Return of the Prodigal Suburb

Abstract

The suburb is a global phenomenon. Its seeds were sown in early industrial Britain and it has since spread throughout much of the former British Empire and the world. The Arabian Gulf littoral was one site in which suburban development took hold, and it is the oscillation of one of its cities’ center of gravity from the pre-oil historic urban core to the new periphery and back again that is the focus of this essay. In the wake of the oil boom, Kuwait City at once expanded and lost its traditional urban core and thus its character. The suburbanity of Kuwait has become a source of much lament. Yet instead of a return to the city, the Kuwaiti quest for urban salvage has taken a different route, that of attempting to perfect the suburb. Germinating within one of suburbia’s spatial types, though, are the kernels of such a return. In Kuwait, a simmering urban longing has been incubated by a fundamentally suburban artifact: the shopping mall. The Avenues is Kuwait’s largest and most consequential mall, within which is an artificial re-creation of a cosmopolitan promenade and an alleyway-style market inspired by the old city fabric. By striving to bring the outside in, the mall effectively affords a pedestrian urbanism away from the city’s car-dominated built environment. Though brandable as aesthetically kitsch, environmentally unsustainable, and politically facile—as a crude response to modern Kuwait’s lacking urban character—The Avenues is an example of the fruitfulness of the alignment of architecture and mock urbanism. The presumptively low-brow here acts as a catalyst for a collective reappreciation of the urban. By becoming a crucible around which Kuwaitis have come to face the legacies of their urban past, this case of spatial historical fiction in the periphery prods them, even if ever so slightly, toward questioning the center’s status quo.