9

PRECIOUS PROPERTY
Water and Oil in Twentieth-Century Kuwait

Laura Hindelang

In early 1962, Kuwait’s first substantial subterranean water reservoir was discovered at
Raudhatain in northern Kuwait.1 The Ralph M. Parsons company, which was conducting
hydrogeological surveys on behalf of the government of Kuwait, was a US firm formerly
active in building oil refineries. Geologists described how “the fresh water [had] gathered in
a geological basin one side of which is an anticline of the structure forming the Raudhatain
oil-field.”2 Raudhatain’s water (most of it fossil) and petroleum effectively sprang from the
same geological formation and were accessed by similar technologies. This multifaceted
historical relationship between Kuwait’s water(scape) and petroleumscape, with its spatial
and architectural, social, and political as well as symbolic and representational layers, is the
topic of this chapter.
One can trace petroleum’s impact on twentieth-century Kuwait in many ways: airplane
and automobile culture, gas stations, air-conditioning, and the proliferation of plastics—all
depend on petroleum. In Kuwait, the oil industry but also the oil revenue-financed govern-
ment transformed the city-state’s urban and desert landscapes, its architectural forms, and
the built environment. However, despite the growing omnipresence of petroleum-derived
products and lifestyles, petroleum as a raw material, as an unprocessed liquid, has usually
remained invisible in urban space. Chemically, oil and water do not mix, but in Kuwait, as
the brief example of Raudhatain illustrates, the history of oil and the history of water flow
together. Yet, the visual-spatial absence of oil has obscured the two fluids’ interdependent
conditions of existence. Water has been given a direct material and spatial presence in a way
that oil has not, whereby potable water, whose production, transport, and distribution has
relied substantially on petroleum and the petroleumscape in one way or another, became the
representative liquid of Kuwait’s oil-based modernization.
Water has been celebrated with direct contact in ways petroleum was not because of
oil’s physical characteristics (toxic, inflammable, smelly). At the official inauguration of
the opening of the Raudhatain water reservoirs, Kuwait’s deputy prime minister drank
from the powerful stream of clear water shooting down from a massive pipe connected

DOI: 10.4324/9780367816049-12
160 Laura Hindelang

FIGURE 9.1  hotograph taken at the official inauguration of the Raudhatain Water Resources
P
Project, where Sheikh Sabah al-Salem al-Sabah, deputy prime minister and minister of
foreign affairs, sampled Raudhatain water. Source: Unknown photographer, September
19, 1962. Image from the BP Archive, University of Warwick, ARC233262_061.

to the new water scheme (Figure 9.1). The British ambassador to Kuwait reported from
the event that:

it was interesting to watch the surge of delighted people, led by the Deputy Prime
Minister, to the flowing water immediately after the opening ceremony, and their
eagerness to touch and taste this rare commodity which now made its first appearance
here in its natural state.3

In the course of Kuwait’s modern history, both potable water and petroleum have acted as
pivotal commodities that shaped the modernization of the country and the making of mod-
ern Kuwait City.4 They are Kuwait’s precious properties.
This chapter argues that petroleum has been written into Kuwait City’s urban space, so-
cial practices, and also into its urban visual culture, all of which forms the petroleumscape,5
through a form of waterscape, the spatial, material, social, and symbolic production of wa-
ter. Integrating perspectives from the architectural history and the environmental/energy
history of the Middle East, this chapter examines key historical moments where layers of
the petroleum(scape) and water(scape) intersect and form a palimpsestic relationship. We
can trace these intersections in the form of institutions, companies, governments, images,
built form, and spatial configurations. It is a transnational and quasi-colonial relation due
to Kuwait’s status as a British quasi-protectorate until 1961 and the European-American
monopolization of much of the oil industry that operates globally. Within this relationship,
images—visual-symbolic representations—and infrastructures do not just reflect a status
quo, but rather they create narratives and sites in a—often diachronic—feedback loop.
 Water and Oil in Twentieth-Century Kuwait 161

