Doha Modular Village

Sustainable accommodation for Qatar 2022 World Cup

Doha was selected as the country of choice for the 2022 World Cup, with the country promoting the competition as the first sustainable carbon neutral games. There were several significant challenges in achieving this:

• The extreme heat experienced all year round meant careful considerations for accommodation
• The games will attract many football fans looking for affordable accommodation. For most football tournaments, it has been common to have tented facilities adjacent to stadia. For cultural and religious reasons, this is not practical in Doha.
• 60,000 hotel bedrooms will be required for the event. This is approximately the number of hotel beds currently available in the city of London.
• With £100bn being spent in the run-up to the Games, over 100,000 workers will be needed to build the infrastructure and stadiums. Accommodation will be required for them and with the World Cup in Qatar being under far greater international scrutiny than previous events, safety and quality is imperative.

Our multi-disciplinary proposal to the 2022 Qatar World Cup Committee demonstrated how these issues could be addressed and a viable solution achieved in the most cost effective, sustainable manner. Our proposal of using modular construction to build accommodation for both workers and football fans addressed these requirements.

It also offered the possibility of a positive legacy for Qatar, with opportunities for future use of this accommodation for other purposes in other countries. The importance of the legacy of the World Cup is not taken for granted with this and as such the accommodation blocks can be modified or dismantled as required to suit the needs of future in Qatar.

The welfare of the workers and fans and how the buildings respond to the environment lie at the heart of the proposals and the nature of the modular construction meant that these accommodation blocks could be constructed in a cost effective sustainable way. The proposals demonstrated that the facilities could constructed in any location and remained flexible enough to be modified to provide suitable accommodation for both workers and football fans during construction phase and the event respectively.

Keppie worked closely with Gardiner & Theobald, Ramboll and Caledonian Modular. The latter developed a workers compound in Sullom Voe, Shetland Islands for the Oil and Gas industry, housing over 800 personnel in modular accommodation. This compound also provided dining and recreational facilities along with other worker amenities. Our design utilised this philosophy and built on its principles for the scale of our proposal.