DOHA // A groundswell of international pressure has prodded the Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to action. Negotiations with the Houthi rebels, with whom his government has been warring for nearly a year, are said to be nearing a breakthrough. And after “open war” was declared on al Qa’eda last week, air strikes on militant strongholds in the north-east mountains reportedly killed Qasim Raymi, a top al Qa’eda commander.
It's only the beginning.
“This is a long-term, multifaceted security challenge for the international community but also for the Gulf region,” said Steven Wright, an assistant professor of international affairs at Qatar University. He is working on a research paper about Yemeni instability, the Gulf and the response of the international community.
Since Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was accused of trying to set off a bomb while his Christmas Day flight from Amsterdam neared Detroit, grave concerns about the security situation in Yemen, where the plot was allegedly hatched, have been expressed by international media outlets, security analysts and world leaders.
“You are seeing an increased recognition, from the international community and the GCC, that Yemen is potentially the biggest security challenge in the region,” Mr Wright said.
Most assessments suggest that Yemen – facing two insurgencies, deeply rooted extremism, dwindling supplies of water and oil and a dreadful economy, among other difficulties – is on the brink of collapse.
For Gulf countries, the first danger comes from Yemen’s porous borders, as extremists operating within Yemen could move into Oman and Saudi Arabia and cause problems. The second, greater danger concerns energy security – piracy and terrorist attacks on tankers and shipping lanes in the Gulf.
“This is a risk to Gulf countries’ main economic lifelines,” Mr Wright said. Last week a statement from al Qa’eda in Yemen urged “the citizens of the Arabian Peninsula to face the Crusader’s campaign and their agents … by attacking military bases, embassies and intelligence, and the existing fleets in the waters of the Arabian peninsula and the surrounding territory”.
Still, Mr Wright said, the danger to embassies, major corporations and other foreign interests within Gulf countries is minimal. “The GCC countries have very effective internal security mechanisms.”
Another Gulf analyst disagreed. “Of course, the threat is always there,” said Riad Kahwaji, director of the Dubai-based Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis. “Al Qa’eda has made that clear – its threat to Gulf countries and western assets here is long-standing.”
Less clear is how the region and the international community should handle the problem of Yemen. To prevent internal attacks, Mr Khawaji advised Gulf nations to improve their intelligence gathering and co-operation and enhance border control and security systems.
Even more vital is attacking the problem at its roots. “Gulf countries need to be using all their political strength to pressure the Yemeni government to be more engaging politically, with political reforms and national dialogue with all the parties in order to certify national unity,” Mr Kahwaji said.
GCC countries have in recent years provided tens of millions of dollars in aid to Yemen.
After the failed attack in Detroit, the United States doubled its counterterrorism aid, to $140m per year. Yet it has been providing counter-terror assistance to Yemen since the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, to little effect. In 2006, international donors pledged nearly $5bn to turn Yemen around, but a lack of coordination has undermined those efforts.
Mr Wright said he was optimistic about an upcoming aid conference on Yemen scheduled for the end of this month in London. “That’s where the solutions are going to be discussed and fleshed out.”
-----
originally appeared in The National, www.thenational.ae
1.18.2010
1.17.2010
Qatar's cultural ambitions: take one
Doha // Khalifa al Maraikhi shoulders a heavy burden.
“Every nation has a culture,” said the director of Aqaribabzah, the first Qatari feature film. “As an artist, filmmaker or musician, it’s important to reflect this culture into your art.”
As Doha steps into the spotlight as the Arab Capital of Culture for 2010 – an Arab League and UN designation – its budding reputation as a cultural centre is at stake.
Previous recipients of the honour, including Damascus, Jerusalem and Algiers, have found the designation both opportunity and test for their nascent arts scenes.
In Qatar, dozens of artists, artisans and government officials have already prepared more than a hundred events, including music recitals, heritage festivals, calligraphy contests and art exhibits.
Mr al Maraikhi's Aqaribabzah ("Clockwise" in Arabic) might be the bellwether. Financed, produced and directed by Qataris, it represents the filmmaking ambitions of a country of some 250,000 people. It also highlights one of Qatar’s few native art forms.
The film, set in the 1930s, is based on the Gulf legend of three men who make a Faustian bargain with a djinn in exchange for the ability to become master fijiri singers. Although there are several different genres, fijiri music generally comprises a lead singer accompanied by a clapping, drum-playing chorus. The form originated more than a century ago among pearl divers of Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar, and remains popular in the region.
At the same time, Aqaribabzah underscores Qatar’s cultural shortcomings. Five years ago, Mr al Maraikhi and a friend wrote a script based on the folk tale and passed the story on to a few acquaintances.
But with no film production studios in Qatar, nothing came of it until last January, when the country received the cultural capital honour.
Within weeks, the ministry of culture, arts and heritage approved the film with a 10 million rial (Dh10.1m) budget. “In the US and Europe there are production companies that invest in films,” said Mr al Maraikhi, 50. “Here we don’t have those – we need the government to help us.”
The film’s composer is Howard Shore, an American who scored the Martin Scorsese film The Aviator. The cinematographer, assistant director and crew are Bollywood veterans flown in from India. The lead actress, Maisa Magribi, is from Morocco.
The rest of the cast and crew are Qatari, but with little experience.
On the last day of shooting a few weeks ago, the director sidled up to his thobe-wearing leads after an unsatisfactory take. Using words and gestures, he explained his vision for the scene, returned to his chair behind a stack of monitors and shouted, “Action!”.
The room froze – except for the actors, whose faces expressed great fear as they cautiously descended into a cave marked by grotesque wall paintings.
“I’m getting tired of telling actors what to do,” said Mr al Maraikhi, whose Qatari cast has only worked on stage or on TV serials. “Film acting is different, every movement, every expression is important; we’ve had to teach them that. They started out a bit nervous, now they’re doing all right.”
Initially scheduled to hit theatres in March, Aqaribabzah’s release was pushed back to May, following post-production in Bangkok. The delay is due, in part, to Qatar’s lack of facilities.
“Everybody is talking about a film industry, but this requires studios, screenwriters, experienced actors, filmmakers and a market,” said Mr al Maraikhi, who studied filmmaking in Los Angeles before returning to Qatar in the 1990s to make short films and music videos. “We just don’t have film production experience here. What we have is maybe the beginning of a film movement.”
That movement would include the Doha Tribeca Film Festival, held here last November. As well as attracting large crowds, it may also have uncovered some young filmmaking talent.
That same week, the Qatari media group Alnoor Holdings launched a US$200 million (Dh740m) film fund that plans to partner as yet unnamed Hollywood players to make a dozen feature films over five years, starting with a $100m film about the life of Prophet Mohammed.
Although not widely known, Qatar has a budding music, art and poetry scene too, which the government has been trying to promote.
In poetry, Ali al Muri, a Qatari, has in recent weeks proved to be one of the more entertaining and successful contestants on the current season of the reality TV show, Million’s Poet.
A recent religious and cultural festival organised by the Fanar Islamic Centre included well-attended poetry recitals, along with calligraphy and other exhibitions.
In terms of music, the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra regularly performs classical and operatic pieces, and presented a programme of eight Puccini arias this past week. During Qatar’s National Day celebrations last month, dozens of fijiri musicians and singers performed at malls and parks across Doha. And the Qatar Foundation is set to open the Qatar Music Academy in September. Open to all nationalities, it will focus on Arab music, highlighting links to American jazz and European composition.
Regular art shows attract nationals and expats to small, chic galleries in Souq Waqif, a popular downtown Doha quarter remade into a traditional souq. In March, Sotheby’s opened a Doha office – its first in the Gulf. And before moving on to cities including Abu Dhabi, Amman, New York, Paris and Berlin, the Art Wanson Gallery last month launched the world tour of its exhibition Passion for Art at Doha’s Grand Hyatt Hotel.
“Doha is fast becoming a hub of art and culture and we want to be a part of the process,” said Mercedes Duerinckx, who owns the gallery, based in Marbella, Spain.
But it is the much-praised Museum of Islamic Art, which offers one of the region’s most dynamic collections of art and artifacts, that made Qatar’s name in international arts. The museum opened in January 2009 and is planning a host of exhibits and screenings in conjunction with the cultural capital title.
Qatari leaders acknowledge that Doha’s art scene does not build on tradition. Rather they intend to build a new foundation for art in the Qatari capital. “We are not buying culture, we are investing in culture,” said Abdullah Najjar, the chief executive of the Qatar Museums Authority. “It is something that will be seen by future generations as an important investment.”
Aqaribabzah is among the most high-profile of those investments.
“I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time,” said Salah Darwish, one of the film’s leading stars.
The 57-year-old Qatari studied drama in Cairo and earned acting awards in Damascus but stopped performing 26 years ago because of a dearth of good roles. “There were no interesting stories, no good parts,” he said. “But this film could change everything.”
Mr al Maraikhi hopes to take Aqaribabzah to international festivals, and to make more movies in the future. But first he is looking to the film’s premiere, as part of Doha’s year as the Arab Capital of Culture.
“It’s a big deal, because you’ll have many people, many countries seeing what Qatar is doing at the moment,” he said. “We don’t expect to make millions out of this film, but we hope that people enjoy it.”
--------
originally published 15 Jan, 2010, in The National:
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100115/FOREIGN/701149898/1135
“Every nation has a culture,” said the director of Aqaribabzah, the first Qatari feature film. “As an artist, filmmaker or musician, it’s important to reflect this culture into your art.”
As Doha steps into the spotlight as the Arab Capital of Culture for 2010 – an Arab League and UN designation – its budding reputation as a cultural centre is at stake.
Previous recipients of the honour, including Damascus, Jerusalem and Algiers, have found the designation both opportunity and test for their nascent arts scenes.
In Qatar, dozens of artists, artisans and government officials have already prepared more than a hundred events, including music recitals, heritage festivals, calligraphy contests and art exhibits.
Mr al Maraikhi's Aqaribabzah ("Clockwise" in Arabic) might be the bellwether. Financed, produced and directed by Qataris, it represents the filmmaking ambitions of a country of some 250,000 people. It also highlights one of Qatar’s few native art forms.
The film, set in the 1930s, is based on the Gulf legend of three men who make a Faustian bargain with a djinn in exchange for the ability to become master fijiri singers. Although there are several different genres, fijiri music generally comprises a lead singer accompanied by a clapping, drum-playing chorus. The form originated more than a century ago among pearl divers of Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar, and remains popular in the region.
At the same time, Aqaribabzah underscores Qatar’s cultural shortcomings. Five years ago, Mr al Maraikhi and a friend wrote a script based on the folk tale and passed the story on to a few acquaintances.
But with no film production studios in Qatar, nothing came of it until last January, when the country received the cultural capital honour.
Within weeks, the ministry of culture, arts and heritage approved the film with a 10 million rial (Dh10.1m) budget. “In the US and Europe there are production companies that invest in films,” said Mr al Maraikhi, 50. “Here we don’t have those – we need the government to help us.”
The film’s composer is Howard Shore, an American who scored the Martin Scorsese film The Aviator. The cinematographer, assistant director and crew are Bollywood veterans flown in from India. The lead actress, Maisa Magribi, is from Morocco.
The rest of the cast and crew are Qatari, but with little experience.
On the last day of shooting a few weeks ago, the director sidled up to his thobe-wearing leads after an unsatisfactory take. Using words and gestures, he explained his vision for the scene, returned to his chair behind a stack of monitors and shouted, “Action!”.
The room froze – except for the actors, whose faces expressed great fear as they cautiously descended into a cave marked by grotesque wall paintings.
“I’m getting tired of telling actors what to do,” said Mr al Maraikhi, whose Qatari cast has only worked on stage or on TV serials. “Film acting is different, every movement, every expression is important; we’ve had to teach them that. They started out a bit nervous, now they’re doing all right.”
Initially scheduled to hit theatres in March, Aqaribabzah’s release was pushed back to May, following post-production in Bangkok. The delay is due, in part, to Qatar’s lack of facilities.
“Everybody is talking about a film industry, but this requires studios, screenwriters, experienced actors, filmmakers and a market,” said Mr al Maraikhi, who studied filmmaking in Los Angeles before returning to Qatar in the 1990s to make short films and music videos. “We just don’t have film production experience here. What we have is maybe the beginning of a film movement.”
That movement would include the Doha Tribeca Film Festival, held here last November. As well as attracting large crowds, it may also have uncovered some young filmmaking talent.
That same week, the Qatari media group Alnoor Holdings launched a US$200 million (Dh740m) film fund that plans to partner as yet unnamed Hollywood players to make a dozen feature films over five years, starting with a $100m film about the life of Prophet Mohammed.
Although not widely known, Qatar has a budding music, art and poetry scene too, which the government has been trying to promote.
In poetry, Ali al Muri, a Qatari, has in recent weeks proved to be one of the more entertaining and successful contestants on the current season of the reality TV show, Million’s Poet.
A recent religious and cultural festival organised by the Fanar Islamic Centre included well-attended poetry recitals, along with calligraphy and other exhibitions.
In terms of music, the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra regularly performs classical and operatic pieces, and presented a programme of eight Puccini arias this past week. During Qatar’s National Day celebrations last month, dozens of fijiri musicians and singers performed at malls and parks across Doha. And the Qatar Foundation is set to open the Qatar Music Academy in September. Open to all nationalities, it will focus on Arab music, highlighting links to American jazz and European composition.
Regular art shows attract nationals and expats to small, chic galleries in Souq Waqif, a popular downtown Doha quarter remade into a traditional souq. In March, Sotheby’s opened a Doha office – its first in the Gulf. And before moving on to cities including Abu Dhabi, Amman, New York, Paris and Berlin, the Art Wanson Gallery last month launched the world tour of its exhibition Passion for Art at Doha’s Grand Hyatt Hotel.
“Doha is fast becoming a hub of art and culture and we want to be a part of the process,” said Mercedes Duerinckx, who owns the gallery, based in Marbella, Spain.
But it is the much-praised Museum of Islamic Art, which offers one of the region’s most dynamic collections of art and artifacts, that made Qatar’s name in international arts. The museum opened in January 2009 and is planning a host of exhibits and screenings in conjunction with the cultural capital title.
Qatari leaders acknowledge that Doha’s art scene does not build on tradition. Rather they intend to build a new foundation for art in the Qatari capital. “We are not buying culture, we are investing in culture,” said Abdullah Najjar, the chief executive of the Qatar Museums Authority. “It is something that will be seen by future generations as an important investment.”
Aqaribabzah is among the most high-profile of those investments.
“I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time,” said Salah Darwish, one of the film’s leading stars.
The 57-year-old Qatari studied drama in Cairo and earned acting awards in Damascus but stopped performing 26 years ago because of a dearth of good roles. “There were no interesting stories, no good parts,” he said. “But this film could change everything.”
Mr al Maraikhi hopes to take Aqaribabzah to international festivals, and to make more movies in the future. But first he is looking to the film’s premiere, as part of Doha’s year as the Arab Capital of Culture.
“It’s a big deal, because you’ll have many people, many countries seeing what Qatar is doing at the moment,” he said. “We don’t expect to make millions out of this film, but we hope that people enjoy it.”
--------
originally published 15 Jan, 2010, in The National:
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100115/FOREIGN/701149898/1135
Is the Karzai government worth Western blood and treasure?
Doha// “The Bush administration is guilty of a dereliction of duty,” said Lawrence Korb, assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan Administration, referring to the ongoing war in Afghanistan.
“It was criminal, what the United States did,” Korb explained. “A lot of the problems we're seeing today are a result of the fact that we went in there, created a vacuum and then walked away...President Bush promised a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan, and then never followed up.”
A full house packed the Education City studio of the BBC's Doha Debates this week as an accomplished panel took up the motion: “This House does not believe that this Afghan government is worth fighting for.” More than eight years after the US-led invasion, international forces are bogged down in guerrilla warfare with a resurgent Taliban while the President Hamid Karzai-led government is charged with election fraud, corruption and ineffectiveness.
Assisted by their host, BBC presenter Tim Sebastian, the panelists engaged in verbal battle on the legitimacy of the Karzai government, the need for international forces and the components of democracy, before a slim majority of the audience – 51 percent to 49 percent – voted to carry the motion.
“Afghanistan never wanted to be host for long to foreign troops – this is the history of Afghanistan, this is our nature,” said Shukria Barakzai, Mr Korb's co-panelist and a member of the Afghan parliament.
She was responding to a question from the audience about why the Afghan people do not protest against the continued presence of US-led forces. “But right now, we are a little baby,” she said, “and until we can stand on our own feet, we need it.”
Mr Korb pointed to the example of Iraq, where US forces had begun pulling out and would be out completely by the end of next year. “I'm very happy that President Obama, in announcing a troop increase in Afghanistan, also talked about a deadline,” he said. “The message is that this government has to clean up its act.”
