Modernizing Kuwait: Nation-building and unplanned spatial practices

Abstract

This is a study of city planning intentions and their unintended spatial practices as manifest in Kuwait's urban center. Focusing on Kuwait's public space, Duwwar El-Sheriton, its weekly migrant labor gathering is traced back to Kuwait's first master plan in 1952 up until the present. In a modernizing city built on a very specific regime of labor migration and modernist/nationalist city planning that strategically censor the city's duality, migrant worker's spatial practices in Kuwait's public space subvert their explicit exclusionary nature, injecting a brief public vision of communities rendered invisible by the official plan of the contemporary state.