Negotiating the Politics of Exclusion: Georges Candilis, Housing and the Kuwaiti Welfare State

Abstract

In the early stages of welfare planning, the Kuwaiti state restricted equal access to its housing programs in neighborhoods outside the city. The subsequent demographic shift, caused by a Kuwaiti exodus to the ‘suburbs' and non‐Kuwaiti urban labor migration, prompted calls for housing schemes to encourage city living for citizens. Georges Candilis's proposal for a residential neighborhood in Kuwait City emerged from this context. This article examining Candilis's unrealized project also offers a critical perspective on Kuwait's unbalanced housing policies. From this analysis, it draws observations on the role of architects and their limited impact on policies established by decision‐making networks within the welfare state. Seen from this perspective, the Candilis project bears witness to broader socio‐economic agendas that privileged some groups while marginalizing or excluding others.

The Forever Frontier of Urbanism: Historicizing Persian Gulf Cities

“…She argues that the process resulted in the political inclusion but social marginalization of Bedouin Kuwaitis, who were instrumentally re‐tribalized to create a political support base for the regime. This process was accompanied by schemes that involved providing free land and housing to all Kuwaitis in specially zoned suburbs, which resulted in an additional citizen/non‐citizen binary and, as Asseel al‐Ragam () notes, led to the neglect of the old city center, clearly bringing the contradictions of state policy into view. Thus, by isolating nuclear families in suburbs consisting of single‐family dwellings, physically and morally separating spaces of work and leisure, and reifying categories of identification through careful zoning, states and corporations sought to shape not only urban space, but also the individuals who lived in it (Alissa, : 53).…”