Mirwais Yasini, deputy speaker of the Lower House of the Afghan parliament who briefly ran for Afghan president last year, did not see that happening anytime soon. “There is no security, there is corruption, there's no reconciliation, there are no services for Afghan citizens,” he said. “Democracy is just a slogan...we are establishing a very dirty precedent.”
Yasini's co-panelist, former US Ambassador Peter Galbraith, was fired last year from his post as a United Nations envoy to Afghanistan for accusing his boss of concealing election fraud. He said the government could not provide the security, rule of law and services necessary to support the US-led war.
“A government that is ineffective and in office by fraud cannot win the support of the population,” said Mr Galbraith. “It cannot do what it needs to make a counter-insurgency strategy work.”
Standing up from his seat in the audience, the Afghan Ambassador to Qatar, Wali Monawar, asked what sort of alternatives Mr Galbraith might offer to the current government. Mr Galbraith suggested a new election or a power-sharing political system.
Mr Sebastian pressed the point. “There is no other government,” he said. “This is the Afghan government, however ineffective or corrupt, however it fails to meet your expectations.”
Mr Galbraith pointed to the one million phoney votes estimated by European Union monitors. “Tim,” he said, “you cannot say that a govt that is in office by massive fraud is a legitimate government.”
“What do you expect?” responded Mr Sebastian. “It's hard enough to get a fair election in the United States.”
Ms Barakzai pointed out that President Karzai had received the support of the Afghan people three times – in a 2002 loya jirga, or meeting of elders, in the first presidential election, in 2004, and again last year. “Democracy is not a product,” she said. “It's always a process and this process takes decades and generations.”
“But why must it take decades and generations?” asked Mr Sebastian.
Ms Barakzia responded, “How long did it take your country to establish democracy?”
A BBC/ABC poll released this week found 68 per cent of Afghans saw the government as heading in the right direction. And Mr Korb viewed the Afghan Parliament's recent rejection of 17 of Mr Karzai's 24 proposed cabinet members as a “great step forward” for democracy. “We tend to confuse elections with democracy,” he said. “It's civil society that you have to build, that's the key thing.”
Meanwhile, Amnesty International, a rights group, said the Karzai government shows “blatant impunity” for human rights, and has released at least five major drug leaders. Further, Mr Galbraith said last year's election fraud “disenfranchised every Afghan who cast an honest vote.”
Yet more than 500 international troops died in Afghanistan in 2009.
“They're dying for the chance to give Afghans a chance to choose their own destiny,” he said. “We're interested in helping the Afghan people make their own choices, and they have a limited amount of time..after a few years we will have done all that we can.”
“It was criminal, what the United States did,” Korb explained. “A lot of the problems we're seeing today are a result of the fact that we went in there, created a vacuum and then walked away...President Bush promised a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan, and then never followed up.”
A full house packed the Education City studio of the BBC's Doha Debates this week as an accomplished panel took up the motion: “This House does not believe that this Afghan government is worth fighting for.” More than eight years after the US-led invasion, international forces are bogged down in guerrilla warfare with a resurgent Taliban while the President Hamid Karzai-led government is charged with election fraud, corruption and ineffectiveness.
Assisted by their host, BBC presenter Tim Sebastian, the panelists engaged in verbal battle on the legitimacy of the Karzai government, the need for international forces and the components of democracy, before a slim majority of the audience – 51 percent to 49 percent – voted to carry the motion.
“Afghanistan never wanted to be host for long to foreign troops – this is the history of Afghanistan, this is our nature,” said Shukria Barakzai, Mr Korb's co-panelist and a member of the Afghan parliament.
She was responding to a question from the audience about why the Afghan people do not protest against the continued presence of US-led forces. “But right now, we are a little baby,” she said, “and until we can stand on our own feet, we need it.”
Mr Korb pointed to the example of Iraq, where US forces had begun pulling out and would be out completely by the end of next year. “I'm very happy that President Obama, in announcing a troop increase in Afghanistan, also talked about a deadline,” he said. “The message is that this government has to clean up its act.”
Mirwais Yasini, deputy speaker of the Lower House of the Afghan parliament who briefly ran for Afghan president last year, did not see that happening anytime soon. “There is no security, there is corruption, there's no reconciliation, there are no services for Afghan citizens,” he said. “Democracy is just a slogan...we are establishing a very dirty precedent.”
Yasini's co-panelist, former US Ambassador Peter Galbraith, was fired last year from his post as a United Nations envoy to Afghanistan for accusing his boss of concealing election fraud. He said the government could not provide the security, rule of law and services necessary to support the US-led war.
“A government that is ineffective and in office by fraud cannot win the support of the population,” said Mr Galbraith. “It cannot do what it needs to make a counter-insurgency strategy work.”
Standing up from his seat in the audience, the Afghan Ambassador to Qatar, Wali Monawar, asked what sort of alternatives Mr Galbraith might offer to the current government. Mr Galbraith suggested a new election or a power-sharing political system.
Mr Sebastian pressed the point. “There is no other government,” he said. “This is the Afghan government, however ineffective or corrupt, however it fails to meet your expectations.”
Mr Galbraith pointed to the one million phoney votes estimated by European Union monitors. “Tim,” he said, “you cannot say that a govt that is in office by massive fraud is a legitimate government.”
“What do you expect?” responded Mr Sebastian. “It's hard enough to get a fair election in the United States.”
Ms Barakzai pointed out that President Karzai had received the support of the Afghan people three times – in a 2002 loya jirga, or meeting of elders, in the first presidential election, in 2004, and again last year. “Democracy is not a product,” she said. “It's always a process and this process takes decades and generations.”
“But why must it take decades and generations?” asked Mr Sebastian.
Ms Barakzia responded, “How long did it take your country to establish democracy?”
A BBC/ABC poll released this week found 68 per cent of Afghans saw the government as heading in the right direction. And Mr Korb viewed the Afghan Parliament's recent rejection of 17 of Mr Karzai's 24 proposed cabinet members as a “great step forward” for democracy. “We tend to confuse elections with democracy,” he said. “It's civil society that you have to build, that's the key thing.”
Meanwhile, Amnesty International, a rights group, said the Karzai government shows “blatant impunity” for human rights, and has released at least five major drug leaders. Further, Mr Galbraith said last year's election fraud “disenfranchised every Afghan who cast an honest vote.”
Yet more than 500 international troops died in Afghanistan in 2009.
“They're dying for the chance to give Afghans a chance to choose their own destiny,” he said. “We're interested in helping the Afghan people make their own choices, and they have a limited amount of time..after a few years we will have done all that we can.”
1.13.2010
Doha's real estate sector stumbles
DOHA // A surplus of homes and the aftershocks of the global economic crisis are hammering prices for rental and residential properties across Doha.
In a recent survey from Century 21 Qatar, apartment rental prices in some areas of the city fell by 10 per cent last month. Rental and housing prices have dropped 20-60 per cent in the past 18 months, say several Doha property agents, even as similar scenarios play out in other GCC metros.
“The market is not good at all,” said P N Baburajan, a property agent who as worked in the sector in Doha for 20 years. “There used to be so many new companies coming in, from Dubai and UAE and Saudi Arabia, even the US and Europe, and bringing all those employees. But now companies have stopped coming – and some have reduced staff strength as well.”
Still, developments continue to rise. Work continues on The Pearl-Qatar, a series of high-end retail outlets and leafy residential neighbourhoods built on a man-made island twisting out into the Gulf like a string of pearls. Crowned with two luxury hotels, “smart” housing for more than 40,000 and a dozen kilometres of pristine beaches, it is the grandest property development in the history of Qatar and is set for completion in 2013.
In addition to The Pearl, Doha developers are building Al Wa’ab City, a US$3.2 billion (Dh11.75bn) family-oriented community development from Nasser Bin Khaled Holding; Lusail, a $5.5bn luxury waterfront city from Qatari Diar, with housing for 200,000, not far from The Pearl; and Barwa Village, a $500 million housing project to be completed in the coming months.
All this new housing will enter an already crowded market. In a report released last September, the Qatar Oman Investment Company found some 15,000 unoccupied apartments across Doha. More recently, Bank of America Securities-Merrill Lynch warned that by 2012, when Qatar’s gas-driven expansion has been completed, there will be limited need for labour in the non-oil economy. Expatriates may then leave Qatar in large numbers, resulting in a “significant overhang” of property.
Troubles in the property sector are not unique to Doha. Kuwait’s City of Silk has been halted in the planning stages, and Aldar Properties, Abu Dhabi’s largest developer, has put its plans for the project on hold. In style and scale, The Pearl is reminiscent of Dubai developments such as the Palm islands and The World, both of which were built by Nakheel. Nakheel is under the umbrella of the government-owned Dubai World, which recently began talks to restructure its debt repayments – due in part to an unstable property market.
Yet United Development, the company behind The Pearl, is fortunate to be building in Qatar, where abundant gas revenues have allowed the government to support developers and financial services firms in the downturn, buying portfolios and backing up loans. The Qatari economy is expected to grow nearly 15 per cent this year, among the world’s fastest.
This may explain The Pearl’s target demographic. One-bedroom homes – which include remote-controlled lighting and cooling, high-speed wireless internet, maid service, security and reception, and a health club with gym, jacuzzi and juice bar – retail for 1.5m Qatari rials (Dh1.5m). The Pearl says it has sold nearly two-thirds of its available properties, including all 450 villas.
“We have some interest,” said Georges Bou Abdallah, the sales and leasing team leader in Doha for the brokerage firm Asteco, referring to flats at The Pearl. “But there’s more interest in the secondary market, in resale.” Resale properties at The Pearl were going for about 1mn rials, he said, 25-30 per cent off their initial price.
Rental prices for apartments at The Pearl have dropped further. Units initially budgeted at 20,000 rials have come down to 10,000-11,000 rials. “We are getting inquiries, but mainly people are viewing and not renting,” said Mr Baburajan, who remained optimistic. “The market is slowly coming up. By the middle of 2010, the situation will be changed.”
United Development has faced delays in delivering some units, but after cutting costs and curbing expansion plans, expects to meet its deadlines. “Everything is more or less on schedule,” a representative said.
In Porto Arabia, residents have begun moving in to The Pearl’s first completed apartment building, while some 40 luxury outlets – including Armani, Coach, Balenciaga and Hermes – have opened on the promenade. In late afternoons and evenings, couples, families and friends stroll the boardwalk, stopping to chat over coffee, watch sidewalk performers and window shop.
“It’s been pretty slow,” said Amin Derriche, assistant manager of the Giorgio Armani store, which opened last February. “But we expected it to be like this. Business here won’t be like our European stores for another two to three years.”
--- originally appeared in The National, www.thenational.ae
In a recent survey from Century 21 Qatar, apartment rental prices in some areas of the city fell by 10 per cent last month. Rental and housing prices have dropped 20-60 per cent in the past 18 months, say several Doha property agents, even as similar scenarios play out in other GCC metros.
“The market is not good at all,” said P N Baburajan, a property agent who as worked in the sector in Doha for 20 years. “There used to be so many new companies coming in, from Dubai and UAE and Saudi Arabia, even the US and Europe, and bringing all those employees. But now companies have stopped coming – and some have reduced staff strength as well.”
Still, developments continue to rise. Work continues on The Pearl-Qatar, a series of high-end retail outlets and leafy residential neighbourhoods built on a man-made island twisting out into the Gulf like a string of pearls. Crowned with two luxury hotels, “smart” housing for more than 40,000 and a dozen kilometres of pristine beaches, it is the grandest property development in the history of Qatar and is set for completion in 2013.
In addition to The Pearl, Doha developers are building Al Wa’ab City, a US$3.2 billion (Dh11.75bn) family-oriented community development from Nasser Bin Khaled Holding; Lusail, a $5.5bn luxury waterfront city from Qatari Diar, with housing for 200,000, not far from The Pearl; and Barwa Village, a $500 million housing project to be completed in the coming months.
All this new housing will enter an already crowded market. In a report released last September, the Qatar Oman Investment Company found some 15,000 unoccupied apartments across Doha. More recently, Bank of America Securities-Merrill Lynch warned that by 2012, when Qatar’s gas-driven expansion has been completed, there will be limited need for labour in the non-oil economy. Expatriates may then leave Qatar in large numbers, resulting in a “significant overhang” of property.
Troubles in the property sector are not unique to Doha. Kuwait’s City of Silk has been halted in the planning stages, and Aldar Properties, Abu Dhabi’s largest developer, has put its plans for the project on hold. In style and scale, The Pearl is reminiscent of Dubai developments such as the Palm islands and The World, both of which were built by Nakheel. Nakheel is under the umbrella of the government-owned Dubai World, which recently began talks to restructure its debt repayments – due in part to an unstable property market.
Yet United Development, the company behind The Pearl, is fortunate to be building in Qatar, where abundant gas revenues have allowed the government to support developers and financial services firms in the downturn, buying portfolios and backing up loans. The Qatari economy is expected to grow nearly 15 per cent this year, among the world’s fastest.
This may explain The Pearl’s target demographic. One-bedroom homes – which include remote-controlled lighting and cooling, high-speed wireless internet, maid service, security and reception, and a health club with gym, jacuzzi and juice bar – retail for 1.5m Qatari rials (Dh1.5m). The Pearl says it has sold nearly two-thirds of its available properties, including all 450 villas.
“We have some interest,” said Georges Bou Abdallah, the sales and leasing team leader in Doha for the brokerage firm Asteco, referring to flats at The Pearl. “But there’s more interest in the secondary market, in resale.” Resale properties at The Pearl were going for about 1mn rials, he said, 25-30 per cent off their initial price.
Rental prices for apartments at The Pearl have dropped further. Units initially budgeted at 20,000 rials have come down to 10,000-11,000 rials. “We are getting inquiries, but mainly people are viewing and not renting,” said Mr Baburajan, who remained optimistic. “The market is slowly coming up. By the middle of 2010, the situation will be changed.”
United Development has faced delays in delivering some units, but after cutting costs and curbing expansion plans, expects to meet its deadlines. “Everything is more or less on schedule,” a representative said.
In Porto Arabia, residents have begun moving in to The Pearl’s first completed apartment building, while some 40 luxury outlets – including Armani, Coach, Balenciaga and Hermes – have opened on the promenade. In late afternoons and evenings, couples, families and friends stroll the boardwalk, stopping to chat over coffee, watch sidewalk performers and window shop.
“It’s been pretty slow,” said Amin Derriche, assistant manager of the Giorgio Armani store, which opened last February. “But we expected it to be like this. Business here won’t be like our European stores for another two to three years.”
--- originally appeared in The National, www.thenational.ae
1.08.2010
How TV for Arab kids grew up
DOHA // Since hitting the airwaves in September 2005, Al Jazeera Children’s Channel has broadcast thousands of hours of animated, talk and game shows in classical Arabic. It has also earned a fistful of awards and started to put a modern and distinctly Arab face on children’s programming in the region.
“We have planted the seed of change,” said Mahmoud Bouneb, the network’s executive general manager. “We have planted the seed of hope for a better tomorrow, but also for a better Arab citizen.”
Mr Bouneb recalls first hearing of the Qatari First Lady Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al Missned’s idea for an educational, entertaining and locally produced Arabic language children’s channel, in 2002.
“I thought it was, not a joke, but let’s say a fantasy, in the Arab world,” he remembers thinking at the time. “I always thought that children’s television was a very serious business and we in the Arab world have no experience with it.”
Seven years ago, locally produced programming for children was practically non-existent. Arabic-language children’s television meant dubbed versions of Bugs Bunny and Yu-Gi-Oh!
Though he had never been involved in children’s television, in early 2003 Mr Bouneb left his job working for the chairman of the board at Al Jazeera News to become the new network’s executive general manager. For more than two years he worked with producers, programmers and consultants from the Paris-based LaGardere Group to develop an identity for Al Jazeera Children’s Channel.
“I remember the first thing we discussed was, ‘Are we going to let children debate freely on this channel?’” he said. “My answer from Day One was yes, because in Arabic culture we don’t have a tradition of listening to the children ... I said ‘Let’s listen to the children, we would be amazed by what we hear.’
Today, children’s voices dominate JCC programming, in shows such as Nadra Ala, a weekly debate show, and Ad Darb, a popular, fast-moving game show.
At the station’s Education City headquarters, on the edge of Doha, the walls and furniture are painted in bright, child-friendly colours, such as orange and sky blue. Cheerful staffers watch over a steady stream of visiting youngsters and a wide variety of in-house productions keep three top-of-the-line studios in near-constant use.
