Tariq Al-Suwaidi

Tariq Al-Suwaidi directs The Majlis Foundation for Civic Design, a non-profit institution concerned with the quality of shared space in the Emirates: pavements, shade, libraries, transit interchanges, and the ordinary civic infrastructure that determines whether a city is comfortable to inhabit at three in the afternoon in August.

He came to the work sideways. Trained as an urban planner, he spent his early career on large masterplanning commissions before taking a research post that required him to spend a year documenting how residents of a single Dubai neighbourhood actually moved through it on foot. The resulting study, which found among other things that a substantial share of pedestrian journeys were made by workers with no realistic alternative and no shade for most of the route, reoriented his professional interests permanently.

The Majlis Foundation now runs a small research programme, a public lecture series and an annual award for civic projects. Its influence has been quiet and cumulative: shade standards, seating provision, drinking water access, the width and continuity of pedestrian routes. Al-Suwaidi is careful to avoid positioning the foundation in opposition to development, arguing instead that the ambitions of the emirate and its pedestrians are not in conflict and that the deficit is one of attention rather than resources.

He is a persuasive and notably unsentimental advocate, preferring measurement to rhetoric, and the foundation publishes its data openly. He has curated two exhibitions on the architectural history of the Gulf coast and teaches a graduate seminar. Colleagues describe a man who will interrupt a meeting to point out that the room has no natural light, and mean it as a substantive comment rather than a joke.