Placemaking in Hot and Arid Cities: Climate Resilience Lessons From Doha

By Ethan Kent , Executive Director, PlacemakingX

Some reflections from my visit to Doha, Qatar, learning from and growing the local placemaking conversation and capacity. Was thrilled to work with the new local placemaking network called Amaken Qatar, and the Arab's region's Amaken Placemaking network, of PlacemakingX. Our host Earthna , a program of the Qatar Foundation , is facilitating a global learning network for hot and arid cities.

When temperate weather and water are rare, we need to focus all the more on shaping our cities around resilient public spaces of plentiful purpose. With more cities becoming hot and arid, and a greater number of people living in them, how we ensure these cities are shaped sustainably is of increasing importance. In settlements inherently less habitable to humans, placemaking is all the more needed to make them livable, to focus efficient development around, and to further guide and grow their sometimes contested identities.

By focusing on placemaking, Doha can leverage its impressive urban assets for greater inclusion, sustainability, and resilience. In recent decades, the city has grown through quality public realm infrastructure and design. Doha can now lead the way for cities globally by connecting and leveraging its infrastructure and diverse population through placemaking. By continuing to invest in inclusive public spaces for local lovability, Doha can achieve livability more affordably, more quickly, and more authentically.

Doha has set a new standard for quality urbanization through impressive infrastructure and design.

By focusing on placemaking, Doha can leverage its impressive urban assets for greater inclusion, sustainability and innovation.

Some strategies for Doha, and all hot and arid cities, to go to the next level through placemaking:

Placemaking for Comfortable and Attractive Destinations

Placemaking is about preserving and giving purpose and meaning to space. Arid cities often have lots of space and little sense of place. Hot cities also need to work a bit harder to make comfortable human environments for people who choose to or need to live there. Shade, greening, cooling towers, and contextual materials can help make the environment more bearable. Through placemaking it is perhaps even more important to make the public environment worth bearing. While not everywhere needs to be a place people want to be, in less habitable cities we need to concentrate attractive places, and such defined destinations can be even bigger draws amongst what we refer to as “place deserts.”

Attracting Compact Land Use Though Place-Led Development

Most arid cities have spread out in the flat desert for lack of a reason to be closer together. Placemaking can give cities a reason, and natural incentive, to live more densely, without forcing people to live in conditions that may have driven them from temperate cities with even higher population pressures. Placemaking is a natural antidote to sprawl, and a catalyst to creating 15-minute cities more organically, while often making regulation less necessary.

Attaching People to Place through Local Engagement and Identity

As many arid cities have been developed more recently, how they define and grow the identity of their place can be of great impact. In arid regions that have emerged focusing on livability, and accommodating people, they next often need to focus on rooting people to their places, and engage them in shaping the identity and relationships in a place to increase their place attachment. Studies show higher place attachment increases economic growth and also logically increases long-term investment contributing to a place identity.

A Proposed Paradigm Shift for Hot and Arid Cities

• From placeless sprawl to abundant places
• From centering architectural objects to centering human activity
• From passive consumption to active creativity and participation
• From inhumane spaces to human scaled places
• From leading development with private space to leading with public space
• From planning for cars and traffic to planning for people and place

Qatar is demonstrating that countries with hot and arid environments are able to create thriving societies in urban environments, even when natural resources are scarce. Regardless of climate, Doha’s development is proving that it is possible for all cities to make their urbanization more sustainable, innovative, and inclusive.?

We look forward to continuing to learn from and support Amaken Doha and the Qatar Foundation as a global innovation hub for cities learning about placemaking in hot and arid cities.

The global placemaking movement is increasingly organizing around cross-cutting agenda networks, building on and supporting the more than thirty regional(like Amaken Placemaking ) and national placemaking networks(like #AmakenQatar).

All images by the author.