JCC, which also has offices in Amman, Beirut, Cairo, Paris and Kuala Lumpur, produces about 60 per cent of its programming. That content reaches 45 to 50 million households across the Arab world and Europe.
A year ago, the station split into two channels – Baraem TV, aimed at three to six-year-olds, and the original Al Jazeera Children’s Channel, for seven to 15-year-olds.
Baraem’s animated series Nan and Lili has been honoured repeatedly, including earning a certificate of merit at last year’s International Communications, Video and Interactive Media Competition and, last month, the CINE Golden Eagle Award from a US consortium for innovative TV and cinema. Competitors such as Nickelodeon Arabic and MBC-3 have in recent years begun to produce in-house game shows and other edutainment programming much like that seen on JCC.
JCC has produced or co-produced more than 50 films. Still Alive in Gaza, a feature documentary about Palestinian youth that JCC co-produced, will screen at the Berlin International Film Festival next month.
JCC also offers special programming for Ramadan and a show on the Quran, but does not allow religious ideals to dominate. “Islam is part of our daily life, it’s our religion, and it should be integrated into our content,” said Mr Bouneb. “But we are not a dogmatic channel.”
Nor is JCC a commercial venture. Its US$100 million (Dh367m) annual budget is provided mostly by the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development.
Even with minimal marketing, the network has made an impact. “Everything that contributes to the compounding of knowledge in the region is a positive," said Hatem Samman, a director of Booz and Company’s Ideation Center, a Dubai-based think tank.
Yet he questioned the breadth of the station’s influence. “How do you compete with sources from the West and the US in particular?” asked Mr Samman, pointing out that his own children mostly watched English-language stations such as the Disney channel. “You need to have a comparative advantage. One way to do that is if you cannot beat them, you join them, with joint ventures and the like.”
Thus, JCC’s two main objectives are more in-house content and greater reach. It has signed partnership agreements with production firms in the UK, Canada and Japan, among others. An animated show about the Arabic hero Salahaddin and Richard the Lionheart, co-produced with a Malaysian firm, will begin airing this summer.
Within two years, Mr Bouneb hopes to create an English-language version of Baraem and move into the North American market.
Later this month, JCC will launch a video-on-demand platform on its website, where visitors will be able to access detailed programming information and watch their favourite shows at any time.
Mr Bouneb wants “to increase the local flavour, the local identity”, in JCC’s programming. “We are just a television channel which is trying to bring beauty into the lives of the Arabic children,” he said, “to make a difference in their lives and to give them a better future.”
---
originally appeared in 8 Jan, 2010, The National, www.thenational.ae
“We have planted the seed of change,” said Mahmoud Bouneb, the network’s executive general manager. “We have planted the seed of hope for a better tomorrow, but also for a better Arab citizen.”
Mr Bouneb recalls first hearing of the Qatari First Lady Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al Missned’s idea for an educational, entertaining and locally produced Arabic language children’s channel, in 2002.
“I thought it was, not a joke, but let’s say a fantasy, in the Arab world,” he remembers thinking at the time. “I always thought that children’s television was a very serious business and we in the Arab world have no experience with it.”
Seven years ago, locally produced programming for children was practically non-existent. Arabic-language children’s television meant dubbed versions of Bugs Bunny and Yu-Gi-Oh!
Though he had never been involved in children’s television, in early 2003 Mr Bouneb left his job working for the chairman of the board at Al Jazeera News to become the new network’s executive general manager. For more than two years he worked with producers, programmers and consultants from the Paris-based LaGardere Group to develop an identity for Al Jazeera Children’s Channel.
“I remember the first thing we discussed was, ‘Are we going to let children debate freely on this channel?’” he said. “My answer from Day One was yes, because in Arabic culture we don’t have a tradition of listening to the children ... I said ‘Let’s listen to the children, we would be amazed by what we hear.’
Today, children’s voices dominate JCC programming, in shows such as Nadra Ala, a weekly debate show, and Ad Darb, a popular, fast-moving game show.
At the station’s Education City headquarters, on the edge of Doha, the walls and furniture are painted in bright, child-friendly colours, such as orange and sky blue. Cheerful staffers watch over a steady stream of visiting youngsters and a wide variety of in-house productions keep three top-of-the-line studios in near-constant use.
JCC, which also has offices in Amman, Beirut, Cairo, Paris and Kuala Lumpur, produces about 60 per cent of its programming. That content reaches 45 to 50 million households across the Arab world and Europe.
A year ago, the station split into two channels – Baraem TV, aimed at three to six-year-olds, and the original Al Jazeera Children’s Channel, for seven to 15-year-olds.
Baraem’s animated series Nan and Lili has been honoured repeatedly, including earning a certificate of merit at last year’s International Communications, Video and Interactive Media Competition and, last month, the CINE Golden Eagle Award from a US consortium for innovative TV and cinema. Competitors such as Nickelodeon Arabic and MBC-3 have in recent years begun to produce in-house game shows and other edutainment programming much like that seen on JCC.
JCC has produced or co-produced more than 50 films. Still Alive in Gaza, a feature documentary about Palestinian youth that JCC co-produced, will screen at the Berlin International Film Festival next month.
JCC also offers special programming for Ramadan and a show on the Quran, but does not allow religious ideals to dominate. “Islam is part of our daily life, it’s our religion, and it should be integrated into our content,” said Mr Bouneb. “But we are not a dogmatic channel.”
Nor is JCC a commercial venture. Its US$100 million (Dh367m) annual budget is provided mostly by the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development.
Even with minimal marketing, the network has made an impact. “Everything that contributes to the compounding of knowledge in the region is a positive," said Hatem Samman, a director of Booz and Company’s Ideation Center, a Dubai-based think tank.
Yet he questioned the breadth of the station’s influence. “How do you compete with sources from the West and the US in particular?” asked Mr Samman, pointing out that his own children mostly watched English-language stations such as the Disney channel. “You need to have a comparative advantage. One way to do that is if you cannot beat them, you join them, with joint ventures and the like.”
Thus, JCC’s two main objectives are more in-house content and greater reach. It has signed partnership agreements with production firms in the UK, Canada and Japan, among others. An animated show about the Arabic hero Salahaddin and Richard the Lionheart, co-produced with a Malaysian firm, will begin airing this summer.
Within two years, Mr Bouneb hopes to create an English-language version of Baraem and move into the North American market.
Later this month, JCC will launch a video-on-demand platform on its website, where visitors will be able to access detailed programming information and watch their favourite shows at any time.
Mr Bouneb wants “to increase the local flavour, the local identity”, in JCC’s programming. “We are just a television channel which is trying to bring beauty into the lives of the Arabic children,” he said, “to make a difference in their lives and to give them a better future.”
---
originally appeared in 8 Jan, 2010, The National, www.thenational.ae
1.01.2010
A new urban paradigm in Doha
Doha // Tim Makower recalls the moment he and the Qatari first lady, Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al Missned, came up with the central theme for a government-backed, US$5.9billion (Dh21.6bn) plan to remake Doha’s city centre into a pedestrian-friendly urban idyll.
“We were discussing this whole issue of how can we bring Qatari families back into the city centre,” said Mr Makower, a partner with the UK-based Allies & Morrison and among the project’s lead architects. “We told her Highness we think we should be creating town houses, we should be clustering them around communal, private gardens and she said, ‘Oh, that’s a fereej’.”
By mingling modern architectural ideas with Qatari traditions, such as crossing the contemporary town house with the Gulf fereej, or courtyard village, “the Heart of Doha” aims to create a rooted yet original sensibility. “That’s a fundamental part of this,” said Mr Makower. “Learning from the past, reflecting the past, but doing it in a new way.”
Qatari Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani and his wife Sheikha Mozah first conceived the idea to rebuild central Doha around 2004. Within months they selected a 35-hectare downtown site and hired international architecture and design firms including Arup, Aecom (formerly Edaw) and Allies & Morrison to devise a master plan.
For more than three years, professors from Harvard, Yale, MIT, and the Aga Khan Professoriate of Islamic Architecture reviewed, challenged and finally approved the plan. After months of razing buildings to prepare the site, Heart of Doha’s official groundbreaking arrives later this month. Construction is to take place in five phases and should be completed in 2016.
In a quarter set between the Emiri Diwan, or ruler’s palace, and the recently rebuilt Souq Waqif, Heart of Doha will coalesce around two main thoroughfares: Kahraba, or “electricity” Street, which was Doha’s first high street, and the old wadi.
Computer renderings of the completed project offer a glimpse into an ultra-modern Gulf future: solid, stone-clad façades give way to secluded courtyard gardens; pretty shopping arcades lead to pleasant green plazas; and sleek streetcars glide past smart-looking residents strolling though compact neighbourhoods.
The development, an endowment for Qatar Foundation, is being managed by Dohaland, a Qatar Foundation subsidiary. To many involved, the Heart of Doha is not a simple construction project but a blueprint for contemporary urban living in Doha and beyond.
“The Heart of Doha aspires to regenerate the historic core of the city and to act as a stimulus for future wider city renaissance,” said Issa Mohannadi, executive director of Dohaland. “The ultimate objective, however, is to propose a new paradigm of architecture and planning for the cities of the Arabian Gulf.”
In creating that paradigm, Mr Makower and his fellow architects laid out seven key steps to create a Qatari architectural language. The first is timelessness, or linking Qatar's past to its present and its future. The second step is coherence. Rather than dominate and divide, the buildings, streets and spaces should link and build communities, as well as integrate with a vast underground infrastructure of roads, parking areas, and utilities.
A team of engineers, planners and architects, including Allies and Morrison, Porphyrios Associates, the Jordanian firm Dar Al Omran and Adjaye Associates, has had to set personal goals aside. “There are some disharmonies,” said Mr Makower. “It’s like a choir. We all want to sing different parts and hopefully it will work well together at the end.”
Another step focuses on building a home. “The home is very important because we are building the Qatari family back into the city centre,” said Mr Makower. The completed project includes housing for up to 10,000, including fereej-style town houses allocated to Qataris. These include a majlis and courtyard, but also a gym and underground parking.
The fifth step is the street. Unlike many urban settings in the Gulf, the Heart of Doha will welcome pedestrians with retail and store fronts, streetcars, open plazas and shade. Much of the vehicular traffic will be kept underground. “You will be able to cross the street without being run over,” said Mr Makower.
Most homes will be within walking distance of schools, shops, mosques and public spaces. But since Doha is too hot for street activity for much of the year, step six focuses on adapting to climate.
Most major streets run north-south to take advantage of Qatar’s northerly breezes. Buildings, some of which are certified by the environmental building standard LEED, are designed to keep sunlight out and to catch and scoop wind down into spaces. Many roofs have solar-panelled canopies that provide shade, create terraces and provide energy.
Even the grand civic space at the heart of the Heart of Doha incorporates concerns for climate, with a shading structure than can be raised and lowered to allow more or less sun in.
Barahat Al-Naseem Square, designed by Michel Mossessian, is an urban version of the majlis, with a carpeted floor and sides faced inward.
Though far from fruition, the project has drawn raves. “The plan and the architecture appear intelligent, restrained and distinctive,” the architecture critic of the Financial Times wrote in November.
He compared Heart of Doha favourably to regional efforts like the Burj Dubai and Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island and Masdar City. “If there is one scheme in the region to keep an eye on,” he wrote, “this is it.”
-- this story originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae)
“We were discussing this whole issue of how can we bring Qatari families back into the city centre,” said Mr Makower, a partner with the UK-based Allies & Morrison and among the project’s lead architects. “We told her Highness we think we should be creating town houses, we should be clustering them around communal, private gardens and she said, ‘Oh, that’s a fereej’.”
By mingling modern architectural ideas with Qatari traditions, such as crossing the contemporary town house with the Gulf fereej, or courtyard village, “the Heart of Doha” aims to create a rooted yet original sensibility. “That’s a fundamental part of this,” said Mr Makower. “Learning from the past, reflecting the past, but doing it in a new way.”
Qatari Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani and his wife Sheikha Mozah first conceived the idea to rebuild central Doha around 2004. Within months they selected a 35-hectare downtown site and hired international architecture and design firms including Arup, Aecom (formerly Edaw) and Allies & Morrison to devise a master plan.
For more than three years, professors from Harvard, Yale, MIT, and the Aga Khan Professoriate of Islamic Architecture reviewed, challenged and finally approved the plan. After months of razing buildings to prepare the site, Heart of Doha’s official groundbreaking arrives later this month. Construction is to take place in five phases and should be completed in 2016.
In a quarter set between the Emiri Diwan, or ruler’s palace, and the recently rebuilt Souq Waqif, Heart of Doha will coalesce around two main thoroughfares: Kahraba, or “electricity” Street, which was Doha’s first high street, and the old wadi.
Computer renderings of the completed project offer a glimpse into an ultra-modern Gulf future: solid, stone-clad façades give way to secluded courtyard gardens; pretty shopping arcades lead to pleasant green plazas; and sleek streetcars glide past smart-looking residents strolling though compact neighbourhoods.
The development, an endowment for Qatar Foundation, is being managed by Dohaland, a Qatar Foundation subsidiary. To many involved, the Heart of Doha is not a simple construction project but a blueprint for contemporary urban living in Doha and beyond.
“The Heart of Doha aspires to regenerate the historic core of the city and to act as a stimulus for future wider city renaissance,” said Issa Mohannadi, executive director of Dohaland. “The ultimate objective, however, is to propose a new paradigm of architecture and planning for the cities of the Arabian Gulf.”
In creating that paradigm, Mr Makower and his fellow architects laid out seven key steps to create a Qatari architectural language. The first is timelessness, or linking Qatar's past to its present and its future. The second step is coherence. Rather than dominate and divide, the buildings, streets and spaces should link and build communities, as well as integrate with a vast underground infrastructure of roads, parking areas, and utilities.
A team of engineers, planners and architects, including Allies and Morrison, Porphyrios Associates, the Jordanian firm Dar Al Omran and Adjaye Associates, has had to set personal goals aside. “There are some disharmonies,” said Mr Makower. “It’s like a choir. We all want to sing different parts and hopefully it will work well together at the end.”
Another step focuses on building a home. “The home is very important because we are building the Qatari family back into the city centre,” said Mr Makower. The completed project includes housing for up to 10,000, including fereej-style town houses allocated to Qataris. These include a majlis and courtyard, but also a gym and underground parking.
The fifth step is the street. Unlike many urban settings in the Gulf, the Heart of Doha will welcome pedestrians with retail and store fronts, streetcars, open plazas and shade. Much of the vehicular traffic will be kept underground. “You will be able to cross the street without being run over,” said Mr Makower.
Most homes will be within walking distance of schools, shops, mosques and public spaces. But since Doha is too hot for street activity for much of the year, step six focuses on adapting to climate.
Most major streets run north-south to take advantage of Qatar’s northerly breezes. Buildings, some of which are certified by the environmental building standard LEED, are designed to keep sunlight out and to catch and scoop wind down into spaces. Many roofs have solar-panelled canopies that provide shade, create terraces and provide energy.
Even the grand civic space at the heart of the Heart of Doha incorporates concerns for climate, with a shading structure than can be raised and lowered to allow more or less sun in.
Barahat Al-Naseem Square, designed by Michel Mossessian, is an urban version of the majlis, with a carpeted floor and sides faced inward.
Though far from fruition, the project has drawn raves. “The plan and the architecture appear intelligent, restrained and distinctive,” the architecture critic of the Financial Times wrote in November.
He compared Heart of Doha favourably to regional efforts like the Burj Dubai and Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island and Masdar City. “If there is one scheme in the region to keep an eye on,” he wrote, “this is it.”
-- this story originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae)
12.18.2009
Qatar zeroes in on cousin marriage
DOHA // Six years after the law passed, Qatar launched mandatory premarital screenings this week, mainly to alert couples who may be related of any potential health risks for their future offspring.
About half of all marriages across Gulf nations are between cousins, and their frequency is increasing, according to a recent study in the Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention. At 54 per cent, the rate of cousin marriage appears highest in Qatar, and has increased nearly 30 per cent from the previous generation.
On its own, marriage between cousins, or consanguinity, is not necessarily problematic. But many debilitating genetic disorders – including sickle cell anaemia, cystic fibrosis, spinal muscular atrophy, mental retardation, epilepsy and Down syndrome – can be up to 20 times more frequent among populations in which cousin marriages are common.
“It is certainly a problem,” said Dr Ahmad Teeb. A genetics and paediatrics professor at the Weill Cornell Medical College of Qatar, he has been researching Arab genetic disorders for more than 25 years and contributed to the recent study.
“The issue here is not the cousin marriage, the issue here is to avoid the disease,” Dr Teebi sai. “However, virtually none of us is free from carrying some bad genes, and when you are cousins the likelihood of you are carrying the same bad gene is higher.”
