Two Views of a Changing City

VIEW A — Within living memory, much of Muscat was a collection of small towns separated by mountains and connected by rough tracks. A journey that once took half a day now takes twenty minutes on a motorway. Hospitals, universities and airports that would have seemed unimaginable fifty years ago are now simply part of daily life. It is fashionable to romanticise the past, but those who lived through it rarely wish to return to a time of high child mortality, limited schooling and summers without electricity. Development, whatever its costs, has given ordinary families choices their grandparents never had.

VIEW B — No one seriously argues against hospitals. The question is not whether Muscat should develop, but how. A city designed around the car has made walking in many neighbourhoods unpleasant or impossible for much of the year. Old quarters, where neighbours once shared courtyards and daily news, have been replaced in places by detached villas behind high walls. We have gained speed and space, but in some areas we have lost the casual encounters that make a community. Measuring progress only by roads and buildings assumes that what cannot be counted does not matter.

Both writers agree that the changes are enormous and, in many ways, irreversible. Where they differ is in what they choose to measure, and in what they believe a city is ultimately for.