Kuwait's Modern Spectacle: Oil Wealth and the Making of a New Capital City, 1950-1990

1. Yasser Elsheshtawy, “The Great Divide: Struggling and Emerging Cit-ies in the Arab World,” in The Evolving Arab City: Tradition, Modernity, and Urban Development, ed. Yasser Elsheshtawy (London: Routledge, 2008), 2.

2. Stephen Gardiner and Ian Cook, Kuwait: The Making of a City (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1983), 14.

3. See Rosemarie Said Zahlan, The Making of the Modern Gulf States: Ku-wait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 1998), 39.

4. See International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), The Economic Development of Kuwait (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 23.

5. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 46.

6. Henri Lefebvre, “Space: Social Product and Use Value,” in Critical So-ciology: European Perspectives, ed. J. W. Freiberg (New York: Irvington, 1979), 286.

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Vol. 33, No. 1, 2013 • doi 10.1215/1089201x-2072694 • © 2013 by Duke University Press

7

Kuwait’s Modern SpectacleOil Wealth and the Making of a New Capital City, 1950 – 90

Farah al- Nakib

G ulf metropolises like Dubai and Doha are often characterized in academic discourse today as newly emerging “oil cities” that are “unburdened by history” in their attempts at modern devel-opment.1 In 1983 architect Stephen Gardiner made a similar claim about Kuwait City when he

described it as a “unique creation of oil.” 2 Though common, this view is misleading. While oil certainly initiated a new era in the Gulf in all aspects of life — not least in the development of the built environ-ment — Gulf cities are not solely outcomes or end products of oil. For more than two centuries, from the time of its settlement in 1716 to the launch of the oil industry in 1946, Kuwait was a thriving maritime town whose inhabitants were heavily involved in pearling, trading, and seafaring as elsewhere along the Gulf littoral. The town port therefore served as the locus of urban expansion as the markets, harbors, shipbuilding yards, and residential quarters all emanated from this central point on the shoreline.

While the process of city formation in the pre- oil period was shaped by the town’s port economy, after 1946 oil became the driving force behind Kuwait’s urbanization. Oil was discovered in commercial quantities in Kuwait in 1938, and the first barrels were exported in 1946. Revenues from oil royalties rap-idly increased from $760,000 in 1946 to $5.95 million in 1948.3 In 1951 Kuwait’s ruler Abdullah al- Salem al- Sabah (r. 1950 – 65) increased the terms of the concession with the Kuwait Oil Company to a 50 – 50 profit- sharing agreement, leading to an exponential rise in the country’s oil income; by 1953 revenues shot up to $169 million and kept increasing annually.4 The shift from a port economy to an oil economy had a significant impact on the process of city formation in Kuwait, making salient Henri Lefebvre’s ar-gument that the passage from one economic mode of production to another generates the creation of a “fresh space.” 5 A society’s adjustment to new economic realities inevitably leaves its mark on space, as “the planning of the modern economy tends to become spatial planning.” 6 In 1952 the state approved a new

7. Gardiner, Kuwait, 14.

8. Jill Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rul-ers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 45.

9. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmoder-nity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 238.

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master plan for Kuwait that led to the demolition of the pre- oil port town to be replaced with a new modern cityscape planned and built by the state. As such, the “unique creation of oil” that Gardiner observed in 1983 was the particular version of Ku-wait’s urban landscape in the making since 1952.

Though certainly the catalyst behind the creation of this new city, oil played a role in re-shaping the process of city formation in Kuwait in more complex ways than simply financing state- led urban development projects. The advent of oil wealth fostered a desire for rapid modernization among state and society alike, with the idea of al- nahda (the awakening) becoming the main ideo-logical construct driving the development process. This quest for modernity and progress created a tension between the “modern” as both a visual representation of the urban ideal and a political strategy on the part of the government on the one hand, and the lived experience of the city’s resi-dents on the other, that left a visible mark on the built environment. As a result of the numerous obstacles hindering urban development after the advent of oil that I explore below, the state found it increasingly di cult to produce a cohesive and truly functional city center to replace the demol-ished pre- oil port town. And so, as the objective from very early on was to create a capital city to serve as the ultimate symbol of Kuwait’s newfound prosperity, the state planning authorities consis-tently abandoned the many comprehensive plans to create a new urban order for Kuwait City and instead created an urban spectacle that gave a dis-tinct impression that Kuwait was a rapidly modern-izing city despite the fact that, behind the scenes, it was stagnating. This article analyzes particular urban development projects produced between 1950 and the Iraqi invasion of 1990 that contrib-uted to this spectacle of modernity and led to Gar-diner’s conclusion that Kuwait City was not only the unique creation of oil but also an “optimistic, imaginative, confident and utterly modern” city.7

Al- Nahda: The DreamIn addition to the pragmatic need for more space to accommodate the country’s steadily increasing population after the advent of oil, the rapid re-development of Kuwait’s urban landscape under Abdullah al- Salem was part of a broader state strategy to adjust to changing social and political circumstances. Before oil Kuwait’s rulers had been financially dependent on merchant capital for public revenues: first through voluntary donations, then from 1904 through taxation and the imposi-tion of customs duties on mercantile imports. The discovery of oil in 1938, however, provided the gov-ernment with an independent income to be spent in whatever manner the ruler saw fit. A merchant- led political opposition movement that same year challenged this new arrangement. To the opposi-tion, control over the town’s finances was tradition-ally the responsibility of the merchants and not the palace, which “led them to believe they had a continuing right to a say in the distribution of state wealth.” 8 Although the ruler Ahmed al- Jaber (r. 1921 – 50) disagreed and eventually dissolved the short- lived legislative assembly the opposition had established, the movement revealed that Kuwait’s rulers needed to legitimize their control over the country’s newfound wealth and the sudden and unprecedented level of government intervention in economic and social aairs, particularly once oil revenues increased exponentially under Abdul-lah al- Salem. The absence of the state in public life before oil meant that this kind of political legiti-macy could not be sought in the country’s past and therefore had to be located in its present and, more important, its future. As such, a vital approach to state building in the early oil years entailed the erasure of Kuwait’s pre- oil past and a concomitant emphasis on modernity and progress in state de-velopment discourse and practice. The redevelop-ment of the urban landscape was an intrinsic com-ponent of this strategy for, as David Harvey argues, “any struggle to reconstitute power relations is a struggle to reorganise their spatial bases.” 9

10. Minoprio and Spencely, and P. W. Macfar-lane, “Town Planning in Kuwait,” Architectural Design, October 1953, 272.

11. Barges Hamoud al- Barges, A Twenty- Five Year Era of Kuwait’s Modern Advancement (Ku-wait: Kuwait News Agency Information and Research Department, 1986), 22.

12. Peter Lienhardt, Disorientations: A Society in Flux, Kuwait in the 1950s (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 1993), 35.


14. Al- Barges, A Twenty- Five Year Era, 32.

15. R. L. Banks, “Notes on a Visit to Kuwait,” Town Planning Review 26 (1955): 50.

16. Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity: Rep-resentations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2008), 35.