Marriage between second cousins or more distant relations has very little impact on the passing down of genetic disorders. Yet the children of first cousins, who share 12.5 per cent of their genes, are nearly twice as likely as the general population to contract a disorder. And within populations that intermarry regularly over generations, the coincidence of disorders can increase exponentially.
“If certain disorders are more common in a population,” said Dr Teebi, “the likelihood of its occurrence can be many times increased.” In the Gulf, most cousin marriages are between first cousins.
A report by the Dubai-based Centre for Arab Genomic Studies (CAGS) in September found that a handful of genetic diseases – the blood disorder thalassaemia, diabetes and Down syndrome among them – have reached epidemic levels (more than 100 cases per 100,000) in several Gulf countries. The report also found that Arabs have one of the world’s highest rates of genetic disorders, nearly two-thirds of which are linked to consanguinity.
Qatari leaders have been working to improve national health and medical awareness. This week, the Doha Exhibition Centre hosted Qatar Health 2009, an international forum for the latest advancements in health care research and technology. Sidra Medical and Research Center, a Qatar Foundation initiative that is backed by a US$7.9 billion (Dh29bn) grant and set to open in 2012, aims to become a regional centre of biomedical research and medical education.
Yet Qatar is the last Gulf nation to institute premarital screenings and many nationals remain unaware of the risks of marrying a close relation. A study to be published in Cambridge University’s Journal of Biosocial Science next month found that most Qataris surveyed did not know that consanguinity had been linked to serious genetic diseases or that distant cousin marriages were genetically less risky than unions between first cousins.
“These results indicate that more effort needs to be made in developing public health strategies to improve the population’s understanding of the cost-benefit analysis involved in contracting consanguineous marriages given the goal of healthy offspring,” the report’s authors wrote.
Although cousin marriage is legal in 26 US states and across Europe, the rate of consanguinity in industrialised nations is generally less than one per cent. In Muslim countries, meanwhile, cousin marriage represents about 35 per cent 40 per cent of all unions. Research from CAGS and others suggests consanguinity is declining in Lebanon, Egypt and among Palestinians, but increasing in Morocco, Mauritania and Sudan.
It is also increasing across the Gulf. Dr Teebi links the trend to tribal tradition and the region’s expanding economies. “Rich families tend to marry rich families, and from their own – and the rich like to protect their wealth,” he said. “So it’s partly economic, and it’s also partly cultural.”
Qatar’s Supreme Council of Health aims to change that culture, with an outreach campaign that includes workshops, online information, university lectures and the distribution of educational CDs and brochures. Earlier this week, the Qatari minister of public health, Abdullah bin Khalid al Qahtani said, “a healthy family is the basic cell of society”.
The screenings are meant to strengthen that cell. Couples are tested for both communicable and genetic diseases. Doctors warn of any disorders likely to be passed to each other or to the couple’s potential offspring, but cannot withhold a marriage licence due to any health risks.
The final decision rests with the betrothed. “The couple will think twice or maybe three or four times,” said Dr Teebi. He said that similar screenings in the UAE and Bahrain appear to have lowered the frequency of sickle cell anaemia.
“Some people might say, ‘All right, we will take the risk,’ and some will change their mind,” he said. “It’s the nature of humans that they will think about it.”
About half of all marriages across Gulf nations are between cousins, and their frequency is increasing, according to a recent study in the Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention. At 54 per cent, the rate of cousin marriage appears highest in Qatar, and has increased nearly 30 per cent from the previous generation.
On its own, marriage between cousins, or consanguinity, is not necessarily problematic. But many debilitating genetic disorders – including sickle cell anaemia, cystic fibrosis, spinal muscular atrophy, mental retardation, epilepsy and Down syndrome – can be up to 20 times more frequent among populations in which cousin marriages are common.
“It is certainly a problem,” said Dr Ahmad Teeb. A genetics and paediatrics professor at the Weill Cornell Medical College of Qatar, he has been researching Arab genetic disorders for more than 25 years and contributed to the recent study.
“The issue here is not the cousin marriage, the issue here is to avoid the disease,” Dr Teebi sai. “However, virtually none of us is free from carrying some bad genes, and when you are cousins the likelihood of you are carrying the same bad gene is higher.”
Marriage between second cousins or more distant relations has very little impact on the passing down of genetic disorders. Yet the children of first cousins, who share 12.5 per cent of their genes, are nearly twice as likely as the general population to contract a disorder. And within populations that intermarry regularly over generations, the coincidence of disorders can increase exponentially.
“If certain disorders are more common in a population,” said Dr Teebi, “the likelihood of its occurrence can be many times increased.” In the Gulf, most cousin marriages are between first cousins.
A report by the Dubai-based Centre for Arab Genomic Studies (CAGS) in September found that a handful of genetic diseases – the blood disorder thalassaemia, diabetes and Down syndrome among them – have reached epidemic levels (more than 100 cases per 100,000) in several Gulf countries. The report also found that Arabs have one of the world’s highest rates of genetic disorders, nearly two-thirds of which are linked to consanguinity.
Qatari leaders have been working to improve national health and medical awareness. This week, the Doha Exhibition Centre hosted Qatar Health 2009, an international forum for the latest advancements in health care research and technology. Sidra Medical and Research Center, a Qatar Foundation initiative that is backed by a US$7.9 billion (Dh29bn) grant and set to open in 2012, aims to become a regional centre of biomedical research and medical education.
Yet Qatar is the last Gulf nation to institute premarital screenings and many nationals remain unaware of the risks of marrying a close relation. A study to be published in Cambridge University’s Journal of Biosocial Science next month found that most Qataris surveyed did not know that consanguinity had been linked to serious genetic diseases or that distant cousin marriages were genetically less risky than unions between first cousins.
“These results indicate that more effort needs to be made in developing public health strategies to improve the population’s understanding of the cost-benefit analysis involved in contracting consanguineous marriages given the goal of healthy offspring,” the report’s authors wrote.
Although cousin marriage is legal in 26 US states and across Europe, the rate of consanguinity in industrialised nations is generally less than one per cent. In Muslim countries, meanwhile, cousin marriage represents about 35 per cent 40 per cent of all unions. Research from CAGS and others suggests consanguinity is declining in Lebanon, Egypt and among Palestinians, but increasing in Morocco, Mauritania and Sudan.
It is also increasing across the Gulf. Dr Teebi links the trend to tribal tradition and the region’s expanding economies. “Rich families tend to marry rich families, and from their own – and the rich like to protect their wealth,” he said. “So it’s partly economic, and it’s also partly cultural.”
Qatar’s Supreme Council of Health aims to change that culture, with an outreach campaign that includes workshops, online information, university lectures and the distribution of educational CDs and brochures. Earlier this week, the Qatari minister of public health, Abdullah bin Khalid al Qahtani said, “a healthy family is the basic cell of society”.
The screenings are meant to strengthen that cell. Couples are tested for both communicable and genetic diseases. Doctors warn of any disorders likely to be passed to each other or to the couple’s potential offspring, but cannot withhold a marriage licence due to any health risks.
The final decision rests with the betrothed. “The couple will think twice or maybe three or four times,” said Dr Teebi. He said that similar screenings in the UAE and Bahrain appear to have lowered the frequency of sickle cell anaemia.
“Some people might say, ‘All right, we will take the risk,’ and some will change their mind,” he said. “It’s the nature of humans that they will think about it.”
12.16.2009
Arabs encouraged to blog and be heard
DOHA // For Raouf Shabayek, blogging is easy.
“Everyone can blog,” the editor-in-chief of the Dubai-based consultancy Real Marketing Solutions said during a blogging conference on Saturday. “It doesn’t have to be 1,000 or 2,000 words, it can be one sentence, one picture – we can all add something to the conversation.”
Five years ago, Mr Shabayek started a blog about Arabic entrepreneurship (blog.shebayek.com). Waves of positive feedback soon inspired him to organise his writing into a book, which he published himself. He has since published three more, and now sees blogging as a potential Gutenberg Bible for the region. "We in the Arab world can now have our own Renaissance," he said.
About 300 speakers, bloggers and guests turned up at “Mudawanat: All About Blogging,” a one-day forum held at Doha’s Sharq Village resort, to help realise that vision. IctQatar, a government-run technology support group, organised the event to nurture interest in blogging in Qatar and across the region.
Arabic is the world’s fifth most widely spoken language, yet Arabic speakers represent less than three per cent of all web users, according to Internet World Stats. Nearly three-quarters of the world’s blogs are written from Europe and the United States. A June study by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society found there are an estimated 35,000 active blogs in the Arabic language. But compare that to 70,000 blogs in Farsi.
Yet the potential is considerable. A report from Internet World Stats found that internet users in the Middle East and North Africa increased nearly twenty-fold between 2000 and 2009, faster than in any other language or region. Google searches for the word “mudawanat” (“blogging” in Arabic) have increased 20 per cent to 50 per cent in the past few years, most prominently in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Morocco.
The conference’s keynote speaker, Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at Altimeter Group, a social media research and advisory firm in California, called for clarity among those interested in starting a blog. “What is your topic, and who is your audience?” Mr Owyang asked. “Find your area of interest and focus on it.”
He advocated several steps: treat your blog like a brand; make an editorial calendar; hire a designer to improve the site; and incorporate social networking tools from Facebook and Twitter to better respond to your readers.
An attendee asked Mr Owyang if social networks were pulling web surfers away from blogs. “They’re not taking away from each other; they’re all becoming one,” he said. “You’re building a house and you have many tools – a hammer, saw, nails – you should use them all.”
Ahmad Hamzawi, Google’s head of engineering for the Middle East and North Africa, highlighted some of those tools. He showed how to use Google’s keyword tools to find frequently used search terms, explaining that increasing the use of such terms on a blog increases that blog’s search rank.
For those uncomfortable with English, Mr Hamzawi explained Google Translate, an add-on that offers immediate translations of blog posts in up to 50 languages. Finally, he emphasised the growing popularity of the form: more than 120,000 new blogs are launched every day. Technorati, which indexes blogs, reported in October 2008 that there were 133 million blogs worldwide.
There are about 1,100 blogs in Qatar, according to Ammar Mohammed Khaled, who blogs at ammar- talk.com and founded Al Jazeera Talk, where Arab youth discuss a wide range of issues online. He urged more Qataris to blog, pointing out that blogs can incorporate words, images and video and blogs offer freedom when so much news is controlled.
At least one audience member appreciated this last point. Hassan Al Jefairi said that over the past two decades he had been forced out of columnist positions from three of Qatar’s Arabic-language newspapers because his work ruffled government feathers.
“Everybody knows I’ve got a hot mouth and a hot pen, and I write about hot issues,” said al Jefairi, who writes mostly on environmental and economic issues.
Recently he took to the internet. Al Jefairi’s new blog – he calls it an “electronic magazine” – attracted more than 3,000 visitors in its first month and inspired him to distribute his writing in book form. “There’s more freedom of speech today,” he said.
“The topics I am raising today, 15 years ago I couldn’t discuss them.”
Shabina Khatri discusses a wide variety of issues on her personal and professional blogs, as well as in contributions to Global Voices Online. Her initial inspiration? A slow work day, several years ago. “I was bored at work and decided to start a blog,” said Ms Khatri, whose site quickly gained attention. “You don’t have to be famous. Anybody in this room can just start blogging.”
Blogs can also be a way to make money, according to Mr Hamzawi. He showed attendees how to use Google’s AdSense and FeedBurner applications to place advertisements on their blog and generate income.
Mr Owyang offered a warning to the profit-seekers. “Start a blog with passion first, and then if it turns into a business, great,” he said. “But if you’re starting a blog just to make money, it will probably fail.”
Originally published in The National --
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091216/FOREIGN/712159952
“Everyone can blog,” the editor-in-chief of the Dubai-based consultancy Real Marketing Solutions said during a blogging conference on Saturday. “It doesn’t have to be 1,000 or 2,000 words, it can be one sentence, one picture – we can all add something to the conversation.”
Five years ago, Mr Shabayek started a blog about Arabic entrepreneurship (blog.shebayek.com). Waves of positive feedback soon inspired him to organise his writing into a book, which he published himself. He has since published three more, and now sees blogging as a potential Gutenberg Bible for the region. "We in the Arab world can now have our own Renaissance," he said.
About 300 speakers, bloggers and guests turned up at “Mudawanat: All About Blogging,” a one-day forum held at Doha’s Sharq Village resort, to help realise that vision. IctQatar, a government-run technology support group, organised the event to nurture interest in blogging in Qatar and across the region.
Arabic is the world’s fifth most widely spoken language, yet Arabic speakers represent less than three per cent of all web users, according to Internet World Stats. Nearly three-quarters of the world’s blogs are written from Europe and the United States. A June study by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society found there are an estimated 35,000 active blogs in the Arabic language. But compare that to 70,000 blogs in Farsi.
Yet the potential is considerable. A report from Internet World Stats found that internet users in the Middle East and North Africa increased nearly twenty-fold between 2000 and 2009, faster than in any other language or region. Google searches for the word “mudawanat” (“blogging” in Arabic) have increased 20 per cent to 50 per cent in the past few years, most prominently in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Morocco.
The conference’s keynote speaker, Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at Altimeter Group, a social media research and advisory firm in California, called for clarity among those interested in starting a blog. “What is your topic, and who is your audience?” Mr Owyang asked. “Find your area of interest and focus on it.”
He advocated several steps: treat your blog like a brand; make an editorial calendar; hire a designer to improve the site; and incorporate social networking tools from Facebook and Twitter to better respond to your readers.
An attendee asked Mr Owyang if social networks were pulling web surfers away from blogs. “They’re not taking away from each other; they’re all becoming one,” he said. “You’re building a house and you have many tools – a hammer, saw, nails – you should use them all.”
Ahmad Hamzawi, Google’s head of engineering for the Middle East and North Africa, highlighted some of those tools. He showed how to use Google’s keyword tools to find frequently used search terms, explaining that increasing the use of such terms on a blog increases that blog’s search rank.
For those uncomfortable with English, Mr Hamzawi explained Google Translate, an add-on that offers immediate translations of blog posts in up to 50 languages. Finally, he emphasised the growing popularity of the form: more than 120,000 new blogs are launched every day. Technorati, which indexes blogs, reported in October 2008 that there were 133 million blogs worldwide.
There are about 1,100 blogs in Qatar, according to Ammar Mohammed Khaled, who blogs at ammar- talk.com and founded Al Jazeera Talk, where Arab youth discuss a wide range of issues online. He urged more Qataris to blog, pointing out that blogs can incorporate words, images and video and blogs offer freedom when so much news is controlled.
At least one audience member appreciated this last point. Hassan Al Jefairi said that over the past two decades he had been forced out of columnist positions from three of Qatar’s Arabic-language newspapers because his work ruffled government feathers.
“Everybody knows I’ve got a hot mouth and a hot pen, and I write about hot issues,” said al Jefairi, who writes mostly on environmental and economic issues.
Recently he took to the internet. Al Jefairi’s new blog – he calls it an “electronic magazine” – attracted more than 3,000 visitors in its first month and inspired him to distribute his writing in book form. “There’s more freedom of speech today,” he said.
“The topics I am raising today, 15 years ago I couldn’t discuss them.”
Shabina Khatri discusses a wide variety of issues on her personal and professional blogs, as well as in contributions to Global Voices Online. Her initial inspiration? A slow work day, several years ago. “I was bored at work and decided to start a blog,” said Ms Khatri, whose site quickly gained attention. “You don’t have to be famous. Anybody in this room can just start blogging.”
Blogs can also be a way to make money, according to Mr Hamzawi. He showed attendees how to use Google’s AdSense and FeedBurner applications to place advertisements on their blog and generate income.
Mr Owyang offered a warning to the profit-seekers. “Start a blog with passion first, and then if it turns into a business, great,” he said. “But if you’re starting a blog just to make money, it will probably fail.”
Originally published in The National --
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091216/FOREIGN/712159952
12.04.2009
Qatari father vents anger sentence given to son's killer
DOHA // After the killing of his 16-year-old son Mohammed in England, Abdulla al Majed vowed, “justice has to be done”. Some 16 months later that justice has come, but it is not the sort the grieving father envisioned.
The judge Anthony Scott-Gall last week sentenced George Austin, 22, from South London, to four and a half years in jail for the killing of Mohammed. Austin has been in police custody since November 2008. With more than a year of time served, plus a possible early release for good behaviour, he could be a free man by early 2011.
“I’m not happy, I’m angry,” said Mr al Majed. “The judge was very good, very fair – the fault is with the British justice system. Their penal code encourages killing because it does not punish harshly. What guarantee do we have that when he’s released he will not kill again?”
