Contemporary Urban Centers Through Sports and Religion: Retrofitting Al Khor's Desert Landscape

Abstract

Sports and religion both operate as opiums where they have been historically known to distract people and prevent them from political activism. They share common social implications. They both indoctrinate and are strong forms of identification amongst the self and the many. Both typologies of sports and religion have evolved as congregational spaces that aim to gather and serve large amounts of people. When stadiums are not in proper use, especially as history has shown structures of mega-sporting events such as the Olympics, they become desolate structures that burden cities and are not optimized in terms of viability and feasibility. The investments made for such events are too immense not to be made use of after the tournament. Qatar is set to host a mega-sporting event in 2022; the FIFA World Cup and therefore provides an opportunity for experimentation. In this thesis I try and answer the following question: can the commonalities found between sports and religion, both metaphorically and spatially, be appropriately juxtaposed together to eliminate the current functional and infrastructural redundancy found in stadiums? What are its spatial consequences if any?