability of Arabs to ignore mess in public spaces, much as we do in the West. The surprise to me is that Muslims see a responsibility in communal standards; what appears to have undermined this is the perception that the Municipality has taken on those responsibilities, perhaps a reflection of the national interest in presenting a good face as a nation.

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Radial versus lineal

The use of a Western radial road system itself became superseded in the mid-nineteen seventies by the increasing needs of motor vehicles, many of which were related to the construction industry. The geometry of the radial system naturally focussed the increasing numbers of vehicles onto the centre of the town, creating serious circulation difficulties and plans were implemented to amend the radial system to a lineal one, and expand the town into a newly created area to the north of the town – the New District of Doha. This system is still being implemented today.

In the early part of this century the architecture of Doha was similar to that of much of the Gulf, the twin influences on its architecture being from the Saudi hinterland and from Persia, directly across the Gulf. Doha consisted of single and two storey buildings built of desert stones or dead coral hasa bahri and gypsum mortar juss, with alleyways, sikkat, feeding the inhabitants out onto the thoroughfares. There was, in the centre of the town, a fortified structure which housed at the beginning of the century a Turkish garrison. Other than that there were only mosques and graveyards of significant visual impact. There were, however, a number of wind towers with even more in Wakrah. Today Doha has the only wind tower left in the country, and that stands exposed on all sides in sharp contradistinction to the conditions which created it.

The introversion characteristic of Islamic towns was reflected not only in the development of buildings, but also in the manner in which landscaping was treated. The Islamic town focused attention on the internal development of the house, particularly on the patio or courtyard. In the often harsh climate landscaping was developed within this contained area in a manner which reflected the relationship between a Muslim and his religion.

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Landscaping

Western landscaping, whether in the formalised terraces of Italy and France, or the exaggerated naturalistic styles of England, visually stretched away from the house in attempts to make monuments of nature and focus attention on the distance. By contrast, Islamic landscaping was introverted and miniaturised, in some parts of the Islamic world, setting out to represent paradise. Not only that, but the injunction against naturalistic representation in Islam avoided the psychological projection of the viewer from the site by omitting designed references to objects found outside the site.

This relationship of landscaping with architecture was essentially reflective, perhaps being best epitomised in the Western mind with the development of the Alhambra in Granada, carried out at a peak in the development of arts and thought in Islamic Spain. In particular the use of water as an essential element of the design – perhaps more important than planting – demonstrated a sophistication and sensibility to the introspective nature of Islam that has rarely been matched. Views from the Alhambra permitted sight of the outlying scenery and, in this manner, reinforced the delicacy of the interior development of the palace, and its relationship with nature.

Within the Gulf there were neither the context, ability nor the opportunity to match the advanced society which produced works such as the Alhambra in southern Spain. The people of the Gulf were relatively unsophisticated bedu, traders and pearlers without the skills, finances or, perhaps, even the desire to produce such refinement in their living environment. Nevertheless, unsophisticated planting was a feature of courtyards in Qatar, though water was not used decoratively, most probably because of its scarcity as well as for the fact that the use of water was normally confined to dry regions where its use in interiors would help air-condition and its appearance affect the physiological and psychological responses to the actual dryness of an interior.

As mentioned previously, the basic materials of construction used to produce single and double storeyed development were desert stones and dead coral taken from the sea, both cemented with a juss mortar. The structures were unsophisticated and were essentially a trabeated form of construction with walls constructed as columns with panel infill, and the openings and roof bridged by mangrove poles bound with ropes to give them added structural integrity. Roofs and upper floors were laid as earth on on woven mats with a semi-impervious coating of juss. In order to prevent damage to the building the flat roof had relatively steep falls so that water wasn’t easily able to damage the structure.

With desert stones being of a variety of shapes and sizes, the form of the buildings were finished with flat forms and faces, there being no arches used in either two- or three-dimensional forms. With no other materials but stones and juss there is little to decorate buildings – should this be required.

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The forces behind development

Although this may not be the place to discuss the background to development, it is probably worth commenting here the forces behind development in Dubai as some feel they demonstrate those which are also operating in Qatar. I am concentrating on Dubai as it is far better known world-wide, it is one of the largest – if not the largest – development site in the world, and there is more public comment on it than there is on Qatar.

