Oman’s deep-rooted history became a topic of interest among Omani youth as the newer generation of students are looking at the historical-cultural background of the country for inspiration.
Recently, a group of Omani graduate students dedicated a research paper which has gained the Prince Sultan Bin Salman Award for Architecture Heritage, on Muscat City Expansion and Accessibility to the Historical Core: Space Syntax Analysis.
Noor al Kamali and Najwa al Hadhrami, graduate students from Sultan Qaboos University, expressed their pride and happiness about what they have accomplished in the field of researching Oman’s history. Noor and Najwa graduated from the College of Engineering.
“The idea of the research was generated when we were studying the Space Syntax course, where we were strongly encouraged by our Professor, Dr Chaham Alaouch, to start research that is relevant to our course'', Noor and Najwa shared.
Within a record time, pushed by the professor’s support, Noor and Najwa have completed the research and successfully published it in the esteemed 'Elsevier’s Procedia' journal. The professor has also guided them in participating in the Prince Sultan Bin Salman Award for Architecture Heritage.
The pre-phase of preparation to start writing the research was long and hectic, since writing a high-qualified research paper needs a well-prepared tool that facilitates the task of writing and analysing.
“Working and publishing credited scientific research requires exceptional efforts. The research was a fruit of a long process of reading, investigating and analysing. Generating a new research question is built from the acquired wide-knowledge and its answer, as well, established from it” Noor and Najwa added.
Numerous sources were consulted, and much research was conducted by Noor and Najwa in various fields of Space Syntax, the heritage of cities and specifically the historical aspect of Muscat to collect data as much as possible. Post-consulting-and-conducting phase, Noor and Najwa have collected a sufficient amount of information that enables them to start writing their research paper precisely and comprehensively.
“We turned to use technical software that helped us to reach the final answer of the research and the conclusion”, Noor and Najwa said.
One of the most critical challenges that Noor and Najwa have had to deal with was they were drawing all of Muscat’s streets manually, as it has consumed a vast amount of their time while drawing and researching them. Yet this step was highly significant since it helped them in reaching accurate results for their papers.
“We would like to take the chance to thank Muscat Municipality and the Department of Civil and Architectural Engendering at Sultan Qaboos University for their effective collaboration which has paved our way and helped remarkably in diminishing the obstacles we have faced”, Noor and Najwa added.
The research highlighted the idea that cities usually have developed from smaller-old cities, and with this expansion, the accessibility to the original-old-smaller cities is affected. Therefore, the research investigates how the expansion of Muscat had affected the accessibility to the old cities.
Sultan Qaboos University always encourages and supports its students and graduates in researching and publishing papers in well-known journals and websites, for instance, students have the privilege of being able to access a library of thousands of reliable resources for free and anytime.
“Our specialisation in Architectural Engineering has indeed been a major factor in promoting us to write the research in Architecture Heritage”, Noor and Najwa said.
They added regarding the reason for choosing this field to conduct research, “Heritage is a keystone of our culture and indispensable part of the present we live in and of the future, we, the youth, will build”.
Omani youth do believe in the heavy responsibility that they should bear in preserving the Omani ancient history from any corruption and the responsibility to expose the unique heritage to the world.
“We were proud to be a team that was nominated for the award and very happy when our names were announced as the winners'', Noor and Najwa expressed.
At the moment of announcing the winners, “We could not find enough superlatives to describe the happiness of our team”, they expressed.
Winning such a prestigious award will motivate the team to work harder and exert much effort in planning for the next step in terms of the research and publishing field.
“The award has encouraged us to work towards enriching the scientific field with more valuable papers, we are aspiring to get more opportunities and support to conduct more research in the field of heritage and architecture.
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