In the summer of 2008, Mohammed al Majed left Doha to study English at an international school in Hastings, England. A few days before he was due to complete his studies and return home, Mohammed was with a couple classmates outside a kebab shop. Austin and two of his friends, all of whom had been drinking alcohol, began harassing the foreign students with racist taunts.
Austin struck Mohammed in the face as the teenager tried to run away. Mohammed’s head slammed into a kerb. He suffered a fractured skull and a brain haemorrhage and died in hospital three days later.
Austin was convicted of manslaughter last month and sentenced on November 25. His attorney, Susan Rodham, argued that the killing “was not premeditated”, and that the head wounds were “indirect” and “not foreseeable”. The British newspaper The Observer termed the sentence “lenient”.
“He should have gotten either a death sentence or 25 years in jail,” Mr al Majed said. “Sharia says, ‘An eye for an eye.’”
In Qatar, such a killing would probably receive a harsher penalty. “The sentence would depend on many factors – including the age of the defendant, did the victim die immediately, the anger of the victim’s family – but it would certainly be more than this,” said Hanan Malaeb, a law professor at Qatar University.
George Austin received a four and a half year jail sentence for killing Mohammed al Majed Nigel Bowles for The National
She estimated the punishment could vary from the death penalty plus a “blood money” payment of up to 150,000 Qatari rials (Dh151,322) to the victim’s family, to a much smaller fine and a dozen years in jail. “If this happened to my son, I don’t think a few years would be enough,” Prof Malaeb added. “This would not give me the satisfaction that he got his punishment.”
Mohammed’s family remains unsatisfied. His mother, father and four siblings live together in Doha, and recall the 16-year-old who liked football and was a member of the Kashafa, or scouts.
“Still no days pass without shedding tears,” said Mr al Majed. “It still makes me too sad to remember him – I don’t like to think about it. All of his family is missing him. But now we are not only upset about losing him, we are upset about this sentence.”
Each year, about 40,000 foreign students study English in Hastings, an East Sussex town of about 85,000. Police say confrontations with locals are not uncommon. Just hours before the incident, the owner of the kebab shop had warned police about the potential for violence from Austin and his friends.
“This was the duty of the British government, but they have failed,” Mr al Majed said.
On Tuesday the killer’s mother, Jacqueline Austin, pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice. She helped her son flee the country to evade capture a month after the killing.
In sentencing Austin, the judge said: “What a sad indictment you are for the youth of Britain.”
The victim’s father puts the killing in context.
“We have respect for the British people,” said Mr al Majed. “But some like this George, they defame the country. They are a danger to their own society.”
Mr al Majed believes the scars left by Austin will be deep and lasting. “The Quran says: ‘To kill one man is to kill all of humanity,’” he said. “He has not just killed one person he has killed against a family and a nation.”
--- originally ran 4 Dec 2009 in The National (www.thenational.ae).
The judge Anthony Scott-Gall last week sentenced George Austin, 22, from South London, to four and a half years in jail for the killing of Mohammed. Austin has been in police custody since November 2008. With more than a year of time served, plus a possible early release for good behaviour, he could be a free man by early 2011.
“I’m not happy, I’m angry,” said Mr al Majed. “The judge was very good, very fair – the fault is with the British justice system. Their penal code encourages killing because it does not punish harshly. What guarantee do we have that when he’s released he will not kill again?”
In the summer of 2008, Mohammed al Majed left Doha to study English at an international school in Hastings, England. A few days before he was due to complete his studies and return home, Mohammed was with a couple classmates outside a kebab shop. Austin and two of his friends, all of whom had been drinking alcohol, began harassing the foreign students with racist taunts.
Austin struck Mohammed in the face as the teenager tried to run away. Mohammed’s head slammed into a kerb. He suffered a fractured skull and a brain haemorrhage and died in hospital three days later.
Austin was convicted of manslaughter last month and sentenced on November 25. His attorney, Susan Rodham, argued that the killing “was not premeditated”, and that the head wounds were “indirect” and “not foreseeable”. The British newspaper The Observer termed the sentence “lenient”.
“He should have gotten either a death sentence or 25 years in jail,” Mr al Majed said. “Sharia says, ‘An eye for an eye.’”
In Qatar, such a killing would probably receive a harsher penalty. “The sentence would depend on many factors – including the age of the defendant, did the victim die immediately, the anger of the victim’s family – but it would certainly be more than this,” said Hanan Malaeb, a law professor at Qatar University.
George Austin received a four and a half year jail sentence for killing Mohammed al Majed Nigel Bowles for The National
She estimated the punishment could vary from the death penalty plus a “blood money” payment of up to 150,000 Qatari rials (Dh151,322) to the victim’s family, to a much smaller fine and a dozen years in jail. “If this happened to my son, I don’t think a few years would be enough,” Prof Malaeb added. “This would not give me the satisfaction that he got his punishment.”
Mohammed’s family remains unsatisfied. His mother, father and four siblings live together in Doha, and recall the 16-year-old who liked football and was a member of the Kashafa, or scouts.
“Still no days pass without shedding tears,” said Mr al Majed. “It still makes me too sad to remember him – I don’t like to think about it. All of his family is missing him. But now we are not only upset about losing him, we are upset about this sentence.”
Each year, about 40,000 foreign students study English in Hastings, an East Sussex town of about 85,000. Police say confrontations with locals are not uncommon. Just hours before the incident, the owner of the kebab shop had warned police about the potential for violence from Austin and his friends.
“This was the duty of the British government, but they have failed,” Mr al Majed said.
On Tuesday the killer’s mother, Jacqueline Austin, pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice. She helped her son flee the country to evade capture a month after the killing.
In sentencing Austin, the judge said: “What a sad indictment you are for the youth of Britain.”
The victim’s father puts the killing in context.
“We have respect for the British people,” said Mr al Majed. “But some like this George, they defame the country. They are a danger to their own society.”
Mr al Majed believes the scars left by Austin will be deep and lasting. “The Quran says: ‘To kill one man is to kill all of humanity,’” he said. “He has not just killed one person he has killed against a family and a nation.”
--- originally ran 4 Dec 2009 in The National (www.thenational.ae).
Young learn principles of print
DOHA // Erika Widén is thinking big. With her new initiative, the director of business development at Qatar’s leading English-language daily newspaper aims to rescue the country’s print media and help build a skilled workforce in the Gulf.
“Not too many people are interested in reading the news around here anymore – they are checking their BlackBerry, maybe getting Al Jazeera on their mobile,” she said at the offices of The Peninsula.
“We want to get these kids interested in reading, interested in the news, and also help them write. There are not a lot of opportunities like this for young people in this region.”
Ms Widén and the Peninsula editor-in-chief, Khalid Abdul Rahim al Sayed, have just launched the Young Peninsula Journalists (YPS) programme, a free journalism training scheme for middle and secondary students. YPJ hopes to engage citizens in news, impart valuable work skills and steer local youth towards a successful career.
On the first day of classes last weekend, the Peninsula offices bustled. Dozens of the programme’s 300 seven to 12th grade students mingled in the halls. Teenage girls in headscarves talked about photography on couches in the lobby. Adolescent boys discussed journalistic integrity. “Some papers are trying their best to cover the real news,” said 13-year-old Vignesh during class. “But some are just publishing news that is not there at all.”
Ethics and accuracy are among the topics of discussion, along with writing, reporting and various media-related concerns. The students come up with their own story ideas – on sport, society, arts, business and more – but are advised to focus on what’s happening in Qatar.
Starting in early January, a YPJ newspaper – with student reporting, photography, graphics and cartoons – will be inserted every Sunday into The Peninsula. The best student work will receive awards.
Over the year-long programme, the students will receive 60 hours of training in the job skills that are much needed in Qatar and across the region. In the UAE, a government body tasked with finding jobs for young Emirati nationals has found the private sector is willing to hire, but often cannot because of a lack of skills.
The Arab Labor Organization estimates unemployment at nearly 15 per cent in Arab countries – the highest for any region.Without intervention, the problem is likely to fester.
“The GCC will remain an unusually young part of the world,” said a report by the Economist Intelligence Unit called The GCC in 2020, which was released last week.
“Much will depend on the extent to which the young population can be harnessed as an effective labour force.”
That goal dovetails with one of YPJ’s lead sponsors. Silatech, an organisation created by Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned in 2008, engages public, private and civil society sectors to create jobs and opportunities for Arab youth.
“This helps young people inside Qatar that give back to Qatari society and enhance its growth,” said Ahmed Younis, director of strategic partnerships and communications at Silatech. “It’s important for the development and growth of the Middle East and North Africa region to be sure young people have a robust set of skills in journalism, public policy, and writing, and this is what we’re hoping to achieve.”
More than half of the YPJ students are Arab, 15 per cent to 20 per cent of whom are Qatari nationals. About 40 per cent are from South Asia, along with a handful of westerners. The initiative will also train 20 students with special needs from The Shaffallah School.
“This is the way the world works today, with people from all different places working together,” said Ms Widén, who put advertisements for the initiative in local Arabic and English-language newspapers. “We want all these different students to be integrated.”
Still, students will learn writing and interviewing skills, the role of a reporter and the value of news. The first class began with the basics – “What is Journalism?” – and ended with an assignment: write the five Ws (who, what, when, where, why) about a recent event.
The Palestinian triplets Yosra, Mohammad and Latifa, all 14, left class together, notebooks in hand. “We want to know more about newspapers, how they work,” said Latifa. She is doing her assignment on natural disasters, while her sister Yosra will focus on crime.
Their brother could not decide what to write about, then he brightened. “I know,” said Mohammad. “I’m going to write about the Algeria-Egypt football match.”
-- originally appeared Friday, 27 Nov 2009, in the National (www.thenational.ae).
“Not too many people are interested in reading the news around here anymore – they are checking their BlackBerry, maybe getting Al Jazeera on their mobile,” she said at the offices of The Peninsula.
“We want to get these kids interested in reading, interested in the news, and also help them write. There are not a lot of opportunities like this for young people in this region.”
Ms Widén and the Peninsula editor-in-chief, Khalid Abdul Rahim al Sayed, have just launched the Young Peninsula Journalists (YPS) programme, a free journalism training scheme for middle and secondary students. YPJ hopes to engage citizens in news, impart valuable work skills and steer local youth towards a successful career.
On the first day of classes last weekend, the Peninsula offices bustled. Dozens of the programme’s 300 seven to 12th grade students mingled in the halls. Teenage girls in headscarves talked about photography on couches in the lobby. Adolescent boys discussed journalistic integrity. “Some papers are trying their best to cover the real news,” said 13-year-old Vignesh during class. “But some are just publishing news that is not there at all.”
Ethics and accuracy are among the topics of discussion, along with writing, reporting and various media-related concerns. The students come up with their own story ideas – on sport, society, arts, business and more – but are advised to focus on what’s happening in Qatar.
Starting in early January, a YPJ newspaper – with student reporting, photography, graphics and cartoons – will be inserted every Sunday into The Peninsula. The best student work will receive awards.
Over the year-long programme, the students will receive 60 hours of training in the job skills that are much needed in Qatar and across the region. In the UAE, a government body tasked with finding jobs for young Emirati nationals has found the private sector is willing to hire, but often cannot because of a lack of skills.
The Arab Labor Organization estimates unemployment at nearly 15 per cent in Arab countries – the highest for any region.Without intervention, the problem is likely to fester.
“The GCC will remain an unusually young part of the world,” said a report by the Economist Intelligence Unit called The GCC in 2020, which was released last week.
“Much will depend on the extent to which the young population can be harnessed as an effective labour force.”
That goal dovetails with one of YPJ’s lead sponsors. Silatech, an organisation created by Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned in 2008, engages public, private and civil society sectors to create jobs and opportunities for Arab youth.
“This helps young people inside Qatar that give back to Qatari society and enhance its growth,” said Ahmed Younis, director of strategic partnerships and communications at Silatech. “It’s important for the development and growth of the Middle East and North Africa region to be sure young people have a robust set of skills in journalism, public policy, and writing, and this is what we’re hoping to achieve.”
More than half of the YPJ students are Arab, 15 per cent to 20 per cent of whom are Qatari nationals. About 40 per cent are from South Asia, along with a handful of westerners. The initiative will also train 20 students with special needs from The Shaffallah School.
“This is the way the world works today, with people from all different places working together,” said Ms Widén, who put advertisements for the initiative in local Arabic and English-language newspapers. “We want all these different students to be integrated.”
Still, students will learn writing and interviewing skills, the role of a reporter and the value of news. The first class began with the basics – “What is Journalism?” – and ended with an assignment: write the five Ws (who, what, when, where, why) about a recent event.
The Palestinian triplets Yosra, Mohammad and Latifa, all 14, left class together, notebooks in hand. “We want to know more about newspapers, how they work,” said Latifa. She is doing her assignment on natural disasters, while her sister Yosra will focus on crime.
Their brother could not decide what to write about, then he brightened. “I know,” said Mohammad. “I’m going to write about the Algeria-Egypt football match.”
-- originally appeared Friday, 27 Nov 2009, in the National (www.thenational.ae).
12.01.2009
Dubai is Good
The Burj Dubai sticks out from the city's skyline like a raised middle finger. Head, shoulders, torso and waist above all comers, the tower tells off legions of Dubai doubters. Indeed the building, which opens in January, is so tall as to be ludicrous. I first saw it from the plane as we prepared to land, and more than anything it looked like a creation beyond human capability, it rose so high, so sharply, piercing the sky like something out of a sci-fi movie. That the tower is stunning, a feat of both imagination and engineering, awe-inspiring and a wonder to behold is without question. But now that Dubai World has defaulted on its debt, the narrative of this Gulf city's glorious rise to global prominence -- as a financial center, a playground for the rich and adventurous, a laboratory for new ideas on architecture and urban planning -- and the meaning of the Burj have taken a darker turn.
A writer friend of mine, responding to mostly unfounded rumors that the foundation of the Burj had long since cracked, called the tower "the height of hypocrisy -- a most apt symbol for the city." Of course the Burj is a metaphor, but of what is as yet unclear. It's unlikely to become the Titanic, for one. Westerners seeking high salaries, ideal weather and the good life will continue to wash up on these shores.
Abu Dhabi will most likely bolster its economy and Dubai the dream will move on - and thank god for that. For Dubai is both a positive force in an unsettled Muslim world and a much-needed poverty reduction machine. Its economy is about as liberal and market-friendly as they get. Its government, although monarchic, is more laissez faire than any from Pakistan to Morocco -- and Muslims are all too aware of this. Ask any non-radical across the Muslim World where he'd like to go on holiday, or for the duration, and you'll likely hear "Dubai" within the first few options. Perhaps more importantly, there are few better places for developing world poor to go looking for work and success. The majority of Dubai's population is not Emirati, nor is it predominantly Western-expats splashing out for pads in Jumeirah beach. This city is comprised of mostly Indians and Bangladeshis, Nepalis, Pakistanis and Fillipinos -- people from poor countries who've come looking for a better life, and mostly found it.
Still, with its reputation tarnished, its leadership chastened in the wake of the debt default, Dubai must now move out of its adolescence. Most likely, the opening of the Burj Dubai will represent the end of an era, and an awakening -- the moment Dubai accepted its mortality, stepped back from the brink and steadied itself.
11.22.2009
A Glimpse of Doha
Having a hard time picturing Doha? This might help.
Envision Las Vegas, a city of gleaming towers rising from the dunes. Add a decent expanse of moderate to low-slung housing stretching inland and southward around a grand, C-shaped bay (some say the city's name comes from dohat, Arabic for bay, while others believe it's a derivation of ad dhawa, for "big tree"). Encircling this bay is the Corniche, a two-mile long pedestrian promenade that skirts the glistening Gulf waters past the rocking dhows in the harbor and terminates at I.M. Pei's glorious new Museum of Islamic Art (it's a gorgeous building, fantastically well placed on its own tiny peninsula jutting into the Gulf -- it changes color during the day, depending on the angle of the sun's rays, and it feels both ancient and new. The inside is less spectacular, mainly broad open spaces, but I've yet to take a good look at the collection, was there only for a couple screenings and discussions during the Doha Tribeca Film Festival. One very neat-o thing about it is that it's also a woman in a niqab -- the two windows at the top are shaped much like a woman's eye slits in a niqab. Find a picture online and you'll see what I mean). The Corniche is Doha's Las Ramblas, its Champs-Elysees, although nowhere near as appealing or popular. Still, on any evening you will find joggers from three or four continents, Indian families dangling toes into the water, various Arab men smoking cigarettes and couples from everywhere but Qatar leisurely taking in the view.
