As the first Gulf city to experience oil urbanization, Kuwait City's transformation in the mid-twentieth century inaugurated a now-familiar regional narrative: a small traditional town of mudbrick courtyard houses and plentiful foot traffic transformed into a modern city with marble-fronted buildings, vast suburbs, and wide highways. In Kuwait Transformed, Farah Al-Nakib connects the city's past and present, from its settlement in 1716 to the twenty-first century, through the bridge of oil discovery. She traces the relationships between the urban landscape, patterns and practices of everyday life, and social behaviors and relations in Kuwait. The history that emerges reveals how decades of urban planning, suburbanization, and privatization have eroded an open, tolerant society and given rise to the insularity, xenophobia, and divisiveness that characterize Kuwaiti social relations today. The book makes a call for a restoration of the city that modern planning eliminated. But this is not simply a case of nostalgia for a lost landscape, lifestyle, or community. It is a claim for a "right to the city"-the right of all inhabitants to shape and use the spaces of their city to meet their own needs and desires.
"This beautifully written and compelling narrative explains both Kuwait's cosmopolitan history as a diverse port city and the fundamental transformation of its urban life, urban space, and political life. It is replete with a wealth of historicized and contextualized insights and is a must read for those interested in a spatial reading of Kuwaiti history, urbanity and development."
American University
"Farah Al-Nakib debunks some tenacious myths about modernist urban planning: far from creating a happier, more productive urban environment, it fostered bleak suburbs marked by class, gender, and race segregation. Her superb book is a hymn to everyday Kuwaitis who, after sixty years of urban upheaval, struggle to reclaim the right to their city."
Brandeis University, author of Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism, and Road Revolt
"Farah Al-Nakib's critical eye and eloquent prose illuminate questions that have engaged generations of urban theorists, historians and activists: the destructive and alienating nature of modernism, the real and the ideal of urban pasts, and the loss of city's ownership. Kuwait Transformed is a brilliant achievement whose relevance goes far beyond the Gulf region and the Middle East, and a must re
