GCDN Annual Convening – Doha 2026

Over the past five decades, Qatar has invested in cultural infrastructure – both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’' – as part of a long-term strategy to diversify the economy, underpin and celebrate national identity, cultivate talent, shape public space, and position the country as an active participant in global cultural exchange.

In this opening session, Her Excellency Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani will describe how Qatar is building its cultural ecosystem, where some common assumptions miss the mark, and the challenges and opportunities ahead. In conversation with Adrian Ellis, Her Excellency will reflect on the considerations behind major investments, the links between culture and place, infrastructure and community, and the local and global forces that shape cultural life – setting the scene for our wider explorations over the days ahead.

Climate and weather shape what public culture can be and when it can happen. Every place negotiates this, but some geographies have always had to treat it as a primary design and programming question rather than a backdrop. In the Gulf and other arid regions, heat pushes public life indoors or into the night. In far northern contexts, long winters, darkness and snow reshape how and when people gather outside. In both settings, artists and cultural leaders have developed a distinct curatorial language for working with time, seasonality, and comfort in environments hostile to lingering.

As climate extremes intensify everywhere, these places are becoming laboratories for how culture can keep public space usable and meaningful under changing conditions. How do artists, curators, and cultural leaders treat climatic extremes as a creative brief rather than a limitation? What does creativity look like when concerns over materials, maintenance, and energy use must come before artistic choices? Looking at contrasting examples from the Gulf and the “great north”, this breakout explores these tensions and asks what lessons other geographies might draw as they adapt to a less predictable world.

Across the Gulf, some of the most visible cultural projects of the past two decades have been built through partnerships with Western museums, brands, and consultancies. Those alliances have helped deliver at speed and brought useful standards. They have also raised harder questions about authorship, dependency, and the risk of being defined through imported templates.

This breakout looks at how institutions can keep the value of global partnerships while shifting the terms. What does it take to move from one-way “knowledge transfer” to locally anchored frameworks that are co-written over time? What is worth carrying forward from Western models, and what needs to be consciously unlearned? And how do you build the local capability and confidence that lets international connections strengthen an ecosystem, rather than overwrite it?

Over the past decade, cultural organisations and districts have adopted digital tools and experiences to keep pace with changing audiences and operating conditions. Increasingly, though, digital is no longer confined to that terrain. It is part of national and regional strategies for growth and innovation, while continuing to shape how institutions understand their audiences, their role, and how they plan for the future.

This opens a harder set of questions. If digital is serving multiple ends – access, participation, visibility, revenue – which do we prioritise without losing the thread of mission? And what does “future-proofing” mean when the tools, audiences, risks, and opportunities keep shifting?

In a year shaped by Qatar Museums’ Years of Culture programme with Canada and Mexico, this session brings three vantage points into the same conversation – national direction, museum strategy, and an artist’s practice of building participation in public life – to explore what it takes to move from reactive adoption to intentional digital strategy.

Women have long been key figures in cultural leadership throughout the Gulf and the wider Arab world. They are not recent arrivals but have historically shaped institutions, programs, and cultural diplomacy. Although outside narratives sometimes depict women’s leadership as a recent development or merely symbolic, the reality shows decades of meaningful influence across museums, cultural agencies, government ministries, biennials, and arts foundations.

This session explores how women in the region navigate institutional power, cultural governance, and public mandates spanning identity and heritage, creative economies, and global engagement. It will examine what shapes what becomes visible and supported, as well as how legitimacy, trust, and continuity are built – and how these leaders balance tradition and innovation across diverse sociopolitical environments.

Many small states, including Qatar, KSA, and others, are advancing national development strategies that place skills development at the center of societal growth. In this context, cultivating talent within museums and heritage institutions becomes a shared national imperative that contributes to broader nation-building objectives.

The challenge of advancing museum and heritage professionals, however, is no longer simply meeting global standards, but how to actively shape locally grounded expertise that engages with international practices while preserving authenticity and cultural autonomy.