Arguing that the commodification of water started early on, preparing the ground for
petroleum, this chapter starts with Kuwait’s river water imports in the early twentieth cen-
tury. It then focuses on early attempts at prospecting for water, which the British turned into
a search for oil. Mid-century water desalination, which only became feasible with the ar-
rival of cheap fossil fuels and oil revenues, provided Kuwait with sufficient, locally produced
potable water for the first time. In the second half of the century, large-scale water produc-
tion and distribution systems with monumental sculptural architecture appeared across the
country, signaling the oil state’s capacity to provide for its citizens. Recently, water coolers
in various shapes have come to adorn the sidewalks of Kuwait City, demonstrating citizens’
will and power to give water for free—although, one should caution, only as long as oil
lasts. Overall, Kuwait’s waterscape offers an analytical lens for investigating petroleum’s
spatialization and social and symbolic representation beyond the oil fields. Moreover, this
chapter demonstrates that in the Middle East, petroleum effectively “reached a new group
of people eager to believe in new lifestyles and imaginaries” and heavily impacted its urban-
ism/spatial configurations by the mid-twentieth century and not—as is commonly assumed
and most studies suggest—as late as the 1970s (due to the oil price boom/oil crisis).6

The Demand for Potable Water Gives Way to the Search for Petroleum
The development of life-sustaining natural resources, in particular a water supply, preceded
and made possible oil’s role in Kuwaiti society, as British archival sources and Kuwaiti accounts
reveal. In the early twentieth century, when growing water scarcity made it urgent to find
alternative sources, Kuwaitis began importing water by boat. Water had become scarce fol-
lowing the dry winter of 1907–1908 and, under Sheikh Mubarak’s reign (1896–1915), the pop-
ulation had been growing.7 During the summer of 1908, shipowner Mohammed Al-Yacoub
first brought river water from the Shatt al Arab to sell in Kuwait. A much frequented intake
location along the Shatt al Arab became a spot “just above Khorramshahr”—the port city that
was largely developed by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) as part of their oil industry
infrastructure in Khuzestan in Iran.8 Prior to these water imports, town dwellers and Bedouins
had depended on rainwater harvesting and artesian wells inside and outside the town. Both the
inner town wells and the wells outside the city walls contained brackish water, often of poor
quality.9 Still, the numerous Al-Shamiya wells, for example, had apparently supplied “practi-
cally the entire population of Kuwait with water.”10 It is noteworthy that the newly imported
river water was not only of a better quality but also cheaper than well water, which was trans-
ported by donkey and camel. Attesting to the new water’s popularity, by the 1930s, already
forty-nine boats of a type called buˉm were exclusively used for water transport, of which “an
average of 6 arrive daily, each with about 8,000 gallons of water worth roughly Rs. 100/-.”11
In 1939, local merchants established the Kuwait Water Company to organize the water trans-
port and the company built three reservoirs for the storage of their product at the harbor.12
The scarcity of water led to a variety of techniques, infrastructure, and jobs involved in the
transport and distribution of water in the town, early on turning the fluid into a priceable prod-
uct. The commodification of water unfolded in layers of physical spaces and social practices.13
When returning from the Shatt al Arab to Kuwait, each buˉm was loaded with big wooden barrels
containing river water. On arrival, the water was either stored in the reservoirs or was poured
into goatskins, strapped on a donkey’s back, and sold to private households. In addition, through
the streets of Kuwait water porters (al-kandarˉı) carried metal containers attached to either end of
a wooden stick. The containers had originally been used for kerosene and were now filled with
162 Laura Hindelang