Otherwise, imagine wide boulevards and dull highways linking glass-walled apartment buildings and five-star hotels, strip malls with foreign franchises of retail, fast food, autos, banking, travel and anything else a consumer bursting with cash might desire. For Qatar is the world's greatest supplier of liquid natural gas, and there's really been no recession here -- Qatar's economy is among the world's fastest growing. The government is predicting 16 percent growth next year and few are disputing. Its per capita income is in the vicinity of $80,000, highest in the world -- but keep in mind there aren't many capitas here.
Qatari citizens make up less than 20 percent of Qatar's total population, which is around 1.3 million. Other Arabs -- mainly from Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Jordan -- make up another 20 percent, followed by Western expats at maybe 15 percent. Then at last we have the immigrant laborers, mostly from South Asia and the Phillipines, who work endless hours in the searing heat and the dead of night, raising buildings, who clean and park cars, tend gardens, run restaurants and serve food -- they make up around 40 percent of the population of Qatar. Doha is rather international: at a mid-level cafe or restaurant – not too swish, not too dhaba, perhaps in a mall or the made-to-look-old Souq Waqif – you'll see an Indian family, a group of Jordanians chatting over tea, a few Qatari men in their dishdashas and thobes and a smattering of Western professionals all minding their own business and feeling relatively at home. Foreigners seem quite comfortable in Qatar, perhaps because they sort of own the place.
But in reality they will never own any of its great wealth. Foreigners cannot become citizens in Qatar, much like the other wealthy emirates and kingdoms in the Gulf. These governments prefer to distribute the booty to as few people as possible.
Despite being on the edge of the desert, there's not much sand here because it's all covered up with concrete. The women, too, are generally covered -- you can tell Qatari women because they were the niqab, generally, or at least the full body and head-cover black with exposed face. Many of them do glamorize the look with makeup and earrings and pastel designs along the cuffs and hem. Most other Muslim women generally wear a headscarf over their hair, but a lot don't. And the Western women wear nearly whatever they want -- I've seen tight jeans and short skirts and cleavage, surprisingly. Westerners make good money working for big business, finance and oil and consulting and airlines and banking and the like, live in very nice apartments, drive sleek cars and dine and dance at the fancy restaurants and bars within 5-star foreign brand hotels like the W, Ramada, Four Seasons, Intercontinental and Sheraton.
Envision Las Vegas, a city of gleaming towers rising from the dunes. Add a decent expanse of moderate to low-slung housing stretching inland and southward around a grand, C-shaped bay (some say the city's name comes from dohat, Arabic for bay, while others believe it's a derivation of ad dhawa, for "big tree"). Encircling this bay is the Corniche, a two-mile long pedestrian promenade that skirts the glistening Gulf waters past the rocking dhows in the harbor and terminates at I.M. Pei's glorious new Museum of Islamic Art (it's a gorgeous building, fantastically well placed on its own tiny peninsula jutting into the Gulf -- it changes color during the day, depending on the angle of the sun's rays, and it feels both ancient and new. The inside is less spectacular, mainly broad open spaces, but I've yet to take a good look at the collection, was there only for a couple screenings and discussions during the Doha Tribeca Film Festival. One very neat-o thing about it is that it's also a woman in a niqab -- the two windows at the top are shaped much like a woman's eye slits in a niqab. Find a picture online and you'll see what I mean). The Corniche is Doha's Las Ramblas, its Champs-Elysees, although nowhere near as appealing or popular. Still, on any evening you will find joggers from three or four continents, Indian families dangling toes into the water, various Arab men smoking cigarettes and couples from everywhere but Qatar leisurely taking in the view.
Otherwise, imagine wide boulevards and dull highways linking glass-walled apartment buildings and five-star hotels, strip malls with foreign franchises of retail, fast food, autos, banking, travel and anything else a consumer bursting with cash might desire. For Qatar is the world's greatest supplier of liquid natural gas, and there's really been no recession here -- Qatar's economy is among the world's fastest growing. The government is predicting 16 percent growth next year and few are disputing. Its per capita income is in the vicinity of $80,000, highest in the world -- but keep in mind there aren't many capitas here.
Qatari citizens make up less than 20 percent of Qatar's total population, which is around 1.3 million. Other Arabs -- mainly from Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Jordan -- make up another 20 percent, followed by Western expats at maybe 15 percent. Then at last we have the immigrant laborers, mostly from South Asia and the Phillipines, who work endless hours in the searing heat and the dead of night, raising buildings, who clean and park cars, tend gardens, run restaurants and serve food -- they make up around 40 percent of the population of Qatar. Doha is rather international: at a mid-level cafe or restaurant – not too swish, not too dhaba, perhaps in a mall or the made-to-look-old Souq Waqif – you'll see an Indian family, a group of Jordanians chatting over tea, a few Qatari men in their dishdashas and thobes and a smattering of Western professionals all minding their own business and feeling relatively at home. Foreigners seem quite comfortable in Qatar, perhaps because they sort of own the place.
But in reality they will never own any of its great wealth. Foreigners cannot become citizens in Qatar, much like the other wealthy emirates and kingdoms in the Gulf. These governments prefer to distribute the booty to as few people as possible.
Despite being on the edge of the desert, there's not much sand here because it's all covered up with concrete. The women, too, are generally covered -- you can tell Qatari women because they were the niqab, generally, or at least the full body and head-cover black with exposed face. Many of them do glamorize the look with makeup and earrings and pastel designs along the cuffs and hem. Most other Muslim women generally wear a headscarf over their hair, but a lot don't. And the Western women wear nearly whatever they want -- I've seen tight jeans and short skirts and cleavage, surprisingly. Westerners make good money working for big business, finance and oil and consulting and airlines and banking and the like, live in very nice apartments, drive sleek cars and dine and dance at the fancy restaurants and bars within 5-star foreign brand hotels like the W, Ramada, Four Seasons, Intercontinental and Sheraton.
Qatar puts on a show
Doha// Brazil snatched Saturday's much-anticipated friendly from England 1-0, but the real winner may have been Qatar.
Despite 50,000 fans from around the Gulf cheering, dancing and chanting in a sold out Khalifa International Stadium, much of the action took place off the pitch. Match organizers Al Jazeera Sports and the Qatar Football Association spent some 5 million pounds to lure two top teams, build an entertainment center and display Qatar's readiness to host the 2022 World Cup, which would be the first ever in the Middle East.
“Everything has been very efficient,” Pat Brogan, a 42-year-old salon owner from London, said before the game. “Qatar Airways was fantastic. The transport has been good. The stadium's gorgeous and everybody has been very nice.”
Brogan and his friend Ricky Darcy have followed their team across several continents and had rarely been treated so well. “In some countries we were cordoned off and separated,” said Darcy, a 37-year-old social worker, referring to England fans' reputation for hooliganism. “In Slovakia we were greeted off the plane by policemen with big dogs. But this, this is the way it should be.”
But questions remained about whether this country of 1.3 million people – and only 250,000 Qataris – could handle the demands of hosting the world's most popular sports championship.
“In terms of infrastructure, I think they could handle a World Cup here,” said Mustafa Ramadan, an English citizen who recently moved to Doha to work as a schoolteacher.
His compatriots were less optimistic. “I can't understand how they could possibly do it,” said Brogan. “They've got one good stadium and a lot of desert.”
As part of the bid, the government plans to build at least two new stadiums in addition to Khalifa: the 86,000-seat National Stadium, to be built as part of the $5billion Lusail City project, and the Doha Port Stadium, a smaller, modular sports stadium with seating for 43,000.
Qatar's 2022 bid is aiming for “a completely new type of World Cup.” While previous cups have been played in up to eight cities, all the events for the Qatar tournament would take place in and around Doha. Organizers say a more compact event will save teams the hassle of constant travel and offer fans the opportunity to see more than one match per day.
Before Saturday's match, fans thronged the Fanzone, an 18,000 square foot festival set up outside the stadium. It included Brazilian, Qatari and English food stands, live music, a mini beach-football pitch, camel rides and face painting.
“This is fantastic,” said Steve Collins, 43, an Australian living in Doha for a year. He came with his wife, a friend and her two children. “This opens up Qatar to the whole world. They should do something like this every weekend.”
A traditional Brazilian Batucada drum band led dozens of fans dancing down the main thoroughfare. Kids played the latest FIFA Soccer video game on a 12' foot screen and a quartet of Buckingham Palace guards marched smartly about the grounds.
“It's been really nice so far,” said Camilla Delboni, a 23-year-old Brazilian who works on an oil rig near Doha. “They brought Brazil here to play – that's very good. But I don't think they could host the World Cup – it's too hot here during the summer.”
A key aspect of the bid is the use of low-carbon cooling technology to control temperatures in outdoor stadiums and practice facilities during the Gulf's broasting summer months. Along with modular tournament sites, after the World Cup this technology would be passed on to other Arab countries looking to improve their football and sports infrastructure.
“For this one match, they've done fine," said Waleed Al Harbi, a 30-year-old Saudi. “But during the World Cup it's different; where's the after party going to be?”
One key party to the bid is Mohammad bin Hammam, a Qatari who is president of the Asian Football Confederation and an influential member of FIFA's Exective Committee. Bin Hammam led the teams onto the field for Saturday's match, and recently spoke out in support of England's bid for the 2018 World Cup. Many believe he did so on the assumption that England will return the favor for Qatar's 2022 bid.
That support needs to come soon. Completed official bid books must be submitted to FIFA by next May and the hosts of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups will be named in December 2010.
This weekend likely boosted the Qatari bid – to what extent is unclear. On the Fanzone “Wall of Support” spirits ran high. “Good luck for Qatar!” wrote one backer. They may need it.
-- an edited version of this story appeared 18 Nov in The National (www.thenational.ae)
11.20.2009
Qatar school reforms pass test
By David Lepeska
Doha // Qatari first lady Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al Missned launched this week’s inaugural WISE Summit with clear objectives. “Innovation in education should become an achievable and executable process,” she told hundreds of educators, academics and experts gathered here to discuss the future of education. “Innovation stems from the society and is not imposed on it – it should therefore be a part of the identity of educational institutions."
Innovation may soon be part of the scholastic identity in Qatar, where an ambitious, six-year-old reform programme has begun bearing fruit. In several dozen new government-run schools teachers have shown greater engagement and students tested higher than peers at standard public schools.
“The reform has achieved important successes in its early years,” said a study released this month by the Rand Corporation. “Independent schools have been showing clear progress in applying new student-centred curriculum and teaching methods.”
In a region with few high-achieving school systems, and millions of knowledge-hungry youths, this tiny nation’s new schools offer hope.
The seeds of Qatar’s billion-dollar reform programme, “Education for a New Era”, were planted in 2001. At that time, some 70,000 K-12 (kindergarten through 12th grade) students attended government financed and operated public schools that could impart the basics but little more.
Seeking to better prepare Qataris for post-secondary education and careers in a globalised economy, the government tasked the Rand Corporation, a US think tank, to analyse its schools and make recommendations.
Rand found a woeful public school system and laid out three options for reform. Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani chose the most ambitious – a comprehensive structural reform that would encourage innovation, accountability and variety within independently managed, publicly funded independent schools – and asked Rand to help implement the programme.
Advisers from the Centre for British Teachers and the US-based Charter Schools Development Center helped new school managers design learning programmes and developed an advanced curriculum centred on Arabic, English, science and mathematics. In 2004, the first dozen schools opened their doors. Increased demand led to the opening of a few dozen more schools by 2006.
Progress followed. “This is just a much better learning environment,” said Jan Wilson, director of professional development at Qatar’s new Supreme Education Council (SEC), which runs the independent schools. After 15 years helping the United Nations rebuild school systems in war-torn countries, she joined the SEC in 2003 and helped replace the traditional school system.
A two-year study by the Rand-Qatar Policy Institute, a joint partnership between Rand and the Qatar Foundation, was released last month and describes more demanding yet more supportive classrooms.
“The leadership teams are well-trained and have a good understanding of what they have to do and the teachers are much more secure and knowledgeable,” added Ms Wilson, pointing out the value of the annual assessment tests given to all students at the new schools. “The tests show a year-on-year improvement across the schools.”
At the Abu Baker Asdeeq Independent School, a boys’ middle school in Doha, the conference room shelves are lined with row upon row of binders – comprehensive profiles of all 650 students. Some 70 per cent are Qatari, according to the vice principal, Fareed Yaghi, and the rest from neighbouring countries.
“Everything is different from the other school,” said Abdullah Yousef Deyab, 14, an Abu Baker 9th-grader who attended a ministry-run school until a few years ago. “The students, the teachers, the whole way of learning – this school is much better.” The teenager is not sure what profession he would like to pursue, but he wants to study at a US university.
That’s a possibility. The number of Qatari students in the US increased by 35 per cent in 2008 – the fastest growth rate in the Gulf, according to the latest Open Doors Report from the New York-based International Institute for Education. About 1,000 Qataris are now studying at US institutions within the US and at Education City in Doha. Some of these students graduated from Qatar’s new independent schools.
Yet Qatar’s success remains a regional exception. “The divide between education and employment has not been bridged and the quality of education continues to be disappointing,” said a 2008 World Bank report on education reform in the Middle East and North Africa. “Despite considerable growth in the level of educational attainment, there continues to be an ‘education gap’ with other regions.”
Qatar’s 106 independent schools have begun narrowing that gap. The government eliminated the ministry of education and by September next year, will have also eliminated all its traditional public schools. By that time, the SEC will be operating 180 independent schools, with the possibility of more to come.
Yet the initiative has not been perfect. School leaders have had difficulty explaining to parents how their schools differ from traditional public schools.
Too many policy changes have slowed administrative progress, and classes in English have lagged because of little proficiency among teachers and students.
Most troublesome has been a shortage of Qatari teachers. “Local capacity is limited by numbers,” said Ms Wilson. “There are just not enough Qatari teachers in the country.” She has partnered with Qatar University to attract more, but that’s not the only hurdle.
Female Qataris are willing to teach in part because it provides a secure, gender-segregated workplace. Qatari males take a different view. “Qatari men just don’t want to teach,” said Fareed Yaghi, vice principal of Abu Baker, where six of the 50 teachers are Qatari.
That may change as the independent schools take root. For now, Qatari educators must content themselves with small, daily revelations. “Today the student parliament requested more time for exams, they told me one hour is too short,” Mr Yaghi said. “I’ll have to talk to the teachers – they may be right.”
-- originally appeared 20 Nov 2009, in The National (www.thenational.ae)
Doha // Qatari first lady Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al Missned launched this week’s inaugural WISE Summit with clear objectives. “Innovation in education should become an achievable and executable process,” she told hundreds of educators, academics and experts gathered here to discuss the future of education. “Innovation stems from the society and is not imposed on it – it should therefore be a part of the identity of educational institutions."
Innovation may soon be part of the scholastic identity in Qatar, where an ambitious, six-year-old reform programme has begun bearing fruit. In several dozen new government-run schools teachers have shown greater engagement and students tested higher than peers at standard public schools.
“The reform has achieved important successes in its early years,” said a study released this month by the Rand Corporation. “Independent schools have been showing clear progress in applying new student-centred curriculum and teaching methods.”
In a region with few high-achieving school systems, and millions of knowledge-hungry youths, this tiny nation’s new schools offer hope.
The seeds of Qatar’s billion-dollar reform programme, “Education for a New Era”, were planted in 2001. At that time, some 70,000 K-12 (kindergarten through 12th grade) students attended government financed and operated public schools that could impart the basics but little more.
Seeking to better prepare Qataris for post-secondary education and careers in a globalised economy, the government tasked the Rand Corporation, a US think tank, to analyse its schools and make recommendations.
Rand found a woeful public school system and laid out three options for reform. Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani chose the most ambitious – a comprehensive structural reform that would encourage innovation, accountability and variety within independently managed, publicly funded independent schools – and asked Rand to help implement the programme.
Advisers from the Centre for British Teachers and the US-based Charter Schools Development Center helped new school managers design learning programmes and developed an advanced curriculum centred on Arabic, English, science and mathematics. In 2004, the first dozen schools opened their doors. Increased demand led to the opening of a few dozen more schools by 2006.
Progress followed. “This is just a much better learning environment,” said Jan Wilson, director of professional development at Qatar’s new Supreme Education Council (SEC), which runs the independent schools. After 15 years helping the United Nations rebuild school systems in war-torn countries, she joined the SEC in 2003 and helped replace the traditional school system.
A two-year study by the Rand-Qatar Policy Institute, a joint partnership between Rand and the Qatar Foundation, was released last month and describes more demanding yet more supportive classrooms.
“The leadership teams are well-trained and have a good understanding of what they have to do and the teachers are much more secure and knowledgeable,” added Ms Wilson, pointing out the value of the annual assessment tests given to all students at the new schools. “The tests show a year-on-year improvement across the schools.”
