أرشيف الوسم: design

At the start of each day, thousands of teachers head to school, and like most Kuwaitis, they move from their government-provided homes to their government jobs. On the morning of October 7, the Ministry of Education issued a decision to relocate more than 8,700 teachers from their usual workplaces to other school sites to balance workloads and bridge deficits in some disciplines. This decision has sparked a wave of protests from teachers and citizens. However, this decision and its consequences reflect a deeper imbalance in Kuwait’s urban development.

Watching the exchange between the protesters and the ministry, we wonder how teachers ended up at a certain school, since most of them did not choose their schools. Most Kuwaitis did not choose their place of residence. The central government employment system distributes jobs according to annual vacancies, and the welfare housing system determines, in some way, housing locations through the available chance and lottery, after years of waiting, which ultimately results in obtaining housing on the outskirts of the urban area in Mutla’a, Khairan, or Sabah al-Ahmad City.

Opportunity determines where the individual lives and where he works; between the two, this forced commuter coexists, and the teacher loses hours every day on the road, while the state bears the high costs of maintaining or expanding these major roads.

In flexible markets, however, people move closer to their workplaces or look for work closer to home. But in Kuwait, this natural mechanism is broken. Housing is unaffordable, government jobs are rigid, and transfer requests are rarely accepted.

The ministry’s decisions may be technically sound, but reform measures must consult stakeholders and allow space for discussion and consideration. Otherwise, they will lead to confusion and injustice; Especially at a time like this, when Professional and civil society bodies, including the Kuwait Teachers’ Society, have been dissolved.

Places and geographies are not marginal; they express the meanings of justice,  shape productivity and well-being of individuals and families. Bringing homes and jobs closer together is a social, economic and environmental imperative. Housing policies in Kuwait must go beyond simply distributing plots and homes.

Public sector employment must account for where people live, and residential suburbs should be designed around public transport, with schools, shops, and workplaces within walking distance. Once this is achieved, roads become vital and enable teachers to reach their schools with the energy their students need.

At the Conference of Housing and Urban Development, during the panel on “Kuwait New Cities: Investment, Development and Partnership Opportunities,” The raised a question was: how do we deepen the connection between commercial activity and social amenities?

The starting premise is simple but often overlooked. The government cannot, and should not, remain the sole provider of every amenity and social service in a growing urban landscape. As new cities scale up, the demand for parks, community centers, religious and cultural spaces, and everyday social infrastructure will outpace what any single public authority can deliver alone. Meeting that demand requires a deliberate system that distributes responsibility across multiple actors. Thus, I proposed four components of such a system.

First, real estate developers should operate under clear, enforceable requirements to provide a defined share of social amenities within their projects, rather than treating them as optional add-ons negotiated project by project.

Second, cooperative real estate companies should be actively encouraged to participate. Kuwait already has a strong cultural familiarity with cooperative models in the retail sector; extending that logic to real estate development could unlock community-oriented investment that purely commercial developers are less inclined to pursue.

Third, civil society organizations, non-profits, and volunteer groups deserve a genuine, active role in shaping future cities, not a peripheral or symbolic one. These groups often understand community needs more intimately than either government agencies or private developers, and they should be structurally embedded in the planning and delivery process.

Fourth, and perhaps most significant, I called for a re-introduction of the Islamic waqf system. Waqf has a centuries-long track record of sustaining schools, hospitals, water infrastructure, and public spaces across the Islamic world, funded and managed independently of state budgets. Modernizing this instrument for contemporary urban development could provide a culturally rooted, financially sustainable mechanism for delivering social infrastructure at scale.

Taken together, these four pillars point toward a shared-responsibility model for urban development, one where the private sector, cooperatives, civil society, and revived Islamic institutions each carry part of the load currently placed entirely on the state. As Kuwait moves forward with its new cities agenda, this kind of layered partnership may prove essential to building places that are not just built, but truly lived in.

In terms of architectural taste, I may not like the architectural style of the Palace of Justice in Kuwait City. But it is undeniable that it has become an architectural landmark that carries weight in the collective memory and shapes the spatial identity of Kuwait City. Here I bring to mind the Italian architect Aldo Rossi (1931-1997) and his idea of an “urban artifact”.

 Rossi wrote: “Architecture in the city means two different things: first, the city as a massive man-made object, a complex work of engineering that grows with time; second, limited but essential aspects of the city, are the urban artifacts.”

Rossi introduces the concept of an “urban artifact”, which includes buildings and spaces that survive over time not for a functional advantage, but because they concentrate collective meaning and become indispensable monuments, such as mosques, markets, and public squares, elements of resistance, which survive demographic and economic change and even physical destruction because they are centers of collective identity.  It allows society to remember who it is and where it came from. Rossi’s concept of a “site” that focuses collective memory has a particular resonance in the Gulf; the historic souks in Kuwait, the old yards (Baraha) in Bahrain, and the towers of Qatari coastal villages are sites where the community’s identity is physically symbolized. Its destruction during   an era of oil-age urbanization, in Rossi’s terms, represented the destruction of collective memory and the dismantling of the infrastructure of identity.

