The news + context
Qatar began preparations for the 2022 World Cup more than a decade ago – which featured an immense construction project “that saw the building of seven stadiums, an airport, subway lines and roads connecting the venues” ahead of the games, writes Marc Lajoie, Grid’s contributing senior data and visualizations reporter.
The country spent some $220 billion on these projects for the games. But these infrastructure investments have also had a stark human cost: A Guardian investigation in 2021 “found that 6,751 migrant workers from five South Asian countries died in Qatar over the prior decade, likely only a fraction of the toll for migrants from all countries.” (Qatar’s official figure is 40 fatalities.)
🛰 In this special visualization, Marc shows that one of the best ways to see the scale of these projects is from above.
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