At the Abu Baker Asdeeq Independent School, a boys’ middle school in Doha, the conference room shelves are lined with row upon row of binders – comprehensive profiles of all 650 students. Some 70 per cent are Qatari, according to the vice principal, Fareed Yaghi, and the rest from neighbouring countries.
“Everything is different from the other school,” said Abdullah Yousef Deyab, 14, an Abu Baker 9th-grader who attended a ministry-run school until a few years ago. “The students, the teachers, the whole way of learning – this school is much better.” The teenager is not sure what profession he would like to pursue, but he wants to study at a US university.
That’s a possibility. The number of Qatari students in the US increased by 35 per cent in 2008 – the fastest growth rate in the Gulf, according to the latest Open Doors Report from the New York-based International Institute for Education. About 1,000 Qataris are now studying at US institutions within the US and at Education City in Doha. Some of these students graduated from Qatar’s new independent schools.
Yet Qatar’s success remains a regional exception. “The divide between education and employment has not been bridged and the quality of education continues to be disappointing,” said a 2008 World Bank report on education reform in the Middle East and North Africa. “Despite considerable growth in the level of educational attainment, there continues to be an ‘education gap’ with other regions.”
Qatar’s 106 independent schools have begun narrowing that gap. The government eliminated the ministry of education and by September next year, will have also eliminated all its traditional public schools. By that time, the SEC will be operating 180 independent schools, with the possibility of more to come.
Yet the initiative has not been perfect. School leaders have had difficulty explaining to parents how their schools differ from traditional public schools.
Too many policy changes have slowed administrative progress, and classes in English have lagged because of little proficiency among teachers and students.
Most troublesome has been a shortage of Qatari teachers. “Local capacity is limited by numbers,” said Ms Wilson. “There are just not enough Qatari teachers in the country.” She has partnered with Qatar University to attract more, but that’s not the only hurdle.
Female Qataris are willing to teach in part because it provides a secure, gender-segregated workplace. Qatari males take a different view. “Qatari men just don’t want to teach,” said Fareed Yaghi, vice principal of Abu Baker, where six of the 50 teachers are Qatari.
That may change as the independent schools take root. For now, Qatari educators must content themselves with small, daily revelations. “Today the student parliament requested more time for exams, they told me one hour is too short,” Mr Yaghi said. “I’ll have to talk to the teachers – they may be right.”
-- originally appeared 20 Nov 2009, in The National (www.thenational.ae)
11.15.2009
A Look at My Place
Some folks have been clamoring for a glimpse of my living conditions here in Doha. Not sure why, exactly, but I thought I'd deliver anyway -- if only to appeal to potential house guests. Come one, come all, anytime after the holidays (I'm heading back to the States for Xmas and New Year's), when Doha is 80 degrees and sunny almost every day, and cool in the evenings.
The living room often looks like this, empty yet welcoming.
This is the ground floor pool, which has a small connected patio. Many an evening you will find me going back and forth from corner to corner lengthwise because it's too short to do laps the normal way. Still it's a cozy little nook, yeah?
And the rooftop pool, nicely tucked away from the world and the perfect spot to while away an afternoon and evening.
The view is not bad either. And when you're surrounded by desert, the sunsets are perfect every night.
Afterwards, the place to go is the Sky View bar at La Cigale, one of the best nightlife spots in the city. Fortunately it's right down the street.
Hope all are well this fine Sunday.
The living room often looks like this, empty yet welcoming.
This is the ground floor pool, which has a small connected patio. Many an evening you will find me going back and forth from corner to corner lengthwise because it's too short to do laps the normal way. Still it's a cozy little nook, yeah?
And the rooftop pool, nicely tucked away from the world and the perfect spot to while away an afternoon and evening.
The view is not bad either. And when you're surrounded by desert, the sunsets are perfect every night.
Afterwards, the place to go is the Sky View bar at La Cigale, one of the best nightlife spots in the city. Fortunately it's right down the street.
Hope all are well this fine Sunday.
11.13.2009
Q & A Show's Value Beyond Debate
By David Lepeska
DOHA // During the question and answer session of this week’s Doha Debates, a Qatari student named Donna stood and asked one of the guest analysts a tough question about political trust, then pressed him to give an honest response. The exchange begged the question: why don’t we have many TV shows like this in the United States?
The thought seems revolutionary. The common wisdom is that it is Arab countries that lag behind, with poor education, little freedom of expression and a dearth of quality entertainment. There is some truth to these beliefs.
But consider that on American television this week, Oprah’s karaoke contest came down to three finalists, Tyra Banks, supermodel turned talk show host, wondered if you’d like to try The Tapeworm Diet, and The Jerry Springer Show asked the eternal question, “My Cousin’s Baby is Yours?”
Yes, US television has some intelligent programming, such as the Emmy-winning The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Charlie Rose on PBS. The BBC, which manages and broadcasts The Doha Debates, is a world leader in news and entertainment programming.
But The Doha Debates is financed entirely by the Qatar Foundation and the majority of its speakers and audience are of Arab origin. It is an Arab production, one that regularly hosts illuminating and often heated discussions on some of the most pressing topics of the day, including extremism, women’s rights and the occupation of Iraq.
It is also closing in on its 50th episode, and with its appeal to the region’s youth, it may be creating a new image of Arab intellectualism.
“In some ways the show has exceeded our expectations,” said the show’s host and founder, Tim Sebastian, who hosted the BBC’s HARDtalk interview show for decades.
The Doha Debates is the BBC’s most popular weekend programme, according to producer Tanya Sakzewski, and the show’s website is among its most visited. This week The Doha Debates rolled out an Arabic-language website, where episodes can be viewed with Arabic subtitles.
At least 2,000 Arab and Qatari students have attended debating classes at QatarDebate, a national debating society established in September 2007 in response to the show’s success. The Qatar Foundation recently launched an Arabic-language student debate show, Lakom Al Karar (“The Decision is Yours”) and Doha will be host to the World Schools Debate Championship in February. Debating clubs have sprung up not just in Doha, but in Saudi Arabia and at a Palestinian university.
This in a region with a rich intellectual history and tradition of debate that many -- especially in the West -- assume has been lost in today's more conservative societies.
“In a sense, this is a giant leap backwards – and that’s a good thing,” added Sebastian. “These young people are questioning, probing, arming themselves with good questions and being dogged about getting answers.”
This week’s motion,“this house trusts Iran not to build a nuclear bomb”, could hardly be more timely. The international community has been pressing Iran on a UN-brokered plan to swap its low-enriched uranium for nuclear fuel. Iran agreed to the deal last month in Vienna but has wavered, hinting that it does not trust western negotiators to keep up their end of the bargain.
The opinions expressed were wide-ranging, belying the “Arab Street” myth of ideological uniformity that lingers in much of the West. “One of the surprising things is Arab diversity, in terms of opinion,” said Sebastian. “We used to be able to tell by dress how people would vote. Now we rarely have any idea.”
Iran and its nuclear ambitions have long been a grave concern in the Gulf. Arguing for the motion, Mr Marandi placed Iran’s nuclear energy programme in the broader framework of breaking the western monopoly on advanced research and technologies.
“We should question the motives of those countries who have and use nuclear weapons,” said Seyyed Mohammad Marandi, head of North American studies at the University of Tehran. “While Iran is the world’s biggest victim of WMD’s, it is very revealing that it has never produced chemical weapons, because Iran deems them immoral.”
An Egyptian student named Rama braved catcalls to voice a potentially controversial query: “How can we trust that any Supreme Leader, present or future, will not issue a fatwa saying it is a Muslim duty to nuke or attack any nation?”
Alireza Nourizadeh, director of the Centre for Arab and Iranian Studies in London, argued against the motion. “How can you trust a government who kills its own people?” he asked.
“Where is your evidence?” asked Sebastian.
“I’m not going to disclose my evidence here,” said Mr Nourizadeh.
“Well then it doesn’t sound very credible, does it?” said Sebastian, earning titters from a studio audience made up mostly of local high school and university students.
That audience seemed to side with Mr Nourizadeh, as 52 per cent voted against the motion. But a Qatari student who voted in favour was unfazed. “I like how this reveals two sides to every question,” said Ahmed al Malik, 18. “We can express both sides, and understand the issues better.”
Sebastian saw the ground shifting.
“You’d be hard-pressed to walk down Oxford Street in London,” he said, “and find students that would rather go debate than spend the day shopping.”
-- edited version appeared in The National, 13 Nov 2009.
DOHA // During the question and answer session of this week’s Doha Debates, a Qatari student named Donna stood and asked one of the guest analysts a tough question about political trust, then pressed him to give an honest response. The exchange begged the question: why don’t we have many TV shows like this in the United States?
The thought seems revolutionary. The common wisdom is that it is Arab countries that lag behind, with poor education, little freedom of expression and a dearth of quality entertainment. There is some truth to these beliefs.
But consider that on American television this week, Oprah’s karaoke contest came down to three finalists, Tyra Banks, supermodel turned talk show host, wondered if you’d like to try The Tapeworm Diet, and The Jerry Springer Show asked the eternal question, “My Cousin’s Baby is Yours?”
Yes, US television has some intelligent programming, such as the Emmy-winning The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Charlie Rose on PBS. The BBC, which manages and broadcasts The Doha Debates, is a world leader in news and entertainment programming.
But The Doha Debates is financed entirely by the Qatar Foundation and the majority of its speakers and audience are of Arab origin. It is an Arab production, one that regularly hosts illuminating and often heated discussions on some of the most pressing topics of the day, including extremism, women’s rights and the occupation of Iraq.
It is also closing in on its 50th episode, and with its appeal to the region’s youth, it may be creating a new image of Arab intellectualism.
“In some ways the show has exceeded our expectations,” said the show’s host and founder, Tim Sebastian, who hosted the BBC’s HARDtalk interview show for decades.
The Doha Debates is the BBC’s most popular weekend programme, according to producer Tanya Sakzewski, and the show’s website is among its most visited. This week The Doha Debates rolled out an Arabic-language website, where episodes can be viewed with Arabic subtitles.
At least 2,000 Arab and Qatari students have attended debating classes at QatarDebate, a national debating society established in September 2007 in response to the show’s success. The Qatar Foundation recently launched an Arabic-language student debate show, Lakom Al Karar (“The Decision is Yours”) and Doha will be host to the World Schools Debate Championship in February. Debating clubs have sprung up not just in Doha, but in Saudi Arabia and at a Palestinian university.
This in a region with a rich intellectual history and tradition of debate that many -- especially in the West -- assume has been lost in today's more conservative societies.
“In a sense, this is a giant leap backwards – and that’s a good thing,” added Sebastian. “These young people are questioning, probing, arming themselves with good questions and being dogged about getting answers.”
This week’s motion,“this house trusts Iran not to build a nuclear bomb”, could hardly be more timely. The international community has been pressing Iran on a UN-brokered plan to swap its low-enriched uranium for nuclear fuel. Iran agreed to the deal last month in Vienna but has wavered, hinting that it does not trust western negotiators to keep up their end of the bargain.
The opinions expressed were wide-ranging, belying the “Arab Street” myth of ideological uniformity that lingers in much of the West. “One of the surprising things is Arab diversity, in terms of opinion,” said Sebastian. “We used to be able to tell by dress how people would vote. Now we rarely have any idea.”
Iran and its nuclear ambitions have long been a grave concern in the Gulf. Arguing for the motion, Mr Marandi placed Iran’s nuclear energy programme in the broader framework of breaking the western monopoly on advanced research and technologies.
“We should question the motives of those countries who have and use nuclear weapons,” said Seyyed Mohammad Marandi, head of North American studies at the University of Tehran. “While Iran is the world’s biggest victim of WMD’s, it is very revealing that it has never produced chemical weapons, because Iran deems them immoral.”
An Egyptian student named Rama braved catcalls to voice a potentially controversial query: “How can we trust that any Supreme Leader, present or future, will not issue a fatwa saying it is a Muslim duty to nuke or attack any nation?”
Alireza Nourizadeh, director of the Centre for Arab and Iranian Studies in London, argued against the motion. “How can you trust a government who kills its own people?” he asked.
“Where is your evidence?” asked Sebastian.
“I’m not going to disclose my evidence here,” said Mr Nourizadeh.
“Well then it doesn’t sound very credible, does it?” said Sebastian, earning titters from a studio audience made up mostly of local high school and university students.
That audience seemed to side with Mr Nourizadeh, as 52 per cent voted against the motion. But a Qatari student who voted in favour was unfazed. “I like how this reveals two sides to every question,” said Ahmed al Malik, 18. “We can express both sides, and understand the issues better.”
Sebastian saw the ground shifting.
“You’d be hard-pressed to walk down Oxford Street in London,” he said, “and find students that would rather go debate than spend the day shopping.”
-- edited version appeared in The National, 13 Nov 2009.
11.08.2009
The Doha Story Begins
So I'm here. I think. Hard to tell I've arrived because, well, Doha can look pretty familiar to an American. On my street alone I've got a heart attack of US franchises, flashing bright red neon signs in two languages. Chili's is considerably more appealing in Arabic, I'll have you know. You've got your McDonald's and Burger King, Hardee's and the like, but the group includes a few I wouldn't expect (Dairy Queen? Johnny Rockets?? Ponderosa?!). The streets are relatively neat and tidy, the buildings dutifully scrape the sky, the doormen are deferential and the bars are filled with beer-swilling, sports-watching professional types.
So you stroll into H&M to look into some duds and you notice a group of veiled women waiting in line to buy their clo...Wait. Where am I? Oh, right, the Gulf. Where all of these cities -- yes, I'm looking at you, Dubai, and you, too, Abu Dhabi; Sharjah and Manama you can join in as well -- are competing to be the most seductive port of call for international bankers and glamorous stars of sport and film, media power players and wealthy businessmen of all stripes. The Gulf may be the only region in the world where the leadership is consciously and purposefully building castles not for the use and improvement of its own citizens but for the delectation of the foreign hordes. Not a moment too soon, either -- about three-fourths of Doha is foreign-born. And here I've come. Am I impressed? Am I enjoying it? Has it bowled me over? Eh.
Which reminds me, what am I doing here? Oh right, the journalism, the reporting, finding stories and sniffing out leads and making contacts and getting the answers. I've done a little of that:
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091103/FOREIGN/711029818
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091108/FOREIGN/711079920
And I'll do more. But for now I'm just trying to get my bearings. What helped most we're the eye-rolling, drool-inducing, try-one-and-you-must-eat-ten kebabs in Souq Waqif. Al Hateem restaurant you have rescued Doha from every-place hell, and I thank you heartily. Shabu W Masa you can take a bow as well, but your franchising ways have me doubting your authenticity. I'm watching you.
Some more images from the first fortnight (I took these with my phone, apologies for the poor quality -- I'll be busting out my camera soon enough):
A shot of "The Mummy" in Souq Waqif, a fantastic old Egyptian flick screened during the Doha Tribeca Film Festival in a great open square abutting the old market in downtown Doha.
A view of West Bay, or the Towers, as their known, from across the bay. Like little boys, they grow taller every day.
At the supermarket Carrefour, above each produce selection is a sign telling you the country in which it was grown. European varieties, you can see, are a bit more costly than those from the developing world - three times more expensive in this case. Predictably, immigrant laborers take the cheaper varieties, and Western expats go with what they know. Qataris? Well they do like their status symbols.
The Villaggio Mall replicates a Venetian street scene. This is indoors -- see the H&M to the left, and you might be able to make out the clouds and blue sky painted on the ceiling, in the upper left corner. This canal is plied all day and evening by what may be the world's only motorized gondola. Even in Vegas the gondoliers actually propel the boat. Not here. But that doesn't deter the steady stream of ride seekers.
So you stroll into H&M to look into some duds and you notice a group of veiled women waiting in line to buy their clo...Wait. Where am I? Oh, right, the Gulf. Where all of these cities -- yes, I'm looking at you, Dubai, and you, too, Abu Dhabi; Sharjah and Manama you can join in as well -- are competing to be the most seductive port of call for international bankers and glamorous stars of sport and film, media power players and wealthy businessmen of all stripes. The Gulf may be the only region in the world where the leadership is consciously and purposefully building castles not for the use and improvement of its own citizens but for the delectation of the foreign hordes. Not a moment too soon, either -- about three-fourths of Doha is foreign-born. And here I've come. Am I impressed? Am I enjoying it? Has it bowled me over? Eh.
Which reminds me, what am I doing here? Oh right, the journalism, the reporting, finding stories and sniffing out leads and making contacts and getting the answers. I've done a little of that:
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091103/FOREIGN/711029818
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091108/FOREIGN/711079920
And I'll do more. But for now I'm just trying to get my bearings. What helped most we're the eye-rolling, drool-inducing, try-one-and-you-must-eat-ten kebabs in Souq Waqif. Al Hateem restaurant you have rescued Doha from every-place hell, and I thank you heartily. Shabu W Masa you can take a bow as well, but your franchising ways have me doubting your authenticity. I'm watching you.
