أرشيف الوسم: urbanism

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.

Municipal decisions shape a city’s soul. Smart cities are built on empathy; they preserve order through regulation and strong communication with communities, offering supportive alternatives and applying subtle, data-driven interventions. Therefore, what is happening in Jleeb al-Shuyoukh these days is of great importance and calls for attention.

Over the past two weeks, a group of government institutions has launched a campaign in Jleeb al-Shuyoukh, a densely populated area known for sheltering low-income workers and for its high number of construction violations and other encroachments. As reported by newspapers, the campaign targeted more than 1,000 buildings, resulting in the evacuation of large numbers of residents and difficult conditions for vulnerable segments of society.

Officials see the deteriorating condition of the area as the result of decades of neglect and unregulated growth, with landlords dividing single-family homes into high-density housing. This has led to negative effects on services and infrastructure and presents risks to security and safety. Thus, the time has come to find quick solutions to this corrupt phenomenon.

Although the official authorities’ diagnosis is correct, an intervention of this magnitude requires more practical planning that examines the problem in depth and from all sides. Many cities around the world have faced similar, perhaps even more frequent, problems and have succeeded in solving them by matching intervention to context.

In Kuwait, we have precise tools to address the subject with professionalism, sensitivity, and humanity. We should have looked at the big picture and considered how the urban area could accommodate low-wage housing in a humane and practical way. Prudent planning favors improvements over demolition and prioritizes preserving the structure and social networks, while taking into account for the requirements of security, safety, and engineering efficiency.

Despite all that we see, the Jleeb area has succeeded in attracting workers, housing them, and providing a central location in the heart of Kuwait, offering affordable housing for the simple worker and access to various areas in the north and south of Kuwait. It also provided residents with a relatively acceptable environment, serving as a social incubator for communities, with restaurants, playgrounds, mosques, markets, shops, and both official and informal services. Therefore, it has the elements that have enabled it to survive and operate for decades.

But when we do not find an alternative to human relocation, it would have been better to discover viable alternatives that take into account the requirements of the state and society and do not neglect the priorities and needs of the worker. Hence, we should seek to develop systems that integrate corporate responsibility for workers’ housing, along with work and residence permits. Develop policies that encourage investment, or spending when investment is not feasible, in affordable housing for workers. In addition, involve the community as a whole in making such decisions. Scientific tools, supported by reliable information, are also needed to monitor ongoing compliance with building regulations and security and safety requirements.

Finally, we call for wisdom and compassion, because urban planning is centered on human beings. The imposition of the law does not imply policies of abstract erasure, and illegal or dense housing does not justify sudden evictions, which expose individuals and sometimes families to harsh conditions. Often, this worker is only a victim of system breakdowns or the pressures of circumstances. The sight of workers scouring the roads and surrounding areas, carrying what they could or sleeping on roofs in the heat of summer, is an indication of a moral failure in a country that has always presented itself as a country of humanity and goodness!

Cities are built on compassion; smart municipalities study the steps, know how to implement soft interventions, provide alternatives, and listen to residents, while also developing and enforcing laws and regulations through transparent procedures and accountable measures. We must realize that abiding by the law is rooted in trust, while fear leads to exporting problems or creating new ones.

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.