The Beginning...

This is my first stab at beginning to tease out what my thesis will become. After spending a semester in Doha, Qatar this past spring, I became interested in the implicit, or at times explicit, segregation of the city on the basis of social class. Having lived and experienced these divisions for a little over four months, I would like to specifically address the division of social space in Doha. These divisions exist at the self-imposed, interpersonal level, for example between myself and some of the maintenance workers at CMUQ, as well as at the urban scale, for instance in Souq Waqif. At this writing, I am interested in a larger-scale urban intervention that addresses issues not only of social class but also climate and the lack of (easy/plausible) pedestrian access to much of the downtown area. My vague and likely naïve initial goal is to mediate and/or make obvious the sometimes unnoticed divisions in the city.