Some more images from the first fortnight (I took these with my phone, apologies for the poor quality -- I'll be busting out my camera soon enough):
A shot of "The Mummy" in Souq Waqif, a fantastic old Egyptian flick screened during the Doha Tribeca Film Festival in a great open square abutting the old market in downtown Doha.
A view of West Bay, or the Towers, as their known, from across the bay. Like little boys, they grow taller every day.
At the supermarket Carrefour, above each produce selection is a sign telling you the country in which it was grown. European varieties, you can see, are a bit more costly than those from the developing world - three times more expensive in this case. Predictably, immigrant laborers take the cheaper varieties, and Western expats go with what they know. Qataris? Well they do like their status symbols.
The Villaggio Mall replicates a Venetian street scene. This is indoors -- see the H&M to the left, and you might be able to make out the clouds and blue sky painted on the ceiling, in the upper left corner. This canal is plied all day and evening by what may be the world's only motorized gondola. Even in Vegas the gondoliers actually propel the boat. Not here. But that doesn't deter the steady stream of ride seekers.
10.05.2009
Sustainable Cities Are the Solution
Recent op-ed for The Guardian (London):
Despite our romantic ideas about nature, it will be well-run, energy-efficient cities that ultimately save us from ourselves
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled a $25m, energy-efficient office building on the Brooklyn waterfront a few months back. The Perry Avenue Building features solar panels, rainwater-fed toilets and six rooftop windmills, which will produce 10% of its energy supply. "Wind power in this city," said the mayor, "is one of the solutions to our problem."
That problem – devising more sustainable cities – has rightfully drawn a great deal of attention of late. In February, Barack Obama created the White House office of urban affairs and quickly set about staffing it with experienced urban planners, to complement what many have called his "green dream team" on environmental policy.
Earlier this year in Strasburg, Obama acknowledged that the US bears the brunt of the responsibility for climate change. Combined with nearly $50bn in infrastructure spending in the stimulus package, the new administration's emphasis on building better cities is clear.
As for New York, the new Brooklyn building is part of a $250m programme to make Brooklyn's Navy Yard a hub for green industry, just one aspect of the mayor's broader plan to make the city more eco-friendly. When he launched PlanNYC two years ago, Bloomberg pointed out that the world's cities were responsible for 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Former US president Bill Clinton and UN officials have quoted the same figure.
This bit of data would mean city dwellers emit nearly four times as much as their rural counterparts. (The UN estimates that humanity became more urban than rural in 2008. Right now, the global populations of urban and rural folk are roughly the same.) Put another way, living in a city is almost four times as polluting as living outside of one.
Thankfully, the figure turns out to be wildly inaccurate.
The carbon footprint of urban dwellers is relatively light, says a report by David Dodman in the April issue of Environment and Urbanisation. Dodman, a researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development, examined emissions reports from cities in the Americas, Asia and Europe.
He found that New Yorkers emit a third less greenhouse gases than the average American and that Barcelonans and Londoners emit about half of their national averages. And urban Brazilians are truly green: the residents of Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro are responsible for only one-third the national emissions average. Dodman's paper complements an earlier study by IIED senior fellow David Satterthwaite, who argued that cities emit about 40% of all greenhouse gases, as opposed to the oft-cited 80%.
On average, then, people who live in small towns and rural areas emit 50% more greenhouse gases than city folk. That cities may be part of the solution, however, does not mean that efforts like Bloomberg's PlanNYC are misplaced. Precisely the opposite is true.
By 2050, some 70% of us will live in urban settings, and it will ultimately be well-managed urban environments, with smart, energy-efficient buildings, power systems, transport and planning, that will save us from ourselves. Seeking better ways to do precisely that, a constellation of designers, architects and academics gathered at a conference on "ecological urbanism" at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design earlier this year.
Mitchell Joachim, who teaches architecture and design at Columbia University and was selected by Wired magazine as one of 15 people Obama should listen to, presented his vision for a collapsible and stackable electric city car, which would hang at public recharging stations, available for shared use.
He also explained "meat tectonics". Aiming to use meat proteins developed in a lab as building material, Joachim presented a digital rendering of an armadillo-shaped, kidney-coloured home. "It's very ugly, we know that," he said. "We're not sure what a meat house is supposed to look like."
Dorothee Imbert, associate professor in landscape architecture at Harvard, pointed to urban farming, a trend that has taken root in Detroit, New York, Milwaukee and a handful of international cities. Imbert mentioned her own student-assisted organic farms in Boston, yet acknowledged that adequate food supplies for future cities "would require rethinking of landscape in the building process".
Pritzker-winning Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas is thinking regionally. The Harvard professor and designer of the MC Escher-esque CCTV building in Beijing talked about his Zeekracht ("sea power" in Dutch), a plan for oceanic wind farms across the North Sea that would provide energy to much of northern Europe. With its constant high winds, shallow waters and advanced renewable industries, Koolhaas believes the North Sea offers energy potential approaching that of Persian Gulf oil.
His plan, which includes production belts in a half-dozen urban centres on or near the sea, energy cooperation and clean-tech research centres, is the type of project that, ideally, will both preserve green spaces and increase urban sustainability.
Another is a recently approved high-speed rail project in California, which will link that state's southern and northern hubs. Obama's stimulus package contains $8bn for high-speed and urban rail projects. That amount is nowhere near enough to install networks on a European scale, but, like windmills on the Brooklyn waterfront, it's a step in the right direction.
Henry David Thoreau moved to Walden Pond "to live deliberately", as he put it. But shortly thereafter the American naturalist and philosopher accidentally burned over a hundred acres of pristine Massachusetts woodlands. We can no longer afford to be like Thoreau. If we want to continue to romanticise our natural world, we, as a civilisation, must also avoid it.
Despite our romantic ideas about nature, it will be well-run, energy-efficient cities that ultimately save us from ourselves
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled a $25m, energy-efficient office building on the Brooklyn waterfront a few months back. The Perry Avenue Building features solar panels, rainwater-fed toilets and six rooftop windmills, which will produce 10% of its energy supply. "Wind power in this city," said the mayor, "is one of the solutions to our problem."
That problem – devising more sustainable cities – has rightfully drawn a great deal of attention of late. In February, Barack Obama created the White House office of urban affairs and quickly set about staffing it with experienced urban planners, to complement what many have called his "green dream team" on environmental policy.
Earlier this year in Strasburg, Obama acknowledged that the US bears the brunt of the responsibility for climate change. Combined with nearly $50bn in infrastructure spending in the stimulus package, the new administration's emphasis on building better cities is clear.
As for New York, the new Brooklyn building is part of a $250m programme to make Brooklyn's Navy Yard a hub for green industry, just one aspect of the mayor's broader plan to make the city more eco-friendly. When he launched PlanNYC two years ago, Bloomberg pointed out that the world's cities were responsible for 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Former US president Bill Clinton and UN officials have quoted the same figure.
This bit of data would mean city dwellers emit nearly four times as much as their rural counterparts. (The UN estimates that humanity became more urban than rural in 2008. Right now, the global populations of urban and rural folk are roughly the same.) Put another way, living in a city is almost four times as polluting as living outside of one.
Thankfully, the figure turns out to be wildly inaccurate.
The carbon footprint of urban dwellers is relatively light, says a report by David Dodman in the April issue of Environment and Urbanisation. Dodman, a researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development, examined emissions reports from cities in the Americas, Asia and Europe.
He found that New Yorkers emit a third less greenhouse gases than the average American and that Barcelonans and Londoners emit about half of their national averages. And urban Brazilians are truly green: the residents of Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro are responsible for only one-third the national emissions average. Dodman's paper complements an earlier study by IIED senior fellow David Satterthwaite, who argued that cities emit about 40% of all greenhouse gases, as opposed to the oft-cited 80%.
On average, then, people who live in small towns and rural areas emit 50% more greenhouse gases than city folk. That cities may be part of the solution, however, does not mean that efforts like Bloomberg's PlanNYC are misplaced. Precisely the opposite is true.
By 2050, some 70% of us will live in urban settings, and it will ultimately be well-managed urban environments, with smart, energy-efficient buildings, power systems, transport and planning, that will save us from ourselves. Seeking better ways to do precisely that, a constellation of designers, architects and academics gathered at a conference on "ecological urbanism" at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design earlier this year.
Mitchell Joachim, who teaches architecture and design at Columbia University and was selected by Wired magazine as one of 15 people Obama should listen to, presented his vision for a collapsible and stackable electric city car, which would hang at public recharging stations, available for shared use.
He also explained "meat tectonics". Aiming to use meat proteins developed in a lab as building material, Joachim presented a digital rendering of an armadillo-shaped, kidney-coloured home. "It's very ugly, we know that," he said. "We're not sure what a meat house is supposed to look like."
Dorothee Imbert, associate professor in landscape architecture at Harvard, pointed to urban farming, a trend that has taken root in Detroit, New York, Milwaukee and a handful of international cities. Imbert mentioned her own student-assisted organic farms in Boston, yet acknowledged that adequate food supplies for future cities "would require rethinking of landscape in the building process".
Pritzker-winning Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas is thinking regionally. The Harvard professor and designer of the MC Escher-esque CCTV building in Beijing talked about his Zeekracht ("sea power" in Dutch), a plan for oceanic wind farms across the North Sea that would provide energy to much of northern Europe. With its constant high winds, shallow waters and advanced renewable industries, Koolhaas believes the North Sea offers energy potential approaching that of Persian Gulf oil.
His plan, which includes production belts in a half-dozen urban centres on or near the sea, energy cooperation and clean-tech research centres, is the type of project that, ideally, will both preserve green spaces and increase urban sustainability.
Another is a recently approved high-speed rail project in California, which will link that state's southern and northern hubs. Obama's stimulus package contains $8bn for high-speed and urban rail projects. That amount is nowhere near enough to install networks on a European scale, but, like windmills on the Brooklyn waterfront, it's a step in the right direction.
Henry David Thoreau moved to Walden Pond "to live deliberately", as he put it. But shortly thereafter the American naturalist and philosopher accidentally burned over a hundred acres of pristine Massachusetts woodlands. We can no longer afford to be like Thoreau. If we want to continue to romanticise our natural world, we, as a civilisation, must also avoid it.
Games Lessons
My latest Economist story, from Sept 3rd issue:
It sounds like a cop-out, but the future of schooling may lie with video games
SINCE the beginning of mass education, schools have relied on what is known in educational circles as “chalk and talk”. Chalk and blackboard may sometimes be replaced by felt-tip pens and a whiteboard, and electronics in the form of computers may sometimes be bolted on, but the idea of a pedagogue leading his pupils more or less willingly through a day based on periods of study of recognisable academic disciplines, such as mathematics, physics, history, geography and whatever the local language happens to be, has rarely been abandoned.
Abandoning it, though, is what Katie Salen hopes to do. Ms Salen is a games designer and a professor of design and technology at Parsons The New School for Design, in New York. She is also the moving spirit behind Quest to Learn, a new, taxpayer-funded school in that city which is about to open its doors to pupils who will never suffer the indignity of snoring through double French but will, rather, spend their entire days playing games.
Quest to Learn draws on many roots. One is the research of James Gee of the University of Wisconsin. In 2003 Dr Gee published a book called “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy”, in which he argued that playing such games helps people develop a sense of identity, grasp meaning, learn to follow commands and even pick role models. Another is the MacArthur Foundation’s digital media and learning initiative, which began in 2006 and which has acted as a test-bed for some of Ms Salen’s ideas about educational-games design. A third is the success of the Bank Street School for Children, an independent primary school in New York that practises what its parent, the nearby Bank Street College of Education, preaches in the way of interdisciplinary teaching methods and the encouragement of pupil collaboration.
Ms Salen is, in effect, seeking to mechanise Bank Street’s methods by transferring much of the pedagogic effort from the teachers themselves (who will now act in an advisory role) to a set of video games that she and her colleagues have devised. Instead of chalk and talk, children learn by doing—and do so in a way that tears up the usual subject-based curriculum altogether.
Periods of maths, science, history and so on are no more. Quest to Learn’s school day will, rather, be divided into four 90-minute blocks devoted to the study of “domains”. Such domains include Codeworlds (a combination of mathematics and English), Being, Space and Place (English and social studies), The Way Things Work (maths and science) and Sports for the Mind (game design and digital literacy). Each domain concludes with a two-week examination called a “Boss Level”—a common phrase in video-game parlance.
In one of the units of Being, Space and Place, for example, pupils take on the role of an ancient Spartan who has to assess Athenian strengths and recommend a course of action. In doing so, they learn bits of history, geography and public policy. In a unit of The Way Things Work, they try to inhabit the minds of scientists devising a pathway for a beam of light to reach a target. This lesson touches on maths, optics—and, the organisers hope, creative thinking and teamwork. Another Way-Things-Work unit asks pupils to imagine they are pyramid-builders in ancient Egypt. This means learning about maths and engineering, and something about the country’s religion and geography.
Whether things will work the way Ms Salen hopes will, itself, take a few years to find out. The school plans to admit pupils at the age of 12 and keep them until they are 18, so the first batch will not leave until 2016. If it fails, traditionalists will no doubt scoff at the idea that teaching through playing games was ever seriously entertained. If it succeeds, though, it will provide a model that could make chalk and talk redundant. And it will have shown that in education, as in other fields of activity, it is not enough just to apply new technologies to existing processes—for maximum effect you have to apply them in new and imaginative ways.
It sounds like a cop-out, but the future of schooling may lie with video games
SINCE the beginning of mass education, schools have relied on what is known in educational circles as “chalk and talk”. Chalk and blackboard may sometimes be replaced by felt-tip pens and a whiteboard, and electronics in the form of computers may sometimes be bolted on, but the idea of a pedagogue leading his pupils more or less willingly through a day based on periods of study of recognisable academic disciplines, such as mathematics, physics, history, geography and whatever the local language happens to be, has rarely been abandoned.
Abandoning it, though, is what Katie Salen hopes to do. Ms Salen is a games designer and a professor of design and technology at Parsons The New School for Design, in New York. She is also the moving spirit behind Quest to Learn, a new, taxpayer-funded school in that city which is about to open its doors to pupils who will never suffer the indignity of snoring through double French but will, rather, spend their entire days playing games.
Quest to Learn draws on many roots. One is the research of James Gee of the University of Wisconsin. In 2003 Dr Gee published a book called “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy”, in which he argued that playing such games helps people develop a sense of identity, grasp meaning, learn to follow commands and even pick role models. Another is the MacArthur Foundation’s digital media and learning initiative, which began in 2006 and which has acted as a test-bed for some of Ms Salen’s ideas about educational-games design. A third is the success of the Bank Street School for Children, an independent primary school in New York that practises what its parent, the nearby Bank Street College of Education, preaches in the way of interdisciplinary teaching methods and the encouragement of pupil collaboration.
Ms Salen is, in effect, seeking to mechanise Bank Street’s methods by transferring much of the pedagogic effort from the teachers themselves (who will now act in an advisory role) to a set of video games that she and her colleagues have devised. Instead of chalk and talk, children learn by doing—and do so in a way that tears up the usual subject-based curriculum altogether.
Periods of maths, science, history and so on are no more. Quest to Learn’s school day will, rather, be divided into four 90-minute blocks devoted to the study of “domains”. Such domains include Codeworlds (a combination of mathematics and English), Being, Space and Place (English and social studies), The Way Things Work (maths and science) and Sports for the Mind (game design and digital literacy). Each domain concludes with a two-week examination called a “Boss Level”—a common phrase in video-game parlance.
In one of the units of Being, Space and Place, for example, pupils take on the role of an ancient Spartan who has to assess Athenian strengths and recommend a course of action. In doing so, they learn bits of history, geography and public policy. In a unit of The Way Things Work, they try to inhabit the minds of scientists devising a pathway for a beam of light to reach a target. This lesson touches on maths, optics—and, the organisers hope, creative thinking and teamwork. Another Way-Things-Work unit asks pupils to imagine they are pyramid-builders in ancient Egypt. This means learning about maths and engineering, and something about the country’s religion and geography.
Whether things will work the way Ms Salen hopes will, itself, take a few years to find out. The school plans to admit pupils at the age of 12 and keep them until they are 18, so the first batch will not leave until 2016. If it fails, traditionalists will no doubt scoff at the idea that teaching through playing games was ever seriously entertained. If it succeeds, though, it will provide a model that could make chalk and talk redundant. And it will have shown that in education, as in other fields of activity, it is not enough just to apply new technologies to existing processes—for maximum effect you have to apply them in new and imaginative ways.
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