9Farah al-Nakib • Kuwait’s Modern Spectacle

Upon his accession to power in 1950 Abdul-lah al- Salem launched a state- led development project that hinged on the twin pillars of urban development and social reform and was driven by a new state ideology of modern planning. The rul-er’s alleged goal was to use the country’s increas-ing wealth to make Kuwait “the best planned and most socially progressive city in the Middle East.” 10 Modernity in the form of social reform (state- funded education, healthcare, employment, and housing) and urban development (infrastructure, wider streets, and new buildings) would “[confer] upon Kuwait a distinct position alongside the ci-vilised and developed world states,” as one gov-ernment publication later put it.11 Rigorous state- orchestrated planning was seen as the only way to successfully produce “all the services that had not been there before — metalled roads, pavements, sewers, piped water, electricity and telephone ca-bles and new buildings — and to produce them all at once.” 12 The objective was to create a cityscape that would serve as the definitive symbol and visual ref lection of Kuwait’s newfound modernity. In this context the old townscape, with its “patches of courtyard houses threaded together with narrow lanes were seen to be in conflict with an accepted picture of the ‘ideal.’” 13 It was therefore decided that the port town would be razed to make way for a new city planned and built by the state (fig. 1).

To justify this erasure of the historic townscape, state rhetoric after 1950 portrayed Kuwait be-fore oil as a period of suffering and hardship, which in turn con-tributed to legitimizing the new role of government: “Since the

State is the only party controlling the oil sector, government interference was imperative from the very beginning because it shoulders the burden of developing the society, modernizing the economy, and fulfilling the individuals’ well- being to make up for years of suering in the pre- oil phase, and to take a short cut towards the establishment of a prosperous up- to- date society.” 14 This constructed dichotomy between past and present implied that only the government, fueled by oil revenues, had the capacity to civilize Kuwait’s uncivilized past and to “make Kuwait the happiest state in the Mid-dle East.” 15 The promise of “progress,” in other words, needed to be confirmed by the memory of “poverty.” 16 If the past was associated with ad-versity, then its erasure and replacement with the new and modern — with the state as the principal agent of this modernity — would be easily accepted and indeed welcomed by the public. In contrast to the negative representation of the pre- oil era, the post- 1950 period became known in official

Figure 1. Aerial photograph of Kuwait Town taken in 1951 in Planning and Urban Development in Kuwait, 1980. Courtesy of the Kuwait Municipality Master Planning Department

17. Minoprio and Spencely, and P. W. Macfar-lane, Plan for the Town of Kuwait (n.p., Novem-ber 1951), 2.


19. Minoprio et al., Plan for the Town of Kuwait, 2.

20. Minoprio et al., “Town Planning,” 273.

21. Geoffrey E. Ffrench and Allan G. Hill, Kuwait Urban and Medical Ecology: A Geomedical Study (Berlin: Springer- Verlag, 1971), 35.

22. Minoprio et al., Plan for the Town of Kuwait, 16.


discourse as al- nahda al- ‘umraniyya: Kuwait’s architectural and civiliza-tional awakening, a phrase that itself implies that Kuwait before oil was uncivilized and dormant.

As the first step in this awaken-ing, in 1951 the state commissioned the English town- planning f irm of Minoprio and Spencely and the planner P. W. Macfarlane to prepare a report for the “re- planning” of Ku-wait Town (approved in 1952).17 The government wanted a functional, well- planned, organized city with good communication networks, wide roads, and advanced infrastruc-ture: all features, it was believed, that would make Kuwait a truly “mod-ern” metropolis. In an interview with Gardiner in the early 1980s Anthony Minoprio ad-mitted: “It was a di cult commission. We didn’t know anything much about the Muslim world and the Kuwaitis wanted a city — they wanted a new city. . . . All we could give them . . . was what we knew.” 18 The planners therefore imported the Brit-ish postwar “new town” plan that they believed was “in accordance with the highest standards of mod-ern town planning.” 19 The modern city of Kuwait would entail a redeveloped “city center,” occupying the space of the old town encircled by a wall (built in 1920 and demolished in 1957), surrounded by new residential suburbs built in the open desert just beyond the gates. These neighborhood units were to be connected to one another and to the urban center by a system of ring and radial roads. The city center would become a predominantly commercial space; industrial, educational, and health facilities were to be gradually weeded out and relocated in specialized zones outside the cen-ter (fig. 2).20

To implement this plan for the “wholesale reconstruction” of Kuwait’s urban landscape, the townspeople were relocated to the new suburbs throughout the 1950s and 1960s.21 Facilitating this

move was a land acquisition scheme launched by the government in 1951 whereby all land inside the town wall was acquired from the townspeople at prices well above market value. Though widely stated in o cial discourse that deliberately inflat-ing land values was the most e cient way of dis-tributing oil wealth, the scheme served to quickly bring all areas earmarked for development under state control. As the pre- oil town was vacated over the ensuing two decades, buildings were systemati-cally demolished and the old irregular street pat-terns erased to make way for “new roads, public buildings, and open space.” 22

There was little public objection to this rapid state- led modernization; in fact, public discourse in the early oil years echoed the quest for mo-dernity and progress driving state development schemes. From the late 1940s onward young Ku-waiti men (and some women) began studying in Cairo and Beirut on government scholarships and became deeply influenced by Arab nationalist writ-ers on the idea of al- nahda: of lifting Arab society out of a perceived state of backwardness to a state of advancement and modernity. The March 1950 issue of al- Bi‘tha, a monthly journal written and

Figure 2. 1952 Kuwait Master Plan. Minoprio and Spencely, and P. W. Macfarlane, Plan for the Town of Kuwait, November 1951. Courtesy of the Kuwait Municipality Master Planning Department

23. Abdulaziz Hussain, “al- Nahdha al- murtaqibah” (“The Coming Awakening”), al- Bi’tha 3 (March 1950), 79.

24. Colin Buchanan and Partners (CBP), Sec-ond Report: The Short Term Plan, vol. 3, Kuwait Town Plan and Plan Implementation (December 1971), 13.

25. Zahra Freeth, Kuwait Was My Home (Lon-don: Allen and Unwin, 1956), 83.


27. Zahra Dickson Freeth, A New Look at Kuwait (London: Allen and Unwin, 1972), 101.

28. Ruth O. Crouse, “First Impressions,” Ne-glected Arabia 190 (1940): 4.


published by Kuwaiti students in Egypt, opened with the statement that Kuwait now possessed the most important means of al- nahda to secure its own rapid and successive development. The article, published in the same issue that covered Abdullah al- Salem’s accession to power the previous month, claimed that the Kuwaiti people were “thirsty for reform, capable of development, and getting used to adjustment.” 23

There was thus a genuine sentiment among the Kuwaiti public that oil wealth was allowing them to escape their past and move toward a brighter future. When oil was discovered in 1938, Kuwait was coming o the heels of a two- decade economic recession caused by the collapse of pearling with the invention of the Japanese cul-tured pearl, a trade embargo between Kuwait and Najd (present- day Saudi Arabia), and the world de-pression. Though life improved in the 1940s before the government began to invest the oil income in public services, the economic decline of the inter-war years was still fresh in the collective memory of the Kuwaiti populace when Abdullah al- Salem unveiled his modernization schemes in 1950. The urban landscape was the physical embodiment of that life before oil, and the fact that it could now be transformed to improve their everyday lives led many Kuwaitis to “welcome the idea of ridding Kuwait of everything to do with the past.” 24 When Zahra Freeth, daughter of a British political agent who grew up in Kuwait in the 1930s, told a group of Kuwaiti women in 1956 that she had been taking photographs of old houses, the women grew “im-patient at [her] interest in the Kuwait of the past, and asked why [she] wasted time on the old and outmoded when there was so much in Kuwait that was new and fine.” When Freeth mentioned that many buildings were to be demolished, one young woman exclaimed, “‘Let them be demolished! Who wants them now? It is the new Kuwait and not the old which is worthy of admiration.’” 25 As Gardiner explained more than two decades later,

