Toward a Spatiotemporal Narrative Approach to Kuwait’s 20th- and 21st-Century Urban History

This essay critiques the conventional historiography of modern Kuwait, which tends to reduce the history of urban transformation in the country within a binary oil-centric teleology that flattens the history of Kuwait into pre-oil poverty versus oil-era prosperity. Despite the undeniable importance of oil as a fuel for the rapid transformation of Kuwait, the problem with this sort of narrative is that it characterizes the advent of oil as a singularly course-changing moment. This, in turn, obscures more complex economic, social, and political patterns relating to the destruction and (re)construction of Kuwait’s built environment since the mid-twentieth century. This essay addresses this issue, applying Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction (and its applications in the urban-studies context) to argue that state-led urban transformation in Kuwait is not a one-time event, but rather comprises a cyclical series of urban-environmental creative destructions intended to fulfill evolving nation-building objectives. As such, the essay identifies three distinct cycles. The first is the “modernization project,” spanning roughly from 1950-1990, wherein the nascent Kuwaiti state used the influx of new oil revenues to turn the historic port town of Kuwait into a modernist capital. The second is the post-Gulf War reconstruction in the period after 1990-91, reflecting shifts toward neoliberalism in the aftermath of wartime devastation. The third is the contemporary period of modernist heritage demolition–of many buildings constructed during the first cycle–related to the state’s new vision (e.g. Vision 2035 and its updates) toward a post-oil national potential. By applying a Schumpeterian lens to the history of urban development in Kuwait, the paper moves beyond oil as a static historiographical determinant in order to demonstrate the ever-changing role of the state and other actors in spatially shaping both the country’s built environment and its history.