States, markets, and communities: Rethinking sustainability and cities

This study presents the centrality of the issues pertaining to sustainability at the urban level. It suggests that in contrast to market-based understandings and representations of sustainability have significant connections to social and cultural forces. By focusing on three case studies, the study showcases how sustainability needs to be understood in terms of the way market-based economic actions and institutional initiatives embed market-based initiatives and forces. The study seeks to create awareness, academically and publicly on the possibility of imagining the coexistence of communitarian and market logic, with implications for sustainability. The study introduces case studies from Doha, Qatar. The intention is to shed light on the theoretical debates and illustrate how embeddedness with its variegated forms has been unfolding. The cases of Souq Al Wakra, Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) Souqna, and Quranic Botanic Garden (QBG) have been chosen because they present not only similarities (a commonality of cultivating embeddedness that produces economic, social, and environmental sustainability) but also differences (in the mechanisms of embedding, as well as the actors involved).