“People are overtaken by events, and the optimis-tic prospect of a gleaming new city to replace the muddle, poverty and primitive conditions would have seemed irresistible.” 26

Many Kuwaitis also believed that the city should be developed to serve as a spatial reflection of Kuwait’s newfound prosperity. In 1970 a number of representatives of seafaring and merchant fami-lies were invited to meet the Council of Ministers to give their views on banning dhows (the Gulf’s traditional wooden sailing vessels) from Kuwait City’s waterfront. When Freeth’s mother Violet Dickson told one of these men she hoped they had told the government to keep the picturesque dhows, “[he] looked slightly taken aback, and said, ‘No; we all agreed that it was a good idea to get rid of them from new Kuwait. Then we can have an el-egant promenade along the front, and not the un-tidy mess that the boats make when they come into harbour.’” 27 This focus on the city as a symbol of Kuwait’s urban modernity reveals that, in addition to a desire to escape the realities of the recent pre- oil past, the modernization projects of the early oil years were also driven by a perceived need to prove that Kuwait was worthy of its sudden wealth. As Dickson’s and Freeth’s aforementioned com-ments suggest, many non- Kuwaiti observers did not see Kuwait’s past as a hindrance to progress as did many Kuwaitis. As early as 1940 Dr. Ruth Crouse, an American missionary visiting Kuwait, noted, “The progressives in these lands cannot un-derstand why the western traveller should find de-light and beauty in these ancient modes of living,” namely fishermen mending nets on the seashore and women carrying straw baskets or earthen jugs on their heads. “To them they are troublesome things for which they have to apologize as they try to build a modern world.” 28 But while such observ-ers romanticized the rapidly disappearing past as much as “progressive” Kuwaitis vilified it, the perspectives of the former may have inadvertently contributed to the discourse of latter: according to

29. Ibid., 3.

30. Thomas Bender, “Conclusion: Reflections on the Culture of Urban Modernity,” in Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City, ed. Alev Çinar and Thomas Bender (Minneapolis: Uni-versity of Minnesota Press, 2007), 273.

31. Paul Edward Case, “Boom Time in Kuwait,” National Geographic, December 1952, 776.

32. Ibid., 777, 776.

33. See IBRD, Economic Development, 2, 22.

34. Rodney Giesler, Close- Up on Kuwait, prod. Kuwait Oil Company Film Unit (United King-dom: Huntley Films, 1962).

35. Ministry of Guidance and Information, al- Kuwait: haqa’iq wa ma‘lumat (Kuwait: Facts and Figures) (Kuwait: Department of Culture and Publications, 1964), 26.

36. Ibid.

37. See ibid., 28 – 37.


Crouse, “The Near East, which seemed dormant for centuries, is awakening to seek so- called mod-ern status of living in a few decades.” 29 The world’s impression that the region had been “dormant for centuries” must have instilled in Kuwaitis, excited by their own rising prosperity, the idea that they did indeed have something to prove. As Thomas Bender argues, “Cities are increasingly aware of existing in a global gaze, seeing their fate in the perception of that gaze. Whether or not the world . . . is in fact looking, their presumed gaze is part of the urban imaginary.” 30

After 1950 the world was in fact watching how Kuwait was coping with its unprecedented over-night prosperity. In 1952 Paul Edward Case of Na-tional Geographic visited Kuwait to witness firsthand how “an obscure Persian Gulf sheikhdom enriched by oil, uses its wealth to improve the lot of all its people.” 31 His observations were then shared with worldwide readers in an eight- page article accom-panied by nearly twenty photos depicting a coun-try in transition, where “the old lives beside the new” but that was clearly on its way to becoming “a model community in an ancient and neglected region of the world.” 32 A decade later the global fascination with this small country that possessed twenty percent of the world’s oil reserves and was already the second largest oil exporter had not subsided.33 In 1962 the (then Anglo- American) Ku-wait Oil Company produced a film titled Close- Up on Kuwait to showcase Kuwait’s rapidly changing society and skyline to audiences back in Britain. The film featured Kuwaiti students studying medi-cine, architecture, and international studies in the United Kingdom, excited about going back home to help their country build “a whole new city.” 34

Perhaps as a response to this global gaze, by the end of the first decade of oil urbanization Ku-wait began participating in international country exhibitions in Europe, Japan, and the Middle East to showcase its nahda al- ‘umraniyya to the world,

“this nahda that has embraced all things mod-ern.” 35 Participating in such world fairs allowed Ku-wait to reveal to outside observers how it was “ex-ploiting all of its wealth and capabilities in order to secure its presence among the world’s civilised nations.” 36 Kuwait’s exhibits displayed photos of multistoried o ce blocks, vast housing projects in new suburbs, state- of- the- art schools and hospitals, and multilane highways and bridges. By the early 1960s Kuwait was participating in at least five such exhibitions every year. The government also began publishing booklets disseminating descriptive and statistical evidence of Kuwait’s rapid progress. As one example, Kuwait: Facts and Figures, published in 1964 by the Ministry of Guidance and Informa-tion, included a section on al- nahda al- ‘umraniyya that highlighted in text and photos the major de-velopment projects completed between 1952 and 1962, including roads, government buildings, dis-trict centers, and the new seaport and airport.37

Al- Nahda: The RealityIn spite of the spectacle of Kuwait’s urban moder-nity on display in various forms after 1950, and notwithstanding the many achievements made in a very short amount of time, in reality the story of Kuwait’s nahda was not as successful as it seemed on the surface, in print or on film. The reality began with the implementation of the 1952 master plan. The plan called for a Green Belt to follow the path of the old town wall in order to preserve the pe-rimeter of the urban center, thereby creating two distinct zones: the commercial city center where the old town stood, and the residential suburbs be-yond it. The planning authorities’ main focus from the start was on building the new suburbs (fifteen by 1965) to rehouse the urban population whose old houses were being demolished. The suburbs were an essential part of the state modernization schemes of the early oil years. While accommodat-ing the townspeople being displaced by the devel-

38. Saba George Shiber, The Kuwait Urban-ization: Being an Urbanistic Case- Study of a Developing Country —Documentation, Analy-sis, Critique (Kuwait: Kuwait Govt. Print Pub., 1964), 116.

39. Ibid., 117.

40. For a full analysis of the land acquisi-tion scheme see Ghanim Hamad al- Najjar, “Decision- Making Process in Kuwait: The Land Acquisition Policy as a Case Study” (PhD thesis, University of Exeter, 1984).