water for sale. These kerosene tins functioned as “the universal water measure.”14 Already, the
world of petroleum—in the form of kerosene tins—facilitated the practices and infrastructures
of water supply in Kuwait and oil manifested as a culture with a related set of social and aesthetic
practices, even though the Kuwaiti oil industry would not begin operating until 1946.
The search for domestic sources of water facilitated the development of the petroleum­
scape. In 1912, Shaikh Mubarak of Kuwait asked the British Government of India, based on
the British-Kuwaiti Protection Agreement of 1899, for assistance in developing “an adequate
water supply.”15 British officials saw an opening for petroleum prospecting, disguised as hy-
drogeological survey, and seized the moment. Sir Percy Cox, who served as political resident
in the Persian Gulf at Bushire, stressed that “the present opportunity for effecting a careful
examination of the Oil Fields of Kuwait territory by an expert geologist, whilst nominally
examining the potentialities of artesian wells in this region, is a most favourable one and
not likely to recur.”16 And with a distinctively imperialist outlook, he highlighted “the im-
portance, on Imperial grounds, of the retention of the Oil Fields in the Persian Gulf region
under exclusively British control,” along similar lines as William Knox D’Arcy, director of
the APOC, who argued for British control of Iranian oil production.17 Evidently, British
officials considered petroleum to merit large-scale surveys in a way that water did not, given
that—at the time—British livelihood did not depend on securing water in Kuwait.
It is somewhat ironic that in 1924, Swiss geologist Arnold Heim, one of the early experts
to assess the availability of exploitable resources in Eastern Arabia, concluded that there was
not enough geological evidence to opt for oil prospecting, but there was for water.18 In fact,
surveying for underground geological water deposits shared many common features with
prospecting for hidden petroleum.19 Although Heim was eventually proven mistaken, it is
telling that his contractor, the London-based Eastern and General Syndicate Limited, was
not interested in drilling for water and British and American efforts to search for petroleum
subsequently increased. As a result, in 1934, British Petroleum (formerly APOC) and Gulf
Oil, an American firm, formed the Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) to explore Kuwait’s oil
deposits. In 1938, the KOC struck crude in the Burgan Oil Field. The Kuwaiti quest to find
water became key to foreign prospecting for oil, disclosing not only the seemingly smooth
shift from quasi-colonial to increasingly corporate British involvement, but also the inextri-
cability of waterscape and petroleumscape in Kuwait.

Desalinating Water in Kuwait: A Technology Transfer

from the Kuwait Oil Company
Given that foreign interest in oil did not solve Kuwait’s drinking water problem, the Kuwaiti
leadership tried to explore other options. Eventually, sea water desalination emerged as a
promising path, but not until the necessary technical, financial, and energy resources were
made available through the emerging oil industry in the mid-twentieth century. However,
the idea of desalinating the Persian Gulf ’s salt water was not entirely new.20 Already Sheikh
Mubarak, under whose reign the water imports had started, had favored the construction of
a distillation facility after he had reportedly witnessed one running in Aden.21 A first attempt
at operating a desalination plant installed by the British company of Messrs. Strick Scott in
1918–1919 failed and Kuwait remained with brackish well water and imported river water.22
Following the initial oil shipment from Kuwait to Britain in 1946, then-ruler Sheikh
Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah (r. 1921–1950) reopened the question with the British Political
 Water and Oil in Twentieth-Century Kuwait 163

Agency in Kuwait, expressing an interest in producing additional drinking water through

seawater desalination, conscious that the KOC was in the process of building a distillation
plant at Ahmadi.23 In the context of the expanding oil industry and the city-state’s mod-
ernization project, Kuwait City experienced a startling demographic and economic surge,
a rapid shift toward petroleum-based lifestyles, and consequently a new level of water de-
mand. Around that time, according to one estimate, imported water had increased to a daily
supply of about 100,000 gallons of river water delivered by twenty-two boats to accommo-
date Kuwait’s water consumption.24
Eventually, the Kuwaiti government commissioned Ewbank & Partners as consulting
engineers for a new and much larger power and desalination plant. It does not come as a sur-
prise that Ewbank & Partners, a company with strong ties to the petroleum sector and sub-
stantial experience with constructing oil refineries in Iran and Britain, had first been hired
by the KOC for their desalination facility. Put into operation in early 1950, the KOC plant
was not only able to satisfy the KOC’s demands but was capable of supplying Kuwait City,
too.25 Initially, the KOC provided the town with 120,000 gallons a day, rising to 200,000
from August 1950 onward,26 by running a 150 mm steel pipeline from the oil harbor Mina
al-Ahmadi, where the desalination plant was located, to the capital.27 Evidently, the oil
industry was integral to the industrial production of desalinated, potable water in Kuwait,
thus anchoring the petroleumscape in the local water needs and the projects designed to
overcome environmental limitations through engineering. Subsequently, the desalination
plants established a new relationship between Kuwait and the sea. With the decline of sea-
faring and maritime trade, the sea gradually became a commodity, first as natural resource
for water production and subsequently as a view (see Couling, this volume).

