• Built from scratch over the past 20 years, Lusail is a monument to Qatar's ambition and wild excesses.
The World Cup final will take place on Sunday in a giant golden basket of a stadium located in the middle of a futuristic, $45 billion city called Lusail. Twelve miles north of Doha, it comes with skyscrapers, a university, wide-open boulevards and a marina for luxury yachts – all lit up like Petrostate Las Vegas.
Twenty years ago the entire city was nothing more than a pile of sand.
"There was nothing there, it was like a dirt road," said urban planner and architect Brian Genet, who worked on early designs for the city. making it. One in 10, 1 in 20, 1 in 100 such things can happen."
Qatar made sure Lusail did the same. Initially conceived as part of the tiny emirate's Vision 2030 project, designed to diversify the economy and position it as a global player, Lusail was planned as a tourism hub. I went. But when Qatar won the hosting rights for the World Cup in 2010, the late construction of an 89,000-seat stadium gave this new city a new purpose.
Now, as it stages the world's most-watched sporting event on Sunday, Lusail stands as a symbol of Qatar's naked ambition, rapid modernization and its wild excess.
"Basically, we were building a city from scratch," said Abdulrahman Al-Ishaq, Lusail City's master planning manager.
Lusail also serves as a foundation for what Qatar can do next, now that it has successfully organized a functioning World Cup despite years of incredible opposition over its views on the treatment of women, the LGBT population and migrant workers. staged.
Although there were some flashpoints in the first week, including a security overreach involving fans carrying rainbow flags and a sudden decision to ban the sale of beer in and around stadiums two days before the opening game, the tournament went more or less smoothly. .
Considering Qatar's ability to build a city from scratch in the middle of the desert in the span of 15 years, it is hardly surprising that the country was able to organize a 64-game soccer tournament with few operating problems. A new transit system was in the works as planned, and Qatar looked to handle the large influx of foreign visitors who flowed in and out of the country as its workforce rose and fell.
"Thank you to everyone involved, Qatar, all the volunteers, for making this the best World Cup ever," FIFA President Gianni Infantino said on Friday, four years after calling Russia 2018 the best World Cup ever.
Qatar's ambition for Lusail does not stop there. There are already plans to move other high-profile sporting events here. The city will stage knockout matches in next season's AFC Champions League tournament and Formula 1 Grand Prix, while Qatar prepares to host the 2023 Asian Cup and bid for the 2036 Summer Olympics.
As one of the most rapidly modernizing countries on the planet, run by a royal family with total authority and unimaginable wealth, Qatar has been able to invent projects on a scale that few others can imagine or pull off. Let's hope. But with all that wealth comes some degree of absurdity.
Everywhere you turn in Lusail, Qatar has established itself as the pinnacle of extravagance simply because it can. A pair of towers, which houses a luxury hotel, look like a giant pair of horns, although the official interpretation is that they represent a pair of scimitar swords. The billion-dollar mall, designed to look like Paris, comes with its own canal system and hourly laser light show. Hanging over Lusail Boulevard is a 98-foot statue of a whale shark.
This World Cup has tourists blinking under the twinkling lights of Lusail and may have wondered why much of the city exists. Lucille replied, "Why not?" Even the city's original planners were sometimes taken aback by Qatar's requests.
While projects like Lusail may sound like science-fiction, Qatar is not the only Gulf country in the business of building futuristic cities out of nowhere. Saudi Arabia, under the leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has begun work on a $500 billion mega-city project on the Red Sea called NEOM.
Janet said, "You operate in the realm of imaginative, fanciful ideas." amount, the chip on the shoulder that they may have [almost] invisible to most of the rest of the world."
Invisible is something that is not Lusail. Bordered by the sea to the east and the Al Khor Expressway to the west, the city covers approximately 15 square miles and houses 250,000 residents built to live in new skyscrapers, many of which are still under construction. In a country where most citizens spend most of their time driving from place to place, Lusail'
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