41. See Shiber, Kuwait Urbanization, 93.


opment of the city center, the suburbs themselves were important vestiges of Kuwait’s rapid progress. Though known in English planning records simply as neighborhood units, in Arabic o cial discourse they were referred to as al- manatiq al- namuthajiyyah (the model districts), which showcased Kuwait’s new health clinics and schools, wide roads, lush gardens and trees, luxury housing, and of course rational planning.

But the city center itself — the anticipated hallmark of Kuwait’s newfound urban modernity — never actually developed into the well- planned metropolis everyone hoped it would become. The creation of the suburbs had been relatively straightforward as they were being constructed on previously un- built land in al- badiya (the desert). The city center, however, was being superimposed over a town that had existed for over two centuries, and numerous obstacles immediately emerged that made the 1952 plan’s proposals for the rede-velopment of the city center extremely di cult to implement. When the municipality demarcated a particular section of the city center to be devel-oped, it had to first identify the multiple existing landowners in that area and then acquire the land from them. Once all buildings were demolished the entire area had to be reorganized into blocks to either be used for government projects or sold in parcels to private developers. This complex pro-cess of sorting out “the old, crazy- quilt patterns of property ownership” inside the city took too much of the time and concentration of the municipality’s town planning section throughout the 1950s, “not leaving them the adequate time to pay closer at-tention to what was going on in site planning, civic design, architecture and land- economics.” 38 The government’s “meteoric rush into construction” also meant that the process of parceling out blocks for private development was done on a relatively ad hoc basis without adhering to a comprehensive de-sign plan or strategy, leading to what Saba George Shiber, the municipality’s chief architect from 1960 to 1965, described as the “piecemeal and

spasmodic” development of the city.39 The few of-fice buildings and commercial complexes that did emerge during this period were randomly placed with little spatial coherence linking them with one another. In between these buildings were large va-cant sandlots used for car parking or the disposal of construction waste where pre- oil structures had been demolished, or clusters of dilapidated court-yard houses awaiting demolition. A principal rea-son so much land remained vacant or undeveloped throughout the 1950s was that the aforementioned land acquisition scheme had led to the skyrocket-ing of land values inside the city center. The devel-opment of this land became unprofitable for the state, while land speculation became a much more lucrative venture than construction for the private sector (fig. 3).40

The exodus to the suburbs also meant that the city center was becoming an uninhabited space; as its resident population steadily decreased, urban life inside the Green Belt declined. Though the city began to house large numbers of non- Kuwaitis from the early 1950s onward — mainly migrant laborers living in mass housing in rundown courtyard houses — the government did not put nearly as much eort into developing adequate public services and su cient infrastructure inside the city center as it did out in the suburbs. Urban Kuwaitis had initially found the idea of moving outside the town wall to what was once al- badiya daunting; it was only when they saw paved roads and modern infrastructure being laid that they be-came convinced by government promises that the suburbs would provide them with a better quality of life than their old courtyard houses.41 Nobody was being lured to live inside the Green Belt at that time, and so the city center became not only grad-ually uninhabited but also increasingly neglected and unlivable.

By the early 1960s critiques emerged in the national press exposing this neglect as the public became more aware of the fact that the modern city they had been promised inside the Green Belt

42. See “Ba‘dh al- suwar al- khalfiyyah li- nahdhatina” (“Some Background Images of Our Awakening”), al- Hadaf, 17 April 1963, 1 May 1963, and 12 June 1963.

43. Bender, “Conclusion,” 273.


in place of the town they vacated was not materi-alizing. For example, a regular article series was published in al- Hadaf Arabic newspaper in 1963 under the title “Ba‘dh al- suwar al- khalfiyya li- nahdhatina” (“Some Background Images of Our Awakening”). The series moved beyond the facade of progress showcased in exhibitions and govern-ment publications and provided a behind- the- scenes look at the less pristine reality of Kuwait’s first decade of urban planning and development. One article pointed out that streets inside the city were replete with large potholes that made driving di cult. Both driving and walking were also made tedious by the fact that every available open space in the city, including clearly marked no- parking zones, was being used as a spontaneous car park because of insu cient parking in buildings. The articles consistently criticized the poor quality or complete absence of adequate drainage systems in new buildings and streets, claiming that whole areas of the city center were suffering from the pungent smell of sewage. They also identified that while the city contained some grand new build-

ings, the vacant lots behind these buildings were often transformed into mass garbage dumps.42

These and several other problems combined meant that the city center was not yet the rational, ordered place it was planned to be. As Bender con-tends, “Agreeing to dream is insu cient for real-ization of the dream.” 43

Creating the SpectacleWhile al- Hadaf ’s objective was to show a more rounded picture of Kuwait’s first decade of oil modernization by contrasting the prominent im-ages of al- nahda with the chaotic and messy inter-stices of development, this picture was meant for Kuwaiti eyes only. When it came to Kuwait’s ex-ternal image, the newspaper was as concerned as everyone else with maintaining a positive impres-sion of rapid and successful advancement. “If our purpose behind this publication was to inform the world of our awakening, then I would see a great urgency behind writing [about al- nahda]. But we are writing here in Kuwait for the Kuwaiti people, which gives us the freedom to set this foreground

Figure 3. Haphazard urban development of the 1950s. Courtesy of Kuwait Oil Company archives, Ahmadi, Kuwait

44. “Ba’dh al- suwar al- khalfiyyah,” 17 April 1963.

45. See Shiber, Kuwait Urbanization, 401.

46. See “Mawlid shari‘ fi- l- Kuwait” (“Birth of a Street in Kuwait”), al- Araby, August 1960, 83 – 85.

47. See ibid., 80 – 81.

48. See ibid., 81.


image aside, and to research and investigate an alternative story — that which runs in the back-ground of this awakening — in order to complete the picture.” 44 As this sentiment suggests, from the advent of oil modernization in the 1950s a primary concern of state and society alike was to project a positive image of Kuwait’s newfound prosperity and progress regardless of the realities its residents were forced to deal with behind the scenes. But this spectacle of Kuwait’s urban modernity was not just displayed in articles, international exhibits, films, or government brochures; the built environ-ment itself became part of the spectacle. The con-struction of a coherent and functional city center was already, only a decade into the master plan, proving more di cult than initially thought. And so from the early 1960s on, the state planning au-thorities increasingly abandoned their attempts at creating a usable and sustainable city and concen-trated instead on producing a visual spectacle of modernity. As the three examples examined below will illustrate, most state- led urban development projects in the three decades prior to the Iraqi invasion of 1990 focused more on how the city looked than on how it worked, making it a place where image and representation superseded func-tion and lived experience.