In Dubai, a labour force of about a quarter of a million is in the process of constructing approximately one hundred billion dollars’ worth of projects. This is a massive development by any measure and one that is intended to propel Dubai into the trading and financial focus of the Gulf. But, bear in mind that this has always been the rôle of Dubai; that of an entrepôt for the region, vying with Bahrein in processing goods from Iran, the Indian sub-continent and Africa – and the West.

It is a fact that Abu Dhabi has oil and gas reserves that are significantly larger than Dubai. There is increasing concern for the future of these resources as the known and most easily winnable reserves are being rapidly depleted. This, incidentally, is different from Qatar which has massive gas reserves. The race is now on to find methods for winning the more difficult reserves in a cost-effective manner, though it is widely believed that this will only come about with increased cost to consumers. Dubai, with a much smaller level of reserves, has seen the solution to its dilemma in the development of itself as the trading and financial centre of the region.

At least this is the construction Western observers have placed upon this burgeoning development. However, it is not the argument made by the Al Maktoum family, the ruling family and owners of Dubai. Sheikh Muhamad bin Rashid al-Maktoum, who became Ruler on the death of his brother in January 2006, has a vision for Dubai to become a perfect city; the most perfect, modern Arab city. In doing so he intends it to be an exemplar for the expression of the true values of the Arab world.

There is considerable criticism in the press about some of the standards imposed on non-nationals in Dubai; but there is also a widespread acceptance that Dubai is a safe city where everybody benefits in one way or another – albeit that there are severe constraints on living there caused by the pace and scale of construction.

There are similarities here with Qatar though the scale of development in Qatar is nowhere as great as that in Dubai. But there are also dissimilarities with Qatar having considerable gas reserves, the presence of Western troops on the peninsula, and less of a tradition for entrepreneurialism than Dubai. Nevertheless, Qatar is certainly developing considerable facilities that will depend to a large extent on a continuing ex-patriate presence to house, operate and maintain it.

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Urban design and architecture style

One of the debates that flares up every so often is the rôle of the designer and the direction and meaning of ‘Islamic design’. At the beginning of these notes I stated the reason for regarding the architecture of the Gulf as being ‘Islamic / Arabic design’ and I shan’t go over that again here. What I think might be useful is to look briefly at the character of the architecture that is now being designed and let you make up your own minds.

I have to say that the examples I show here are really believed by their different designers to be ‘Islamic design’ as it is usually termed. If you wish to see more examples I strongly urge you to track down the architecture of Dubai where there is considerably more work being carried out, and on a larger scale.

Let me start by saying that there seems to be considerable lack of understanding of what ‘Islamic design’ is, and also suggest that many clients have no idea either and, worse, often direct the design as they do elsewhere in the world. This first example is of a five and six storey apartment block and is very typical of the style of building which characterised the rapid development of Doha. The reason it’s here is because it’s a very simple, squared-off block with an unalleviated parapet line, square window openings, aluminium fenestration and protruding air-conditioning units but, applied to the wall are pairs of pointed arches – a style that is not particularly local – with not even the benefit of providing shading to the windows from the strong sun.

The second photograph illustrates a development of the first, this time with a classical Western elevational framework and a form of naqsh applied both to the façade and in front of openings. Half the windows are protected where they occur on balconies. Where they are not, there is no protection. You can see that most of the curtains are drawn and I suspect that is because the residents are attempting to protect themselves against solar heat gain. Interestingly there are no air conditioning units on display and I don’t know how the rooms are conditioned.

Which is more than can be said for this arrangement where it is only too obvious how air-conditioning is effected. This is a new building and I find it absolutely incredible that the architect has not been able to make better provision for these units than what you can see here. What might have been a small but usable balcony has been given over to units which not only make access impossible but will be a major source of heat, vibration and noise, as well as obstructing the door or window. My guess would be that somebody changed their mind with regard to the type of air-conditioning or that this is a really bad case of a problem which many architects seem to suffer from; a lack of care for those who will live in their apartments.

In contrast to the above, it is readily apparent how these two buildings are air-conditioned. To many this is a relatively inexpensive way of cooling a building as it is cheaper to buy the units than install a central system. Often they are visible from the street, as in the lower example, and rarely do architects make visual provision for them nor, as in these cases, do they protect them. The point is that air-conditioning units are not considered as design elements of a building. Massed as they are in the lower photograph they are almost attractive and, with a little consideration, might have been located and dealt with so much better…

Here, along a building of a more industrial character, there is no attempt whatsoever to hide the air-conditioning units. Note that although there is shading to one of the windows above the air-conditioners – and I don’t understand why they are not all protect in order to reduce the solar load on the building – they themselves are unprotected from the elements.

