Scaling up Traditional Architecture and Urbanism:
Challenges and Opportunities
Scaling up Traditional Architecture and Urbanism:
Challenges and Opportunities
The Conference
INTBAU Qatar Conference at the Earthna Summit 2025
Date: April 22-23, 2025
Location: Bin Jelmood House, Doha, Qatar
Rethinking Urban Development through Traditional Architecture
Urban development today is shaped by financial imperatives, regulatory frameworks, and technological advancements that often marginalize traditional architecture and urbanism. While today’s planning models prioritize efficiency and short-term economic returns, they may overlook long-term resilience, environmental sustainability, and the socio-cultural fabric of cities. As rapid urbanization accelerates, there is an urgent need to reassess how we define progress in the built environment.
The INTBAU Qatar Conference, held at the Earthna Summit 2025, brings together leading experts, policymakers, architects, and urban economists to critically examine the intersections of traditional architecture, sustainable finance, policy frameworks, and education. These sessions challenge existing development paradigms, questioning whether alternative urban models, that are rooted in place-specific knowledge, human-scale design, and resource efficiency, can offer viable solutions to contemporary challenges.
- Economic Value of Traditional Architecture and Urbanism: Analyzing the long-term financial benefits of traditional urban forms compared to speculative real estate models.
- Policies, Laws, and Regulations: Identifying legal and institutional barriers that marginalize traditional architecture while proposing policy interventions to enable its integration.
- Vocational Training and Educational Programs: Assessing how architectural education has been shaped by mechanized design approaches and discussing pathways for reintroducing craftsmanship, traditional urbanism, and alternative accreditation.
- Bridging Traditional Urbanism and Sustainable Finance: Examining why traditional projects struggle to access funding and how alternative financial instruments can reshape investment priorities. These instruments can be ESG-linked finance, public-private partnerships, and blended capital.
- Role of Architects in Scaling Up Traditional Architecture and Urbanism: Evaluating architects’ influence within planning and construction industries and how they can advocate for urban models that prioritize livability, sustainability, and cultural integrity.
The Programme
Scaling Up Traditional Architecture and Urbanism:
Challenges and Opportunities
- — Policy Making, Laws, and Regulations.
- — The Construction Supply Chain: Materials, Suppliers, Fabricators, and Logistics.
- — Guilds, Vocational and Educational Programs.
- — Analysis of the Economic, Social, and Environmental Impact of Construction and Urbanism: Modern vs. Traditional.
- — Funding Institutions and ESG Frameworks.
- — Advocacy, Lobbying, and Public Relations.
- — The role of Architects, Master Builders and Planners.
- — The availability of master builders and crafts people.
- — The Role of Real Estate Developers.
The Speakers
The speakers and the programme to be announced soon
About Us
The International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture & Urbanism (INTBAU) is a global organisation dedicated to supporting traditional building practices, architecture, and urban planning. Established in 2001 by HRH The Prince of Wales, INTBAU brings together a network of architects, urbanists, artisans, and scholars who share a commitment to sustaining and revitalizing traditional crafts, architectural heritage, and culturally rooted urban
designs.
Established in 2022 under the Caravane Earth Foundation, INTBAU Qatar works on the preservation and promotion of traditional architecture and urbanism and seeks to present these traditional methods as viable models for contemporary living.
INTBAU Qatar Winter School at Heenat Salma Farm: Architecture, Ecology, and Tradition
Date: 13th until 25th December.
Location: Heenat Salma Farm, Qatar.
*Applications will open on the 12th of November .
The INTBAU Qatar Winter School is an annual program exploring the intersection of traditional architecture and sustainability. Hosted at Heenat Salma Farm, a site dedicated to regenerative practices, the program challenges prevailing development models by rethinking vernacular design as a foundation for resilient, ecologically attuned urbanism.
Bringing together international and Qatari participants from architecture and urban planning, the 2024 edition focused on crafting a master plan vision for Heenat Salma Village. Under the guidance of leading faculty, participants combined precedent studies, site analysis, and freehand drawing techniques to propose an integrated vision rooted in heritage and environmental responsibility.
The program blended theoretical inquiry with hands-on experience, lectures from experts, site visits, and practical workshops on materials, geometry, and permaculture. The culmination was a public exhibition showcasing design proposals that reimagine traditional architecture not as nostalgia, but as a critical response to contemporary environmental and urban challenges.
Through the Winter School, INTBAU Qatar fosters a deeper understanding of traditional knowledge as a driver of sustainable innovation, challenging the assumption that heritage and progress are at odds.
Plan Your Visit
Heenat Salma Farm
The exact dates will be announced soon
Registration will open shortly.
Heenat Salma Farm is the flagship project of Caravane Earth. It is the centerpiece of our initiative encompassing all elements of our mission.
Heenat Salma is a multidisciplinary project dedicated to holistic methods in agriculture, architecture, and community development. We have successfully transformed a local conventional farm into an organic permaculture centre that grows desert-friendly plants and vegetables, diversifies local food production, and contributes to a renewable, home-grown food supply in Qatar and beyond.
Heenat Salma Farm Farm 280, P.O.Box 90205, Um El Qahab Shahaniya, Doha, Qatar
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