A Focus on FacadesConstruction in the city center throughout the 1950s was sporadic and haphazard, with buildings emerging in random plots without any spatial co-herence or order. Though the suburbs outside the Green Belt were developing successfully, Kuwait had nothing substantial to show for its first decade of oil urbanization inside the city center itself. And so in 1957 the Fahad al- Salem Street project was conceived as the first part of the new city to be developed according to a complete site plan.45 The project was designed to become Kuwait City’s first modern commercial thoroughfare. It began like other areas redeveloped at that time: after 294 old houses occupying the site were demolished, the municipality reordered the area into around 100 real estate parcels that were then sold back to pri-

vate developers to construct the actual buildings lining the street. Unlike other parts of the city, price restrictions on real estate along the thorough-fare were fixed by the municipality to avoid the sky-rocketing of land values that was precluding com-mercial development elsewhere.46 When completed in 1962, the street was flanked by a total of seventy buildings of five stories, comprising 960 ground- floor shops along colonnaded pathways with 2,200 apartments above — all done in three years.47

Fahad al- Salem Street was conceived to be the linchpin of Kuwait City’s urban modernity. It was mainly a shopping strip, commercial development being the most profitable real estate venture that would guarantee the state a return on such expen-sive urban land. In addition to satiating a growing Kuwaiti consumer culture corresponding to the rapidly increasing income of the average house-hold, shopping developments like Fahad al- Salem Street (preceded by New Street in the early 1950s and succeeded by the central business district in the 1960s) were themselves showcases of Kuwait’s wealth and progress. Stores such as Jashanmal, which became one of the most popular depart-ment stores of the development, sold everything from home appliances and electronics to expensive watches and European cosmetics. In these early years of oil such consumer products were vivid and recognizable symbols of the new modes of modern living that Kuwaitis were now embracing.

In addition to its commercial appeal, the project was promoted as an experiment in the most up- to- date and superior building techniques and spatial planning, complete with tree planting, street lamps, and ample parking.48 The street’s de-velopment featured prominently in the aforemen-tioned 1962 film as the definitive representation of Kuwait’s rapidly modernizing urbanism. In reality, however, Fahad al- Salem Street was primarily a cover- up for the chaos and clutter of the city that surrounded it. The corridor street began at the Jahra Gate on the western edge of the city and led visitors down a gleaming new path into the heart of the urban center. A Jahra Street Facade Com-mittee was established in the Public Works Depart-

49. Ibid., 83.

50. Shiber, Kuwait Urbanization, 400.

51. See ibid.

52. “Ba‘dh al- suwar al- khalfiyyah,” 12 June 1963.

53. Gardiner, Kuwait, 55 – 56.


ment to ensure that the street- facing side of each building was no less than fourteen meters wide, the height of all colonnaded arcades was equal, and the facades adhered to a harmonious and uniform de-sign and color scheme. The objective behind these controls was to project a positive image of Kuwait’s new era of rational, “harmonious,” and “beautiful” planning.49 But “behind the façades [and] under the roofs” was a dierent picture.50 Most building interiors were beset with shoddy workmanship, bad circulation, and poor engineering: the result of hurried construction and a lack of the government regulations that had guided the building process for the facades. The image of the street had been given more importance than its sustainability, and

the buildings began to obsolesce on the inside be-fore they were even completed (fig. 4).51

Meanwhile, the areas behind the buildings remained nondescript and were cluttered with parked cars, which were deliberately kept out of sight to maintain the pristine image of the street. The buildings curved with the street corners at intersections to block out the undeveloped lots and dilapidated old houses behind them. An ar-ticle published in al- Hadaf in 1963 describes the space behind the new Sheraton Hotel standing at the entrance to Fahad al- Salem Street. “No doubt that you will be very happy with this street,” the article claims, “and especially with the existence of this grand hotel in a prime location facing the

sea.” But if you happened to exit the hotel from its back entrance you would see a large empty lot “that has not yet been reached by the hand of development.” The space was pri-marily used for parking but also in-cluded a rubbish dump strewn with rats, the remains of some old houses and shanty dwellings, and, “most shocking of all,” people sleeping within these rundown structures.52

Though it became the most popular shopping strip in Kuwait through-out the 1960s, Fahad al- Salem Street had a very short lifespan and began to be demolished in 2005 (fig. 5).

Spectacular ArchitectureDespite the eorts to make city de-velopment more organized in the early 1960s, building was still spo-radic. According to Hamid Shu’aib, who succeeded Shiber in the mu-nicipality in 1965, “There was no follow- up of the Master Plan be-cause there was no notion how to proceed from it,” leading to a lull in construction in the mid- 1960s that would last almost a decade.53 Com-mercial activity began to shift out-

Figure 4. The facades of Fahad al- Salem Street. Courtesy of Kuwait Oil Company archives, Ahmadi, Kuwait

54. Peter and Alison Smithson, “Proposals for Restructuring Kuwait,” Architectural Review 156 (1974): 183.



side the city center to Salmiya, the new shopping district located about ten kilometers south along the coast. By the end of the decade the state plan-ning authorities acknowledged that “the character and coherence that the Old City possessed is van-ishing but development by modern buildings has not replaced this by anything that can yet mark the new City of Kuwait as a great capital city.” 54 And so in 1968 they commissioned another British planning consultant, Colin Buchanan and Part-ners, to produce a more comprehensive master plan for Kuwait, both city and country. The gov-ernment also hired four renowned international architectural firms — Reima Pietila from Finland; Belgiojoso, Peressutti, and Rogers from Italy; Peter and Alison Smithson from England; and George

Candilis from France — to translate the planners’ strategies for the city center into a physical urban- architectural reality. This was a vital link between plan and city that “had been so tragically missing” following the 1952 master plan and was deemed to be the cause of the haphazard and unchecked building of the preceding years.55 The objective behind the architectural plans was to make Kuwait City function as a coherent urban whole and to re-store life in the center after two decades of decay.

After three years and enormous expense, the master plan and four city design plans were sub-mitted to the municipality in 1971. However, the master plan was never approved as state policy and neither it nor the four city plans were ever imple-mented. According to Ghazi Sultan, Director of

Figure 5. The completed Fahad al- Salem Street in the 1960s. Courtesy of Kuwait Oil Company archives, Ahmadi, Kuwait

56. For a full analysis of the problems hindering the implementation of the 1971 master plan, see Karim Jamal, “Kuwait: A Salutary Tale,” Architects’ Journal 158 (1973): 1452 – 57; Colin Buchanan and Partners, “Kuwait,” Architects’ Journal 159 (1974): 1131 – 32; and Ghazi Sultan, “Kuwait,” Architects’ Journal 160 (1974): 792 – 94.

57. Ghazi Sultan, “Notes from the [sic] and on the Municipality of Kuwait,” unpublished writ-ings, October 1968 to October 1971, Sultan fam-ily private collection.

58. “Facing the Export Challenge,” Building 230 (1976): 92.

59. Ken Dalley, “Report from the Gulf,” RIBA Journal 85 (1978): 459.


61. Neil Parkyn, “Kuwait Revisited: Showplace for the World’s Architectural Prima Donnas,” Middle East Construction 8 (1983): 40.


Master Planning in the municipality from 1968 to 1971, the Kuwaiti planning administration — com-posed of the planning board, municipality, and Ministry of Public Works — was ill- equipped to implement the complex and comprehensive plans once the Buchanan team left.56 Furthermore, the municipal council was reluctant to approve “a doc-ument that would have such wide- ranging eect on the market prices of land in Kuwait.” 57 Constant land grabbing and speculation that had been com-mon practices in Kuwait since the late 1940s meant that identifying untouched areas as earmarked for future development would lead to a significant in-crease in the value of that land to the point of mak-ing its development unprofitable.

