DOHA, Qatar — When 31-year-old Samir Shanny was growing up in West Bay, an area just north of this gleaming city’s central zone, there were only a few tall buildings and none of them sparkled the way the Qatari capital’s skyline has as host of the World Cup soccer tournament over the past month.
Mr. Shanny remembers being a kid who loved jumping on his bicycle, finding a few friends and trekking down endless dirt paths that extended across the Connecticut-sized Persian Gulf nation — paths that today are paved over by multi-lane highways linking Doha to a widening multitude of other new cities that have blossomed in the desert up since the 1990s.