Abstract
The emerging city is very different from the matured city. Due to its rapid growth, it tends to grow as a quilt of various simultaneous developments, with pronounced edges and with different configurational patterns. The resulting urban grid is usually spatially deep and disintegrated, meaning one experiences the city as enclaves, disconnected from each other. Matured cities, on the other hand, are shallow systems, which have grown in a paced and consistent way, by repeating and varying local spatial moves. The resulting experience is more holistic – one goes from area to area without noticing the edge conditions. The same is true of urban centres. While in matured cities, there is a clearer hierarchical distribution of centers and sub-centers (with the historical center usually a primary center), in emerging cities, urban centers are often spatially offset, not hierarchical and illegible in terms of a street-bound experience, and in relation to the wider city. Some of the major implications of such spatial deficiencies, as many studies have shown, are the poor distribution of ground-floor revenue-generating landuse, dependent on through-movement footfall; a disorientating urban experience; and a poor appeal for knowledge economies, dependent on face-to-face interactions and random encounters. Then the question becomes, what can we introduce as measures of good urbanism, in order to make the emerging city more spatially shallow, more legible and economically-laden? We employ space syntax in the investigation of three urban centers in Doha - Msheireb, West Bay (the Central Business District) and Lusail. We find stark differences in how these centers engage globally and act locally, in terms of their spatial affordances and the urban experience they engender. We asked: Why does the Central Business District not feel so central? How is Lusail, at the edge of the city, more easily accessed and more integrated than the Central Business District? Why is Msheireb, with its dense network of small streets, easier to navigate and read? These centers have different grid patterns, but that is not the answer. We find our answers in the measures of intelligibility and permeability and argue that, with particular reference to Doha, these should be engaged as control mechanisms for maturing the urban quilt towards a more shallow configurational pattern, which will allow the hierarchical distribution of the city’s centers and sub-centers, resulting in a better urban experience and a better urban economy. The first observation we made is that between the three centers, the CBD is the least intelligible and least permeable, i.e. it does not feel like a part of an urban whole. A small part of the reason is its peninsular morphology. A big part of the reason is the way that the grid is planned, which gives primacy to edge conditions and second-step hierarchy, rather than first-step one. In other words, because there is less reach from the edges into the interior configuration, it is far less permeable; i.e. it is a deeper system. It is also less intelligible because of its inversely configured road hierarchy. In Msheireb or Lusail, there is far greater permeability, the system is shallower and more consistently hierarchical in its through-movement; with Lusail exhibiting greater intelligibility. The phenomenon is further explained by descriptive statistical analysis of length of lines and connectivity measures, which nuance the measures of system integration and choice of movement, analysed at different depths. The results help explain the differences in spatial performance and support the proposition of the importance of intelligibility and permeability of urban centres in the context of the growing polycentric development in emerging cities.