But while the master and city plans were im-mediately abandoned, the quest to make Kuwait City a symbol of the country’s growing prosperity actually increased in the 1970s. The 1973 oil boom, which sparked another (unplanned) construction craze in Kuwait, focused the world’s attention on the Gulf region more closely than ever before. The oil- rich states “with their gigantic spending programmes” oered European, American, and Japanese commercial and construction industries

lucrative financial prospects.58 The vast export po-tential to the region captured the imagination of global investors, and Kuwait’s booming market was at the top of their list as it had the “most secure financial future and . . . the largest population.” 59

Kuwait needed a capital city that would meet the expectations of this global fixation and would more forcefully project the image of prosperity and progress that the world was once again seem-ingly anticipating from the oil- rich state. While the abandoned city schemes required comprehensive, long- term planning and commitment, this kind of spectacle of modernity could be produced more quickly in individual projects.

As their capital city had to satisfy the global gaze, “the Kuwaitis wanted well- known names” in the field of modern architecture to produce these new projects; urban architecture thus replaced consumer products as the preferred markers of Kuwait’s evolving cultural modernity.60 Over the next decade the government called on “a veritable Who’s Who of the international giants” to turn Kuwait into a recognizably modern(ist) city.61 This list of world- class architects included Kenzo Tange from Japan, who designed the new international

airport, the Danish architect Jørn Utzon of Sydney Opera House fame, who designed Kuwait’s National Assembly (Parliament) building (fig. 6), and the Danish modernist architect and designer Arne Jacobsen, who was com-missioned to design the Central Bank. Perhaps most iconic of all the new structures were those de-signed by Swedish architect Sune Lindström and Malene Bjørn from Denmark: the Kuwait Tow-ers water reservoirs on the east-ern edge of Kuwait City and five water tower clusters across the country (fig. 7).Figure 6. Jørn Utzon’s National Assembly building. Photo by the author

62. Al- Barges, A Twenty- Five Year Era, 6.

63. See N. C. Grill, Urbanisation in the Arabian Peninsula (Durham, UK: Centre for Middle East-ern and Islamic Studies, 1984), 6.

64. Lewis Pelly, Report on a Journey to Riyadh in Central Arabia, 1865 (Cambridge: Oleander, 1978), 10.


In addition to presenting an image of Ku-wait’s capital city in a vernacular that the world could recognize and understand as truly modern (and to some extent postmodern), these buildings also represented the spectacular achievements of oil and the great strides Kuwait had taken in

its “march of progress.” 62 The National Assembly building was the symbol of Kuwait’s democratic de-velopment while the Kuwait Towers, which became the country’s national landmark, represented its triumph over nature when only three decades ear-lier fresh water was still imported by dhow from the

Shatt al- ‘Arab river. More than anything, the struc-tures built in the city center during this period reflected the ever- increasing power of the modern state. As state oil revenues shot up from $1.9 billion in 1973 to $8 bil-lion in 1974, profitability was no longer a primary con-cern when it came to urban development projects, as it had been in the 1950s and 1960s.63 Rather, from the mid- 1970s most state- funded construction inside the city center focused on the creation of public and government buildings. For the next decade the goal was no longer simply a mod-ern city created by the state, but a modern capital city created for the state.

The visible presence of the state on Kuwait’s urban landscape was an entirely new phenomenon. Because there had been, as observed by the British Political Resident in 1865, “little Government interfer-ence of any kind, and little need for any” in everyday urban life before oil, Ku-wait’s rulers had left few traces behind on the built environment.64 The pre- oil Figure 7. The Kuwait Towers by Sune Lindström and Malene Bjørn. Photo by the author

65. Barclay Raunkiaer, Through Wahhabiland on Camelback (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 33 – 34.

66. Crystal, Oil and Politics, 93.

67. Lawrence Vale, Architecture, Power, and Na-tional Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 15.

68. See “Sunshine and the Rule of Law: Ku-waiti Law Courts Scheme,” Building Design 501 (1980): 22 – 25.

69. See Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “The Contem-porary Muslim and the Architectural Transfor-mation of the Islamic Urban Environment,” in Toward an Architecture in the Spirit of Islam, ed. Renata Holod (Philadelphia: The Aga Khan Award for Architecture), 1.

70. Quoted in Margaret Cohen, “Modernity on the Waterfront: The Case of Haussmann’s Paris,” in Çinar and Bender, Urban Imaginar-ies, 68.

71. See Dale Electric advertisement, Consulting Engineer 43 (1979): 61.



town did not contain a significant palace structure or any civic or state buildings until the reign of Mubarak al- Sabah (r. 1896 – 1915), who transformed the al- Sabahs’ small seafront residence adjacent to the port into “a large, fortress- like” palace com-plex.65 Although the authority of the rulers and the functions of government grew significantly after 1946, very little changed throughout the first two decades of oil to increase the presence of the state on the urban landscape, even after indepen-dence from Britain in 1961. In 1975, however, the Kuwait Oil Company was nationalized and the government moved, in Jill Crystal’s words, from “a peripheral country dependent on the moves of dis-tant multinationals to an important player in the international oil industry in its own right.” 66 It is not entirely surprising, then, that by the mid- 1970s the state planning strategy sought to enhance the “practical and symbolic focus of national adminis-tration” in the city center.67 These new buildings were given pride of place on the urban landscape, coming up on either side of the new coastal Ara-bian Gulf Road: the Council of Ministers and the Ministry of Foreign Aairs next to Mubarak’s ex-panding Seif Palace (historic seat of al- Sabah gov-ernment) on the seaward side, and the Ministry of Planning, Central Bank, National Museum, Minis-try of Justice courthouse, and National Assembly buildings making their way up the coast on the landward side.

It is interesting to note that the commis-sioned architects of these new state buildings re-ceived explicit instructions from the government in their project briefs that they should be Islamic in character.68 The resurrection of Islamic archi-tecture was a common trend in the Middle East at that time and sought to challenge architectural and constructional influences from America and Europe that were considered incongruous with

local needs and heritage.69 In Kuwait’s particular case, however, the quest for Islamic architecture was less of a return to some lost traditional essence than its invention. By making the new government buildings Islamic in design (usually with arches and geometric patterns), the state institutions they housed were given a sense of rootedness in the city, as if they had always been there, creating what Jonathan Hay describes as an “architecture of permanence.” 70 What at first glance seems like an inherent contradiction — the selection of Western modernist architects for the production of an Is-lamic architectural tradition — perfectly represents the dual image the state wanted its capital city to project: a deep- rooted past combined with a grand modern future (fig. 8).

