An urban regeneration-placemaking strategy for the Qatar National Museum and Souq Waqif’s transit-oriented development in Doha, State of Qatar

In the past 20 years, the State of Qatar has undergone rapid urban growth. Doha, the capital city, has capitalised on large-scale urban and infrastructural projects to strengthen and diversify its economy. The transport system, however, has largely relied on private vehicles, resulting in the need for a new public transit system: the Doha Metro. The recent construction of the metro system is opening up new avenues for the urban regeneration of transit towns as compact, liveable and sustainable neighbourhoods. Due to its historic and cultural significance, the Souq Waqif and the Qatar National Museum (QNM) neighbourhoods have been selected as a case study for this paper to explore and define a strategy for placemaking, based on a sustainable transit-oriented development (TOD) model. The research design is structured in four stages: 1) reviewing the literature about TODs and urbanisation in Qatar; 2) collecting oral and visual data from municipal authorities through structured interviews, site visits and site observations; 3) analysing the collected data and identifying the assessment tools to be adopted; and 4) implementing a novel masterplan focusing on public transit systems as a catalyst for sustainable urban transformation and placemaking. The findings contribute to proposing context-driven design strategies to enhance the liveability of the investigated TODs and to extend their application to other potential transit hubs in metropolitan Doha and in the Middle East.