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Book Cover
E-book
Author Al-Nakib, Farah, 1979- author

Title Kuwait transformed : a history of oil and urban life / Farah Al-Nakib
Published Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2016]
©2016

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Description 1 online resource
Contents Pre-oil urbanism -- Port city life -- A cosmopolitan community -- Oil-era modernization -- The move to the suburbs -- The privatization of urban life -- The de-urbanization of society -- The right to the city
Summary As the first Gulf city to experience oil urbanization, Kuwait City's transformation in the mid-twentieth century inaugurated a now-familiar regional narrative: a small traditional town of mudbrick courtyard houses and plentiful foot traffic transformed into a modern city with marble-fronted buildings, vast suburbs, and wide highways. In Kuwait Transformed, Farah Al-Nakib connects the city's past and present, from its settlement in 1716 to the twenty-first century, through the bridge of oil discovery. She traces the relationships between the urban landscape, patterns and practices of everyday life, and social behaviors and relations in Kuwait. The history that emerges reveals how decades of urban planning, suburbanization, and privatization have eroded an open, tolerant society and given rise to the insularity, xenophobia, and divisiveness that characterize Kuwaiti social relations today. The book makes a call for a restoration of the city that modern planning eliminated. But this is not simply a case of nostalgia for a lost landscape, lifestyle, or community. It is a claim for a "right to the city"--The right of all inhabitants to shape and use the spaces of their city to meet their own needs and desires
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes English
Online resource; title from PDF title page (EBSCO, viewed March 14, 2016)
Subject City and town life -- Kuwait -- Kuwait -- History
Urbanization -- Kuwait -- Kuwait -- History
SOCIAL SCIENCE/Sociology/Urban.
City and town life
Economic history
Social conditions
Urbanization
Erdölexport
Modernisierung
Sozialer Wandel
Sozioökonomischer Wandel
Urbanität
Verstädterung
Kuwait (Kuwait) -- Economic conditions
Kuwait (Kuwait) -- Social conditions
Kuwait (Kuwait) -- History
Kuwait -- Kuwait
Kuwait
Kuwait Stadt
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780804798570
0804798575