These structures definitely satiated Kuwait’s desire for world recognition as a modern and pro-gressive city. They were celebrated and debated in international architectural journals and won prestigious international prizes such as the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, awarded to the Ku-wait Towers in 1981. Kuwait’s new landmarks even showed up on the world stage as examples of tech-nological advancement: a photo of the new Radio and Television Center, for example, was used alongside the Heathrow Airport Control Tower in an advertisement for Dale Electric back- up genera-tors in 1979, proving that Kuwait was at the cutting edge of technology.71 But while Kuwait City by the mid- 1980s had become a pantheon of modernist architecture and contained all the necessary mark-ers of state power and legitimacy, it did not get any closer to becoming a functional city. This new pe-riod of “architectural enlightenment” was as com-positionally incoherent as the preceding decades.72

Neil Parkyn, an architect who lived and worked in Kuwait in the late 1970s, noted on a return to the city in 1983 that these new buildings each stood

73. Parkyn, “Kuwait Revisited,” 40.

74. Vale, Architecture, 220.

75. Parkyn, “Kuwait Revisited,” 42.


77. Shiber, Kuwait Urbanization, 166, 118.


“in isolation, having no ‘back’ or ‘front,’ often no planned linkage to the next one.” 73 As Lawrence Vale puts it, they were “isolated islands in a sea of parking lots.” 74

The spaces behind and between these new masterpieces remained undeveloped and neglected, oc-cupied by the ruins of the few remaining pre- oil courtyard houses and the rapidly obsolesc-ing “dusty walk- ups from the 1950 building boom” 75 (fig. 9). While profitability was no longer a pri-mary concern driving state de-velopment projects during this period, restoring urban life in the historic city center was not much of a concern either. All the foreign consultants involved in Kuwait’s planning from the late 1960s on urged that residential areas must be returned to the city center “if life there was not to fade away in the future.” 76 Yet out of all the major projects in-side the city center commissioned to international architects in the 1970s, the one that was scrapped altogether was a massive national housing project designed by Candilis.

The Turn to HeritageIn addition to the need for resi-dential space, many foreign con-sultants also argued that the best way to bring “character and coherence” to the new city cen-ter was to borrow traits from the more “organic” urbanism of Ku-wait’s pre- oil past, not as “pas-tiche” but as an inspiration for the design and organization of the modern cityscape.77 For in-

Figure 8. Ministry of Justice Courthouse by Sir Basil Spence. Courtesy of the Kuwait Ministry of Oil

Figure 9. “Isolated islands in a sea of parking lots.” Colin Buchanan and Partners, Studies for a National Physical Plan for the State of Kuwait and Master Plan for the Urban Areas, 1968 – 1971. Courtesy of the Kuwait Municipality Master Planning Department

78. “Proposals for Restructuring Kuwait,” 183.

79. Suhair al- Mosully, “Revitalizing Kuwait’s Empty City Center” (master’s thesis, Massachu-setts Institute of Technology, 1992), 119.

80. Hadi Hussain, “Wazir al- ashghal: al- sab‘inat bada’ al- milad al- haqiqy li- tahdith al- Kuwait wa- l- tatawwur al- ‘umraniy marhun bi- l- hifadh ‘ala turathina” (“Ministry of Public Works: The Seventies Saw the Real Birth of Kuwait’s Mo-dernity, and Urban Development Depends on the Preservation of our Heritage”), al- Rai al- ‘Aam, 26 February 1990.

81. “Istitla‘ al- Kuwait: aswaq al- Kuwait bayn al- ams wa- l- youm” (“Kuwait’s Markets between Yesterday and Today”), al- Araby, December 1969, 52.

82. CBP, Second Report, 13.

83. Ibid., 15.

84. Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, trans. El-eonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 73.

85. See “Al- baladiyyah tu‘id taqriran ‘an mashru‘ay shari‘ al- amir wa tahsin al- bi’a” (“The

Municipality Reports on the Two Projects of al- Amir Street and Improvements to the Environ-ment”), al- Rai al- ‘Aam, 27 December 1986.

86. See “Intihaa’ al- ‘amal bi- mashru‘ tajdid aswaq madinat al- Kuwait . . . khilal ashhur” (“Work on the Project to Renew Kuwait City’s Markets Will End within Months”), al- Qabas, 16 January 1990.


stance, Peter and Alison Smithson had proposed in their 1971 plan “a city with a low profile once again in direct contact with the water; a city in which it is easy to move around on foot in the shade in every direction without being abrased by cars or car noise. . . . a city with some of its best old features re-stored and put to use.” 78 At a time when Kuwait was in the throes of shedding its past and proving its place among the modern nation- states of the world, the Smithsons’ suggestion to ignore what the rest of the world was doing and look to their own past for inspiration was not what the Kuwaiti authorities wanted to hear.

It was not until the early 1980s that Kuwait City’s urban past was seen as having a role to play in the development process. As Suhair al- Mosully claims: “At that time, the people and the govern-ment realized that their city was missing some-thing they could not identify, something to do with its traditional spirit. After establishing and recon-stituting themselves as a modern society, Kuwaitis regretted the demolition of the traditional city.” 79 However, it was not so much the “character and coherence” of the old town that the government felt was lacking in the new city but rather (more literally) physical relics of the pre- oil townscape. Instead of using Kuwait’s past as inspiration for the city’s redevelopment, the planning authori-ties simply sought to reify the city’s history in sites of national heritage. The main focus was on the historic suq (market) area, large sections of which had been demolished during the development of the central business district in the early 1960s. In 1984 the municipality launched a comprehensive suq restoration project, which began in 1988 with the renovation of the historic suq al- dakhili. Despite the rhetoric attached to the project about return-ing a “sense of history” to the city center, there was

a strong sense that, as the Minister of Public Works argued in 1990, the preservation of heritage was a sign of “urban progress” and would enhance Ku-wait’s modern image in two ways.80

First, the existence of heritage was necessary for the cultivation of tourism. In 1969 the head of the municipality, Jassim al- Marzuq, noted: “We care about tourism . . . but the first places that tourists go to when they visit a new country are its markets and historical sites.” 81 Al- Marzuq’s senti-ments may have been influenced by the Buchanan consultants working in Kuwait at that time, who in their 1971 master plan wrote that “history recorded in buildings is an important factor in tourism.” 82

The planners strongly recommended that what re-mained of the old markets should be conserved as they had “very attractive qualities, both for the visi-tor to Kuwait and for many Kuwaitis themselves.” 83

This concern with tourism reflects Lefebvre’s argu-ment that with modern urbanization, “the urban core becomes a high quality consumption product for foreigners, tourists, people from the outskirts and suburbanites. It survives because of this dou-ble role: as place of consumption and consumption of place.” 84

The consumption of the suq as a Kuwaiti her-itage site was actually of greater concern than its restoration as a place of consumption. Its pre- oil architectural style was meticulously replicated with chandal (mangrove) beams, wooden shop doors that opened onto the street without plate- glass windows, and storefront benches.85 In addition to proprietors who were forced to close their shops before the renovation, priority for the eighty new retail outlets was given to Kuwaitis who worked in al- suq al- dakhili prior to the 1950s (or their descen-dants) on the condition that they sold the same merchandise as previously.86 Historic fixtures like

87. Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, 73.

88. Shankland/Cox Partnership, Master Plan for Kuwait: First Review 1977: Final Report, vol. 1, Planning and Policy (Municipality of Kuwait: 1977), 80.

89. “Istitla’ al- Kuwait,” 52.


Muhammad al- Ruwayih’s bookshop (opened in 1920) and Qahwat Bu Nashi (the city’s oldest cof-fee shop) were given new locations in the reno-vated market area. But regardless of how much the architects and planners strove for authenticity in design, changing social practices over the previ-ous three decades undermined the viability of the suq’s restoration into the vibrant and active social space it had been before oil. By the 1980s practi-cally every Kuwaiti had moved out to the suburbs with more convenient access to supermarkets lo-cated in neighborhood cooperatives and was ac-customed to shopping in modern air- conditioned complexes. Rather than an attempt to lure shop-pers back into the city center in order to restore its everyday sociability, the “architectural and ur-banistic resurgence” 87 of the central suq area in the 1980s constituted little more than the creation of a museum (fig. 10).

