Doha's strategy for success

Qatar is booming. Doha, the capital, is in the midst of an unprecedented surge in construction, with dozens of large and small-scale projects, ranging from the grand Khalifa Stadium, to a new airport, to the opulent man-made archipelago called the Pearl of the Gulf.

There's the Four Seasons complex in West Bay, Education City and infrastructure improvements throughout the city. The signs of change are everywhere to see.

Beyond the big-ticket investments, a legion of smaller, independent projects - from museums to shopping centers to housing complexes - now dots the local landscape. It all adds up to a vision of a nation ready to explode with possibilities, with the power of new money and new ideas everywhere in evidence.

Gas investment explosion

What's driving growth and investment in the emirate? First, Qatar may be OPEC's smallest oil producer, but it is set to become the world capital of the gas-to-liquids industry by 2010 and the single largest supplier of liquefied natural gas to the United States, a huge market that is expanding fast. The Gulf state has signed a series of multibillion-dollar deals with energy majors in the last year, and state coffers - already swollen - are now on the brink of overflowing.

The repatriation of Arab wealth following the events of September 11, 2001, and soaring oil prices also go a long way towards explaining the current boom. The success of Qatar Airways and increased tourism - aided by high-profile events like 'La France expose au Qatar,' a major trade show taking place in early December - are also factors behind the country's expansion.

Ultimately, though, the current boom is mostly being driven by belief. That Qatar can become a new economic hub in the region, competing with Dubai for tourism, with Bahrain for financial capital and with Jeddah for corporate investment. Compared to those regional heavyweights, Doha does currently look like a pretty small player.

But size isn't everything - as Dubai, in particular, has already proved. With projects like Education City and the power of Al Jazeera, Qatar is making its mark in the region and across the globe.

The current expansion is not without risks, though. Qatar's mind-boggling construction boom, for instance, could be stalled by factors beyond the country's control. The worldwide shortage of concrete - caused by China's unquenchable demand and exacerbated by regional competition from the UAE and Iran - is driving up costs, as is the shortage of talented manpower.

'Material shortages are not a new problem,' says a Lebanese engineer working on Khalifa Stadium. Unpredictability in the supply of specialty steel products had led the project engineers to build their own on-site steel plant. Eliminating order and delivery time on steel, the engineer said, was the only way that Khalifa Stadium can be completed in time for the Asian Games, which are scheduled for 2006.

The Lebanese engineer had recently given a tour of Khalifa's on-site steel operation to a colleague from Bechtel, which has the contract for the new $2 billion Doha International Airport, with its terminal shaped like waves on the ocean. Bechtel had been told to have the airport online by 2008; they thought on-site steel fabrication might help them to reach that deadline.

Overstretched resources and optimistic completion dates are conditions of possible shortcoming in Doha's rapid growth, a lack shared by many nations with booming economies and ambitious visions for development. Qataris in business and government have a powerful sense of what they would like Doha to become, but it is not clear that they have a comprehensive master plan to help guide them to the realization of that vision.

In the absence of guiding principles, a hundred projects are springing forth in various parts of the city, often without sufficient roadwork to service them or to connect them to one another. Meanwhile, power and water services are inconsistent in the city's newer neighborhoods.

Saad al-Muhateneddi, director of facilities and project planning for the Qatar Foundation, says that when Weill-Cornell Medical College built a new teaching hospital in New York, the planning process alone - studies, drawings, public meetings - took more than 25 years. When the Qatar Foundation asked Weill-Cornell to design a research hospital for Education City, they were told the whole project, including planning and construction, had to be completed in just two or three years.

No time for planning

'We don't have time for plans,' says al-Muhateneddi. But Education City, in fact, has one: al-Muhateneddi was standing in front of it, listing in detail its facilities and the community-driven design process he envisioned for each of its components, as he described the state of shock precipitated by Education City's rigorous construction schedules among the foundation's Western partner institutions.

Some of that urgency is dictated by a sense that Qatar's tremendous energy wealth can't last forever. Some is due to a fear that Qatar has entered too late into the race with the UAE to attract tourism and a diversity of businesses and investment. 'We must build now,' al-Muhateneddi says. 'That's what everyone thinks.'

The Doha government did commission a master plan for growth, developed by the US-based consultants the Berger Group. Assuming that by 2020 up to 90 percent of Qatar's population will live in Doha - and folding in the government's ambitious schemes to promote tourism and to use the Asian Games as a catalyst for development - the Berger Group developed a system of land-use recommendations to guide that development.

The Berger Group also recommended the creation of a planning council to interpret and enforce the country's land-use policies and zoning laws.
One Doha-based engineer says that several of the large-scale projects - Pearl of the Gulf, for example, and the West Bay's diplomatic area - are informed by smart planning. But the smaller projects are not governed by a consistent code, he says, nor are they joined to one another by a coherent model for what the city ought to look like in 10, 20 or 50 years.

Add to that free-for-all a problem with rampant speculation and overbuilding in the luxury-end housing market and you have a recipe for sprawl. A local newspaper editor speculated that, for now, the government was happy to have unabated, unplanned development. It reinforced the image of a vibrant, booming Qatar, full of fast-rising possibility.

At a roundtable discussion hosted by Texas A&M University just before Ramadan, a dozen petroleum company executives talked about the most urgent needs of industry and government, and how the university might bring its expertise to bear. A surprising number of those invited said that a lack of strategic planning was the gravest danger to Qatar's energy industry.

The country's emir made a tremendously successful gamble just over a decade ago, borrowing massively and investing that wealth in the country's gas and oil fields, as well as in attendant processing plants. That gamble, and the subsequent rise in gas and oil prices, made Qatar rich.

But, said one French oil executive, those investments are in danger of being neutralized by insufficient infrastructure to support the new facilities. They can get the oil and gas from the ground, but can they get it from the field to the refinery?

That's just one of many unanswered questions about the future of this booming Gulf state. Doubts about tomorrow clearly must be addressed today: it's clear that long-term fiscal uncertainty or a lack of clarity in state planning could prove extremely costly.

For now, though, the future looks extraordinarily bright. For while Qatar's economy may be driven by its energy wealth, it is the country's fresh thinking - the sheer force of new ideas - that is powering it towards bold new horizons.