Ecologies of belonging and exclusion in urban Kuwait: towards an urban co-designed approach

The development of Kuwait City’s urban agglomeration – home to 3 million inhabitants, 71.2 percent of the country’s population – is connected to the country’s discovery of oil in 1938. As citizenship became the key to benefiting from Kuwait’s oil wealth, a complex system of differential inclusion and exclusion was devised to identify those entitled and the type and extent of entitlement. Kuwait’s oil wealth presented the emirate’s rulers with the resources to turn Kuwait’s citadel into a modern administrative and commercial centre, but the new city plans largely failed to have an equalising effect. Instead, the existing hierarchical character and divides of Kuwait were grafted onto its urban space. The urban sprawl that replaced Kuwait’s citadel was divided into districts whose boundaries reinforced status, class, ethnic and gender divides. Housing and mobility in the city, leisure and work all became entangled in a complex web of exclusion and inclusion. This paper draws on the findings of a year-long project on the ecologies of inclusion and exclusion in urban Kuwait and its impact on inclusive and effective urban governance.