Abstract
Recent efforts to formulate strategies that will turn Qatar's capital city into a global hub have given rise to a debate about the morphological and functional composition of one of Doha's most prominent areas - West Bay. At the end of the 20th century West Bay, also known as Diplomatic Quarter, was chosen by public initiatives to become the new Central Business District of Doha. Today, the appeal of West Bay as a business hub is contested by other emerging urban centres – such as the highly integrated Al Sadd area, which has attracted a wide range of advanced producer service sectors. It is therefore the objective of this paper to investigate the spatial configuration of Doha's West Bay, which arguably lays the foundations for the socio-economic interdependencies necessary for its vitality and sustenance. In order to quantify its intrinsic urban complexities, Bill Hillier's space syntax methodology is applied, which elucidates, in various scales, global and local grid conditions, and thus can be used for assessments regarding the distribution of land use patterns and infrastructural networks.
Highlights
The West Bay has been envisioned as a Central Business District (CBD), which puts an expectation on its spatial and functional parameters
The CBD of the digital era depends on the presence of solid ‘social infrastructure’ that allows for the exchange of tacit knowledge, through encounter and interactions, whose degree of connectivity is directly related to the success of CBD’s as strategic economic centres (Sassen, 2001, p.122)
In order to contextualize Doha’s Central Business District and to understand the patterns of urbanisation that led to its existence, the following offers a historical overview of the growth and development of the city
Summary
The West Bay has been envisioned as a Central Business District (CBD), which puts an expectation on its spatial and functional parameters. The CBD of the digital era depends on the presence of solid ‘social infrastructure’ that allows for the exchange of tacit knowledge, through encounter and interactions, whose degree of connectivity is directly related to the success of CBD’s as strategic economic centres (Sassen, 2001, p.122) This new logic of globally competitive, economically viable CBD’s with integrated social dimension has come to bear spatially on such developments as La Defense in Paris, whose density, accessibility and provision of socio-economic services for its residents rivals its counterparts in London and Barcelona (Birck, 2008).
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