The First Power and Desalination Plant in Kuwait City

Large-scale desalination as undertaken at the Mina al-Ahmadi plant was only feasible if fos-
sil fuels were cheaply available. Sheikh Ahmad had wanted “to utilise as fuel the gas now be-
ing burnt off at the fields by the Oil Company.”28 In fact, the wasteful flaring of natural gas
in the oil fields around Ahmadi offered one of the few opportunities to visually experience
petroleum (or rather, one of its by-products). The political authorities and the KOC tried to
stop images of the flaring from circulating as they were considered negative publicity, in-
dicative of wastefulness. Putting the gas to good use in desalination efforts was seen as good
for public relations. Such public relations narratives as well as the official opening of the
city’s plant created important representational layers of the emerging petroleum/waterscape.
On March 29, 1953, both Kuwaiti and British officials inaugurated the massive power
and desalination plant in Shuwaikh, a new industrial area southwest of Kuwait Town. The
government secretary Abdulla Mulla Saleh praised the plant as “one of the most vital proj-
ects for Kuwait” that finally fulfilled “a dream, that has for a long time been in our minds”29
(Figures 9.2 and 9.3). Although petroleum was not directly mentioned, it had clearly be-
come the way to make dreams come true. Moreover, the plant not only impressed in num-
bers and cut a fine figure photographically, but it also materialized the conviction of social
development through technical and economic progress toward a Western (democratic)
model.30 Development and modernization theorists worldwide considered petroleum the
perfect fuel and fortune generator to forge this path of progress. The plant fit this logic of
how oil revenues could be used effectively. Kuwait’s first comprehensive scheme to generate
164 Laura Hindelang

FIGURE 9.2  dministration building with water intake (left) and “Power Station A,” as viewed
A
from the water intake jetty. Source: Unknown photographer, c. 1956, RIBA Collec-
tions, RIBA112508.

electricity and to desalinate and distribute water was financed by oil revenues and fueled by
petroleum, thereby making crude indispensable to Kuwait’s modernization on multiple lev-
els. It is noteworthy that the project was developed and built by British firms only.31 Fusing
quasi-colonial, national, and corporate interests, Kuwait’s modernization was unfolding as
a transnational palimpsestic petroleumscape in which the plant (as built form and architec-
tural design) emerged as a key representational structure.
In 1956, the Architectural Review dedicated an article to the power and desalination plant,
illustrated with large black-and-white photographs of the three-part structure situated at the
waterfront of Kuwait Bay (Figure 9.2).32 The flat horizontal slab with the cantilevered win-
dow and French balcony, to the far left, contained the entrance hall on the ground floor and
the control room above. This administration building adjoined “Power Station A,” a large
horizontal volume housing four turbines, pumps, switchgear, and additional offices, which
opened onto a continuous covered balcony. Constructed from steel frames, reinforced con-
crete, and brick stone, the facades of these adjoined buildings displayed beautiful brick
stones of different shades in geometric patterns. Noteworthy is the thin reinforced concrete
roof with its overhangs that cast delicate zigzag shadows on the façade of the administration
building. These were truly modern buildings in material, construction, and form, designed
to showcase Kuwait’s petro-fueled and water-dependent modernization.
The administration building and the power station faced an open courtyard with parking
spaces that included a zigzag shaped pool with water fountains, filled with the precious ma-
terial the plant was producing (Figure 9.3). The symbolic value of this dynamically shaped
pool—generally considered the first lavish open-air water feature in arid Kuwait—cannot
be overestimated. Its novel display of water in fossil-fueled movement recalls the Palais de
l’Electricité at the 1900 Paris World Fair with its water cascades that translated the invisible
 Water and Oil in Twentieth-Century Kuwait 165

FIGURE 9.3 The water pool in the courtyard of the plant. Source: Unknown photographer, c.
1956, RIBA Collections, RIBA112509.

FIGURE 9.4  blique view of the water tower at Safat Square. Source: Unknown photographer,
O
1960. Image of the BP Archive, University of Warwick, ARC107058_16.
166 Laura Hindelang

electric currents the building produced into an extravagant experience of waterworks in

celebration of the electrical age.
Today, while the administration and the power plant are still in use, albeit for different pur-
poses, the desalination plant, the third building, no longer exists.33 The plant was a symmet-
rically stepped volume of reinforced concrete, clad with brick stones in geometric half-reliefs,
especially on the main façade. Flat roofs made of extra-thin reinforced concrete slabs cantile-
vered the building for shading. The external chimneys connected to the water boilers, similar
to those at the power plant, and framed the building. It housed offices, pumps, turbines, and
switchgear and was connected to the evaporation units. Following the course of the freshly
desalinated and remineralized water that was produced here leads us to the prominent water
distribution scheme implemented together with the plant. It was not the administrative and
industrial facility at Shuwaikh, but the four water towers located strategically across town that
were the most visible manifestation of the city-state’s new water infrastructure.

