Urban Planning

Modernist Urban Inversion

The Case of Doha

“In the second half of the twentieth century, as the car and the modern highway took a grip on urban design, city form underwent perhaps its most dramatic transformation in thousands of years. The cataclysm of Modernism was not just about comprehensive redevelopment and the introduction of a new kind of infrastructure — that had happened before, when the railways entered the Victorian city. What modern road planning did was to alter the fundamental relationship between routes and buildings. It effectively turned cities inside out and back to front”

– Stephen Marshall (2005) Street Patterns, London, New York: Spon Press.

Prior to the automobile, streets served the functions of route, building frontage and public space. Modern road planning, as argued by Marshall (2005), freed them from the street grid, enabling them to follow their own growth patterns. This calculated split of the roles of the street was nothing short of a revolution in urban design. With places and edges now liberated from movement, roads began to drive the configuration of settlements, a direct inverse of the need-based emergence of streets, seen in traditional road planning.

Major streets, therefore, began to be defined purely on the basis of the volume of traffic they serve and the most significant public places began moving inwards into neighbourhoods owing to lack of safety due to the high-speed movement of vehicles. With the route and place now divorced, buildings chose to remain attached to places and turned their backs on the streets, literally inverting the relationship between buildings and routes, turning the city, inside-out and back to front (Marshall, 2005).

This inverse relationship is deeply evident in the planning of emerging cities such as Doha, Qatar. Doha, which witnessed rapid urbanisation at the same time as the birth of modernist road planning, adopted this defective template. What was once an integrated community, with life and movement united in public places, is today a jigsaw of individual pieces cut by unfriendly highways, exactly as Marshall implied when he illustrated the deconstruction of the street (2005,p.7). Even today, after it has been proved definitively that modern road planning is responsible for the dis-urbanisation of places, it continues to drive the urban form of Doha. This research will hence, use Doha as a case study to illustrate the effect of modern road planning on the relationship between the routes and buildings in the context of public place.

Urban development review
‘Traditionally the main streets, in any city, were places of meeting, trading, hawking, busking, bear-baiting, public speaking and pillorying in addition to serving as thorough passage’ (Marshall, 2005,p.3). This relationship between the busiest streets and the most important urban places was not only broken, but also reversed at the onset of modernism, with streets being movement corridors for high-speed vehicles and urban places moving into quiet neighbourhoods. (Ibid.)

Alker Tripp’s idea of turning the existing arterial streets into motor carriageways (Marshall, 2005) eventually materialised in the city-form post-automobile. Tripp was not alone in his view of segregating the street and its people, thereby its life. Le Corbusier also believed that the multi-dimensional street was chaotic and invoked the need for liberating the street from the ‘constriction of its enclosing walls’ (Mumford, 2000, p.56). His opposition to the ‘corridor street, a channel for vehicle and pedestrians between walls of masonry’ (Dunnet,2000, p.78), led to the design of the radiant city with pedestrian movement freed from vehicular traffic and buildings liberated from the street, side alleys and the retail they hold split and ‘dispersed over great distances’ which would eventually be the ‘death of the street’ (Richards, 2007, p.51).

Corbusier’s short-sighted vision did not foresee the erosion of the city which Jacobs saw. Over-dependence on the automobile, and the subsequent widening of roads to increase vehicular capacity would eventually turn the city into a web of expressways, as seen in the case of Los Angeles, Detroit, Denver or Houston. This ‘positive feedback loop’ (Jacobs, 2000, p.349) where more cars lead to wider roads, which lead to more cars, ‘would eventually erode the city, gradually subtracting reasons for using the eroded district, making it less lively, less convenient, less compact and less safe’ (ibid, p.353)As Marshall goes on to say in his book ‘modernism filleted the city, stripping its spine and ribs from the urban flesh’ (2005, p.6), making it a disurban place with buildings, movement and public space parting ways from each other.

It is difficult not to see the similarities between the cities mentioned above, which expanded rapidly in the 60’s, and Doha today. Taking on board this template of excessive highways, cutting the city into disconnected pieces, severing its inherent urban grain, Doha continues to perpetuate the worst of modernist planning. Dispersed landuses, poorly connected by public transportation have led to increased car-dependency, closely emulating this failed model of planning from the sixties.

From an organically grown settlement in the pre-oil era, with winding streets and agglutinated houses forming an introverted community (fareej), Doha grew uncontrollably with the adoption of modernist road planning, leading to a chain reaction starting with:

1. The rapid outward growth of the city as enabled by the automobile. Which led to a positive feedback loop (Jacobs, 2000) of road widening, as a result of the booming suburban population.
2. High speed vehicular movement, and its associated noise and light pollution, led to buildings moving away from the street and eventually facing away from it.
3. This led to the lack of street edge, driving activity into the comfort of big-box malls.

The dis-urbanisation of Doha can be understood as consequences of modern road planning on the three functions of the street, as described by Marshall (2005) — Route, Building Frontage, Public Place.

Route
The advent of the automobile led to shorter commuting times, enabling rapid outward sprawl of the city (Figure 1). An increasing percentage of the population relocated outside the centre and could be reached only by vehicles.