The production of heritage also served a second objective that was integral to the ongo-ing modernity project. In their 1977 review of the 1971 master plan the planning firm Shankland Cox claimed that in addition to a sense of history Kuwait’s modernizing city center required a sense of contrast “as testimony to its maturity.” 88 This, too, was something that al- Marzuq had brought up in his initial call for the conservation of the suq in 1969. He argued that preserving the old while building the new was something that happened in modern cities all over the world. He mentioned London and Paris as examples alongside Arab cit-ies such as Beirut, Damascus, and Cairo where “the old remained alongside the new.” 89 Kuwait, by contrast, had very few visible signs of its past on the urban landscape. The renovated and revitalized suq in the heart of the modern central business district could thus serve, as the Minister of Public

Figure 10. Government officials inspecting the renovation of the suq al-dakhili one month before opening in 1990. al- Watan, 4 February 1990. Courtesy of al- Watan

90. “Wazir al- ashghal: aswaq al- Kuwait sa- tu‘id li- l- ‘asimah ahammiyatuha al- tijariyyah” (“Minister of Public Works: Kuwait’s Markets Will Restore the Capital’s Commercial Impor-tance”), al- Nahdha, 16 September 1989.

91. Dennis, Cities in Modernity, 4.

92. See ibid., 1.

93. Sulayman Khalaf, “The Nationalisation of Culture: Kuwait’s Invention of a Pearl- Diving Heritage,” in Popular Culture and Political Identity in the Arab Gulf States, ed. Alanoud Alsharekh and Robert Springborg (London: Saqi, 2008), 46.

94. Ibid.

95. Ibid., 48.

96. George Candilis, Kuwait (n.d. – c. 1971), 1 – 2, Center for Research and Studies on Kuwait.

97. See Tom Avermaete, Another Modern: The Post- War Architecture and Urbanism of Candilis- Josic- Woods (Rotterdam: NAi, 2005).


Works announced in 1989, to “tie [the city’s] noble past with its radiant present.” 90

This call for the preservation of the old to juxtapose the new represents what Richard Den-nis refers to as “the evocation of a counter- modern other at the heart of the modern city.” 91 Tourism aside, the retention of pieces of the past on the urban landscape and the creation of a deliberate contrast between old and new would unequivo-cally prove just how far Kuwait had advanced in such a short amount of time. Visual reminders of the more austere life of the pre- oil town would throw the city’s lavish new structures — like Jacob-sen’s Central Bank located near the old suq — into sharp relief.92 This juxtaposition of old and new cityscapes was similar to the constructed dichot-omy between past and present so prevalent in state discourse after 1950. However, with three decades of prosperity standing between then and now, by the 1980s the pre- oil past no longer needed to be vilified and escaped. Rather, it was presented as being so detached from Kuwait’s modern present that it could now be celebrated and experienced as a museum display. The simple architectural style of al- suq al- dakhili, the need for walking outdoors, and the traditional clothes and items being sold were all elements of a past that Kuwaitis had been encouraged to forget over the past three decades. Reinstating these features in the heart of the city center and freezing them in time would remind urban Kuwaitis what life was like before state- led modernization brought significant improvements in their everyday lives, while simultaneously satis-fying the requirement for heritage consumption in the modern city. In other words, whereas in the early oil decades the pre- oil past was erased to make way for the spectacle of Kuwait’s urban mo-dernity, by the 1980s this past was made a part of that very spectacle.

Nowhere was the spectacle of Kuwait’s past more clearly evoked as modernity’s other as in Qa-

ryat Yawm al- Bahhar (The Seaman’s Day Village). This site commemorating Kuwait’s maritime heri-tage was constructed in 1986 on the coastline facing Utzon’s new Parliament building. The village was built as a recreational space in which traditional courtyard houses and coee shops, and reenact-ments of pre- oil maritime scenes such as shipbuild-ing and the return from pearling, were “displayed and performed in great detail.” 93 Like the suq, the historic life of the city’s seafront became museal-ized in a confined and controlled space in which Kuwaitis were invited “to experience their past in actuality.” 94 The imposed memory of Kuwait’s pre- oil past on the landscape of the new modern cor-niche was not simply a nostalgic aide- mémoire of the old town and lifestyle that “oil wealth has swiftly swept away.” 95 It served as a device to continuously prove that old Kuwait Town had in fact become a modern, and modernizing, city.

ConclusionIn his design plan for the city center in 1971 Candi-lis noted that as a result of the “brutal dislocations in the condition of life” brought about by oil, Ku-wait City had “lost the qualities of the traditional urbanism of the past” without finding a new urban organization to replace it.96 As an architect, Candi-lis believed that people’s living habits and everyday use of the built environment — two elements that were rarely considered in the rapid redevelopment of Kuwait City after the advent of oil — lay at the heart of architecture and urban design.97 The pat-terns of development during Kuwait’s nahda al- ‘umraniyya suggest that Kuwait’s planning authori-ties did not entirely share this sentiment, as the main concern driving city development after 1950 was not people’s experiences in the city but rather the image of the city. This emphasis on the spec-tacle is evident in the greater concern shown for the facades along Fahad al- Salem Street than the buildings’ sustainability, in the priority given to


99. Antoine Bara, “Jarat al-bahar al-mansiyyah”(“The Sea’s Forgotten Neighbor”), al-Qabas, 29November 1996, first installation.


individual masterpieces to decorate the cityscape over the implementation of plans to restore coher-ence to the city center, and in the reification of the past in sites of national heritage in place of allow-ing the past to serve as inspiration for a new urban order.

This image- driven approach to oil urban-ization after 1950 is ultimately what shaped Gar-diner’s assertion in 1983 that “there was no breath-ing space between ancient and modern, rags and riches; from a tiny place in the sand on the edge of the Gulf. . . . Kuwait hurtled like a mis-sile into the high technology of the mid- twentieth century. And over the next thirty years, the new city of Kuwait — optimistic, imaginative, confident and utterly modern — was conceived, planned, built, replanned and rebuilt. The unique creation of oil, the story of this city is astonishing.” 98 This common characterization of Kuwait’s oil urbaniza-tion as a linear, smooth, successful, and virtually overnight leap from ancient to modern, chaos to order, was more of an illusion than the lived real-ity of its inhabitants. It nevertheless confirms that the state was successful in producing an image of modernity in its capital city after the advent of oil. It was unsuccessful, however, in actually produc-ing the functional, well- planned, modern city first conceived in the 1952 master plan — one with fluid tra c arteries, advanced infrastructure and public services, and, most important, a vibrant city life. Rather, four decades of urban development that focused more on the spectacle than on lived real-ity turned Kuwait City into what one article series published in al- Qabas newspaper in 1996 called “the sea’s forgotten neighbor”: an empty and ne-glected space that was congested during the day-time, that nobody visited after working hours, and that contained more cemeteries and vacant sand-lots than anything else.99

Documents

Kuwait's Modern Spectacle: Oil Wealth and the Making of a New Capital City, 1950-1990