This building has a relatively simple form of enclosure for its wall-mounted air-conditioning units. I’m not sure of the material of their construction, nor of the reason for the gap between the base screen and the vertical elements, but at least it is a relatively simplistic response to the need both to protect the unit from solar gain as well as improve their appearance. Of course it would be better if the units themselves were better designed and, even better, if a more integrated design response could be produced. But they are a relatively new item, and it takes years for better solutions to be produced for a problem which goes largely unnoticed. Incidentally, note that the adjacent window has no protection either from the sun or the rain…

A number of buildings were constructed along the Corniche for the Government in the nineteen sixties and seventies. Government House, the earliest of these, was constructed to the east of where Grand Hamad Road now meets the Corniche, and north of the suq al-samak, or fish suq.

To the west of this, and immediately opposite the Diwan al-Amiri, was the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, shown here from the south-west. Its façade mixes square, rounded and flat pointed arches in a very two-dimensional design which treats the south and north façades, but leaves the east and west to reflect only the double-loaded corridor planning of the building. It is only the pointed arches which show any hint of the part of the world in which the building is located though, to be fair, the deeper set windows and some mushrabiya suggest that it was designed for a hot climate. Regrettably, it is not a building which demonstrates anything of the tradition of the country, or even the region.

These three photos are of two government buildings designed and constructed as elements of the new building programme in the nineteen eighties. The first photograph, of the Ministry of the Interior, shows a sensible approach in some ways to the problems presented by design in the climate Qatar enjoys. Two features – the projecting roof and floors, together with the vertical fins – serve to protect the fenestration from much of the sun that might fall on it. The arches serve to pay lip service to traditional Qatar architecture, though the large mass of building and, particularly, the long, unrelieved, roof line do not. This view of it is taken from the Corniche, and from its north face where the oversailing features and fins are not needed; but it was still a reasonable solution to the problem of designing an office block.

The second and third photos are of the extension to the Ministry of Finance building, a design from the famous architect, Kenzo Tange. It also faces north. The design makes no attempt to use any of the national architectural vocabulary but is accomplished in the manner in which it relates to the old Government House to which is is attached. The end of Government House can be seen on the right of the extension. The balcony on the top floor was not seen as a solar protection device but a verandah to take advantage of the views north across the corniche. The glazed screen to the left is protected from solar gain by the main building. The architecture might be seen anywhere and does nothing to promote Islamic design, however I like the way it resolves the problem of adding to what was a historical building – Government House – by allowing the latter to slide under it.

This photograph is here to demonstrate a similar shape of Islamic design to that applied to the walls of the first apartment block, but one which is more associated with the architecture of the other side of the Gulf, Iran. To my view it looks slightly incongruous in Doha although there is a very arguable case to be made for Iranian architecture bearing in mind that commerce in the Gulf states has historically been established by Iranian merchants, and that ordinary domestic architecture owes much to the architecture of the other side of the Gulf.

But its proportions, detailing and finial design do look to me like transplants from abroad. While this is not necessarily a bad idea, its reflection of a source so near to Qatar is to me more confusing than straight copies of inappropriate Western architecture. Whether this is good or bad, I’m not sure, just confused. Looking at it from this point of view I expect it to be covered in turquoise and beige tiling and for the interior to be domed or at least arched. Somehow it seems disappointing to see it with a horizontal soffit though there are many aswaq in Iran and elsewhere with horizontal ceilings, generally because they are constructed of timber. This development, incidentally, replaces part of the old suq to the east of the wadi whose route is now the main road through the old suq, the whole of the suq now being to the east of Grand Hamad avenue which drives thorugh the old development from the south to the corniche at its northern end.

The two blocks seen in the next two photographs are very typical of the kind of design which does nothing to promote Islamic / Arabic architecture in Qatar. The first is of a staff housing block in the south of the city. The use of small openings and large wall surfaces might, on the face of it, appear to be sensible. But I suspect that the walls are constructed as they are everywhere else, of a single skin of concrete block finished internally and externally with a rendered cement skim and painted. These walls pick up solar heat very quickly, radiating a lower wave length into the rooms. When the rooms are small this can be uncomfortable, the wall mounted air-conditioning units being of little use in maintaining comfort near the walls.

This second example is of a kind where little seems to have been done to create a comfortable environment for the occupants. It appears to be an office block on the upper two levels but, apart from the provision of wall-mounted units, there