Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life

297 Pages·2016·2.581 MB·English

by  Farah Al-Nakib

Kuwait Transformed

Kuwait Transformed
A History of Oil and Urban Life
Farah Al-Nakib
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
©2016 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission
of Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Al-Nakib, Farah, 1979- author.
Title: Kuwait transformed : a history of oil and urban life / Farah Al-Nakib.
Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2016. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015048590| ISBN 9780804796392 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780804798525 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780804798570 (electronic)
Subjects: LCSH: City and town life--Kuwait--Kuwait--History. |
Urbanization--Kuwait--Kuwait--History. | Kuwait (Kuwait)--Economic
conditions. | Kuwait (Kuwait)--Social conditions. | Kuwait
(Kuwait)--History.
Classification: LCC HT147.K9 A46 2016 | DDC 307.76095367--dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015048590
Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 11/13.5 Adobe Garamond
For my parents,
Nazha Boodai and Basel Al-Nakib

Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Note on Transliteration xvi
Introduction 1
1 Pre-Oil Urbanism 21
2 Port City Life 43
3 A Cosmopolitan Community 71
4 Oil-Era Modernization 91
5 The Move to the Suburbs 121
6 The Privatization of Urban Life 149
7 The De-Urbanization of Society 175
8 The Right to the City 199
Notes 225
Glossary of Key Terms 253
Bibliography 255
Index 269

Preface
“I kept thinking that there was something missing,” said Maryam
al-Nusif over a morning cup of hand-brewed coffee at a picnic table in
the Secret Garden. Maryam was talking to me about the origins of the
community gardening project she kick-started in 2014 with some friends,
family, and neighbors in a derelict park in Salmiya, Kuwait’s main com-
mercial district. The garden, in which we were sitting, is around the corner
from her house. “We live in villas with high walls where we can’t even
see the street. We have no connection to the pavement right outside our
front doors. We like to complain about potholes and filth on our streets,
but then we get into our private cars and it doesn’t really affect us. So we
don’t do anything about it. There has to be something missing.” By her
own admission, Maryam has not been able to articulate fully what exactly
this absence is; it is something she feels intuitively as a Kuwaiti. It is what
stimulated her to create the Secret Garden, a seemingly inconsequential yet
potentially transformative social space that encourages people in Kuwait,
particularly children, to feel more connected to their natural, urban, and
social surroundings. As a Kuwaiti, I too feel that “something missing”; it is
what stimulated me to write this book.
In his essay “The Return of the Flâneur,” Walter Benjamin asserts
that most narrative descriptions of cities have been written by o utsiders—
allured by “the exotic and the picturesque”—rather than by natives of
those cities. “To depict a city as a native,” he says, “calls for other, deeper
motives—the motives of the person who journeys into the past, rather
than to foreign parts. The account of a city given by a native will always
have something in common with memoirs; it is no accident that the writer