At a pivotal crossroads between global collaboration and cultural self-definition, this session invites cultural leaders and policy experts to share approaches in how capacity building, professional mobility, cross-border partnerships, and talent pathways can foster not a one-directional transfer of expertise, but a dynamic, reciprocal process of mutual learning that advances skills within museum and heritage ecosystems. By examining scalable mechanisms that connect custodians of heritage and research from the region with global practitioners in sustained and equitable ways, especially across small-states contexts, participants will come out of the session with an understanding in not only new approaches to institutional resilience but also how to empower museum and heritage professionals in their journey to shaping international discourse. In particular, this workshop situates museum and heritage capacity development within the national strategic frameworks of small states, demonstrating how targeted talent pathways moves towards the goals of nation-building.

Cultural districts are more than collections of venues, they are civic spaces, social infrastructures, and places of identity and belonging. Yet what we measure often tells only part of the story. This interactive workshop invites GCDN members to explore how we define and measure 'vitality' in our districts. Moving beyond attendance figures and economic impact, the session introduces a practical framework for understanding cultural vitality across seven interconnected dimensions.
Through hands-on mapping, peer exchange and a guided self-diagnostic, participants will reflect on what their districts currently measure, what remains invisible, and how measurement shapes strategy and governance. The workshop will generate practical insights, shared challenges and new questions to take back to your organization's leadership and teams. It will invite participants to rethink how we evidence success, ensuring our cultural districts remain vibrant, inclusive and resilient for the long term.

Many ambitious cultural infrastructure projects end up solving the wrong problem, or trying to solve too many at once. The result can be architecture that is impressive on opening day but poorly aligned with the place it serves and the relationships it is meant to support. At its root, this is a brief problem. The “why” needs to be clear before the “what”. Buildings are oftentimes seen as a means to an end, but they can also be seen as vessels, as a way to be part of the delivery and implementation of the mission of the institution it is home to.

Drawing on the perspective of GCDN affiliate members, this workshop works through the questions that make a brief useful to architects, not just inspiring on paper. What is the project actually trying to change in this place? Who is it for in practice? What does “working” look like on a normal day? What are the non-negotiables, and where is genuine flexibility helpful? The aim is a clearer shared language between client and architect, so the building that follows fits its context and does what it was envisioned to do.

Nighttime is often associated with parties, music, and alcohol. The Nighttime Foundation challenges this narrow view, championing the hours after dark as a vital dimension of cultural, social, and civic life. Cultural districts can leverage the night as an extension of neighborhood life, enabling unique experiences, artistic experimentation, intergenerational gathering, and community building. This facilitates distinct forms of expression, even if the core activities mirror those found during the day.

As cities rethink how and when public life unfolds, activities after dark can also offer a more sustainable and inclusive choice – providing more comfortable conditions for participation and opening up cultural spaces to a wider range of people, including families, children, and older residents.

Drawing on the Creative Footprint (CFP), VibeLab's research methodology for assessing cultural value at a city scale, this workshop invites attendees to explore a more expansive vision of cultural life after dark. In collaboration with LUCI, the session will incorporate perspectives on lighting practices, examining how light shapes perceptions of accessibility, safety, comfort, and belonging in public spaces.

Together, we will explore three interconnected dimensions of culture at night: community, spaces, and operating conditions, to co-create a shared framework for inclusive cultural activity after dark. By translating global insights to hyper-local settings, this workshop is designed as a mutual exchange where participants are encouraged to bring examples from their own cities or districts, reflecting on how nighttime spaces are activated for culture, which demographics or communities these spaces cater to, and how lighting shapes the activities that can occur after dark.

Envisioned by Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser and carried by Msheireb Properties, Doha Design District was established to anchor Msheireb Downtown Doha as a hub for design, innovation, and creative exchange in Qatar. As a recently designated district, it sits at a pivotal moment, moving from early momentum toward the harder work of defining a durable identity.

In this workshop, GCDN members will work alongside the DDD Director to open the hood of the district and examine foundational choices around identity, programming, partnerships, public space, and operating models. Drawing on peer experience from other contexts, the session focuses on what it takes to translate a strong creative ambition into a coherent, sustainable piece of city life.