Figure 1: Urban growth of Doha as seen from 1947,1966,1988 to 2008 (Source: Qatar National Development Framework)

The lack of mixed-use planning led to a constant need to commute to and from the centre which led to a positive feedback loop (Jacobs, 2000), as seen in Figure 2. The direct effect of this loop was the gradual encroachment of the vehicular right of way into the pedestrian right of way within the street, eventually diminishing it to an unusable edge, forcing people who were willing to walk, into vehicles as well. This led to a secondary loop, which reinforces the original one.

Figure 2: Primary positive feedback loop (left) and secondary positive feedback loop (right)

The slow erosion of the street, where ownership of right of way was transferred from people to automobiles, eventually led to streets serving the sole function of vehicle expressways. With an ever-increasing demand for wider roads, the modern street gradually began to take up a significant share of the urban fabric (Figure 3), marginalising the pedestrian and splitting the neighbourhoods it once held together.

Figure 3: Change in the width of Al Matar Street from 1959 to 2017
(Source: Historical underlays sourced from Ministry of Municipalities & Urban Planning)

Building Frontage
Increased high speed vehicular movement on the modern road made the edges unsafe for people. This, combined with the roar of automobiles and the glare of streetlights, made the street undesirable for buildings to overlook. The onset of air conditioning technology in the region, enabled buildings to adopt detached typologies as opposed to the attached typology that existed pre-automobile, freeing them from the malice that the road had become.

Detached buildings moved away from the street, breaking its edge. With speeds on roads constantly escalating, the streets began to be unsafe for kids to play and pedestrians to walk. Additionally, the modern streets did little to keep out strangers who now had access to neighbourhoods, they wouldn’t have had if the traditional staggering sikkas had been retained. To protect the integrity of neighbourhoods, buildings eventually turned away (Figures 4 & 5) thereby turning the street back to front (Marshall, 2005).

Turning the buildings away from the main street also entailed the need for secondary and tertiary streets to service same volume of built up area. This contributed to an overall increase in area taken up by roads and thereby, reinforcing car-dominance, as seen in Figures 4& 5.

Figure 4: Traditional buildings (built in 1950s) facing the sikka (passage route) in Mushaireb, Doha (Source: Caitlin Sewell) vs modern buildings with backs facing the street, Dafna, Doha, 2017. (Source: Author)

Figure 5: Buildings (with entrances indicated by black dots) facing the street in Doha al Jadeeda, 1971 (left) vs. Buildings facing away from the main street in Duhail, 2017 (right)

Figure 6: The ratio of built up area to road area from 1971 to 2017 shows that there is almost twice as much road area servicing the same volume of built up area now than there was in 1971.

Public Place
Streets, designed as vehicle arteries marginalised all but the car user. With majority of users, now arriving by car, the street edge is treated as secondary with no clear definition of non-vehicular zones. Vast car parking in front of buildings, combined with the lack of a street wall, leaves the street unshaded for most of the day, leading to harsh conditions for pedestrians; thereby, dissimilating what once served as a public place. Parked vehicles and multiple level changes make active frontage on the street difficult to access, driving it into the big box malls and hence, inverting the relationship between the street and its edge and shifting public place from the street to malls.

The analysis of historic and modern public places as seen below (Figure 7) illustrates an inversion in the relationship between public place and the street. While the major route and public space were united in the Souq (market) in 1947, in 2017, on the other hand, the biggest mall in Qatar and therefore, the biggest public place of today, is not only secluded from the street but also blocked off by it.

Figure 7: Diagram of Souq in 1947 vs Doha Festival City Mall in 2017 with circles of the same diameter indicating the extent of influence of public place (as inspired by Marshall, 2005). Source: (Historical underlay obtained from Ministry of Municipalities & Urban Planning, Qatar)

This case study of the influence of modern road planning on the dissolution of the traditional street has been effective in proving that it was in fact antisocial urbanism that was promoted by the modernist movement. The rapid thoughtless transformation of the city into a web of expressways left neighbourhoods and communities tangled in their midst, unable to move freely.

Marshall’s opinion that that modern road planning inverted the relationship between the routes and buildings in the second half of the twentieth century not only holds true but can be seen continuing to be perpetrated in the road planning of emerging cities, today. The street, which was once a single spatial entity, dispersed into multiple disconnected fractions. The functions of movement, public place and building frontage, which were once held together by the street, not only split from it, but turned their backs on it leaving the street to be placeless, people-less corridors, solely, for the movement of cars.

References
Dunnet, J. 2000, Le Corbusier and the city without streets, in Deckker, T. (ed.) The Modern City Revisited. Spon Press, LondonHiller, B. 2007 {Original,1996},

Space is the machine, Space Syntax, London

Jacobs, J. 1992 {Original 1961}, The death and life of American cities, Random House, New York

Marshall, S. 2005, Streets & Patterns, Spon Press, London

Ministry of Municipality & Urban Planning 2008, Qatar National Development Framework, Ministry of Municipality & Urban Planning, Doha

Mumford, Eric P. 2000, The CIAM discourse on urbanism, 1928–1960. MIT Press, London,

Richards, S. 2007, The Antisocial Urbanism of Le Corbusier, Common Knowledge, 2007, 13 (1), pp. 50–66e