The Palace of Justice in Kuwait is a delicate test case for us. Designed by Scottish architect Sir Basil Spence, it was opened in 1986 as part of the state’s policy in the 1960s and 1970s to establish a Kuwaiti-themed architectural modernity! Due to its size, location, and historical value, Kuwaitis interacted with it in different circumstances, adorned it with the national currency, and received decades of the state’s legal memory, becoming the center of a collective identity that went beyond its practical function.

However, the Ministry of Justice recently announced the decision to demolish it, a decision that goes beyond being an administrative decision, as it represents a deliberate dismantling of one of the few spatial anchors that link the modern judicial institution to its founding history. More seriously, the decision comes in the absence of a technical opinion that the building is liable to fall, and it also violates Article 12 of the Constitution, which obliges the state to preserve heritage, and Article 17, which protects public funds, as it is estimated that the demolition of a building with a current value of approximately fifty million Kuwaiti dinars constitutes a direct waste of public estate.

From the perspective of urban development, the demolition of the Palace of Justice enshrines a “culture of demolition”, which reduces the treatment of aging buildings to their replacement rather than periodic maintenance, even though the cost of maintenance is much lower than the cost of demolition and reconstruction, and despite the fact that the replacement empties the site of its historical layers.

On the other hand, if the Ministry of Justice believes that the building is no longer practical or useful for its current operations, then it can be put up for investment, and the private sector should study its rehabilitation for other uses, so that it can become a hotel, a market, a bank headquarters, or even a museum or a public library!

The demolition decision comes in the context of a series of demolitions that inevitably apply to other modernist buildings of the same era, from the Kuwait Airport designed by Kenzo Tango to the Central Bank building designed by Arne Jakobsen, all of which are urban artifacts that are subject to the same fate unless an explicit national policy is adopted to protect modern architectural heritage.

On the twenty-first day of the US-Israeli war on Iran, with Iran now targeting GCC countries in retaliation, we are drawn into the center of a regional conflict. Yet, life here continues with unsettling normalcy. Sirens sound, news circulates, but the streets stay busy, and people maintain their routines. We are reminded how fragile welfare is.

In the last 60 years, the GCC populations have expanded fortyfold, and countries have built modern cities with extraordinary ambition. These cities are equipped with state-of-the-art infrastructure, abundant energy, and cityscapes that rival any on earth. Still, behind this prosperity lies profound vulnerability. Desalination plants remain the sole source of water for millions, even as the threat of sabotage hangs over critical infrastructure. The lesson is becoming impossible to ignore: a city should only grow as large as its water reserves can sustain !

International opposition to the war is rising, and deep Pan-Arab sentiment now aligns with anyone opposing the Israeli regime. This created tension with some expats and could pose a challenge to local governments.  Other highly qualified Expats begin to quietly leave. Cities should reassess their technical and infrastructural dependencies; The war exposes that immigrants are gifts, but immigration as a demographic strategy creates vulnerability !

Interestingly, the long-criticized low-density urbanization in GCC cities now appears to be an unexpected advantage. Sprawling cities with sparse populations mean that missiles and drones face different calculations of destruction than they would in more densely packed cities. High density proves beneficial, but not during wartime !

Meanwhile, while driving on the First Ring Road recently, I came across a painful scene: the damaged headquarters of the Public Institution for Social Security, which had been hit by a missile fragment. The view of the burned tower offers a sharp contrast to the ambitions of skyscrapers in a region known for its world-renowned landmarks and high-rise competition. In wartime, the tower is no longer a landmark, but a target. Working or living in them is considered more dangerous, and they pose a challenge for emergency teams. In wartime, towers turned out to be a useless burden !

Technology has also revealed its limits. Adapted apps, payment platforms, and digital conveniences have always formed a layer built upon stability, not the foundation itself. When conflict began, this distinction stood out unmistakably.

The war underscores the importance of the human and the local. In times of crisis, it is clear that people matter more than platforms. Immediately, we recognized the value of neighbors—those who share sirens and a stairwell. The neighborhood, humanity’s oldest settlement unit, stands as something technology cannot replicate. War reminds us to know and value our neighbors !

Additionally, the war has shifted our understanding of home, making accessibility and centrality essential for survival. A well-located home now holds value for its protection, access, and resilience, not for its aspirations.

Lastly, war strips cities down to their essentials and forces us to confront what we have long taken for granted. Amenities like Water, shelter, community, and proximity are not mere conveniences but the architecture of survival. This moment of reckoning is not unique in history, but it arrives with particular importance for cities built on the assumption of permanent stability. Maybe the deepest lesson of this war is not strategic or political, but fundamentally human: that the measure of a city was never its skyline, but its resilience, and that resilience was never found in its buildings and infrastructures, but in the people who live between them.