The sustainable urban edge design toolkit for coastal cities, the case of Doha, Qatar

Abstract

The city of Doha is undergoing rapid development in various sectors. Mega design projects and developments can be found scattered all over the city. However, when it comes to the overall urban fabric and masterplan of Doha, there is no clear vision or guidelines that are intended to be followed concerning the city’s urban and coastal edge design. The coastal city edges hold great opportunity both socially and environmentally when tackling problems facing the urban fabric. The edged have limitless possibilities of mitigating climate, environmental and urban problems. In Doha, QNDF 2032 introduced the concept of the greenbelt and the coastal management of the city, however, there are no clear set of tools, guidelines or design specifications that could be followed for the implementation of these concepts. The thesis focuses on designing the toolkit required to fill the gaps of QNDF through the methodological approach defined as: (1) data collection, (2) filtering and analysis and (3) validation to assist in achieving the QNV 2030 following QNDF 2032. The outcome is a fully developed draft of the sustainable urban edge design toolkit for coastal cities that included a total of 47 design elements in total, along with a validation on the case of Doha which achieved 68% of the design elements. Future work and limitation are also explored