Putting the Waterscape on Display

“Water towers rise 80 to 100 feet above streets that never knew more water than could be
carried in a goatskin,” one British journalist reported in 1954.34 Indeed, the water towers
exceeded not only average building heights by far, but also common experiences of water
availability and visibility in the city (Figure 9.4). The water towers needed to be in strategic
positions to deliver water to the surrounding area efficiently and their height resulted from
the need for a gravity feed for distribution. But their positions and town-wide visibility were
in fact too preeminent to be merely practical. For example, one water tower was situated on
a roundabout-turned-square and marked the entrance to Fahad Al Salem Street, the most
modern and chic street at the time. Another water tower was erected on Safat Square, a big
open space and the vibrant social and commercial heart of the city. Given the prominent
locations and significant visibility, the towers were meant to be seen by all. Surprisingly,
although the power and desalination plant was somewhat remote, it consisted of three beau-
tifully designed buildings; in contrast, the water towers were extremely exposed and yet
their architectural design seemed inadequate, almost unfinished.
The water towers’ plain and utilitarian construction contradicted the prominent loca-
tions and the visibility the water towers were given around town. They consisted of two
elevated water tanks, each supported by an open-braced steel structure and left unclad.
The fine design of water works was considered an important task with a long tradition in
Western architecture. The Manual of British Water Supply, which the British experts at work
in Kuwait supposedly used, delineates: “As the greater part of the skillfully-designed works
of a water undertaking is hidden underground it is not unreasonable to demand that those
parts displayed to public view shall be of pleasing appearance.”35 In addition to being un-
adorned structurally, the coffered opaque white volumes of the tanks exposed its contents
directly to the sun, as historical photographs show. Neither aesthetic nor purely functional,
how can the architecture of the water towers be explained?
A former employee of John Taylor & Sons, who was involved in constructing the Kuwait
water infrastructure, recalled that:

each water tower […] was to have been clad with architectural features, that in the
city centre [Safat Square] being designed to be particularly lavish. The Ruler decreed,
 Water and Oil in Twentieth-Century Kuwait 167

however, that they should all be left unclad so that the population could see the ben-
efits the oil had brought them!36

By deliberately not cladding the elevated tanks, the construction put the liquid content on
public display. The water towers provided visual proof of the new water source and show-
cased its immediate availability in each tank, thereby symbolically promising the urban
ubiquity of these modern waters. Clearly, in the urban space, the water towers served as
pars pro toto for the new water infrastructure of Kuwait, for which petroleum provided fuel,
technological expertise, and financing. Water was publicly displayed as material evidence of
technological success and a symbol of Kuwait’s modernization. As Carola Hein has noted,
“representation of technology is contingent to historical moments when technology is seen
as a major societal achievement,” which it was.37 In fact, the government of Kuwait branded
the new water infrastructure politically by integrating it into new national symbols. The
first-ever series of definitive postage stamps (1959), issued by a Kuwaiti authority and with
Kuwaiti motifs, included both a view of the power and desalination plant and of Safat
Square with its unclad water tower.38 In the following decades, a new generation of water
towers continued to shape Kuwait’s landscape in forms of even grander iconic architecture
and with even bigger exposure.

A Monumental Sculpture to Water (and Petroleum):

Desalination and Water Distribution in the 1970s
Petroleum continued to be the driving force behind Kuwait’s water infrastructure, thereby
perpetuating and consolidating the spatialization, but also celebration of the petroleum
(scape) through the water(scape). In the 1970s, a new elaborate water scheme established a
hitherto unprecedented sculptural iconicity of water infrastructure that paid tribute to pe-
troleum as financial and technological motor. In 1965, the Ministry of Electricity and Water
commissioned the Swedish construction and engineering company VBB (today SWECO)
for a nationwide piped water distribution and storage scheme connected to the extended
desalination facilities in Shuwaikh and Shuaiba. Commencing operation in 1976, the
mushroom-shaped, light blue (sometimes gray) and white striped water towers became the
spatial but also symbolic manifestation of the new large-scale water system (Figure 9.5).
Looming above their flat surroundings, they left a lasting imprint on the landscape. Swedish
architect Sune Lindström initially developed “The Mushroom” as a multifunctional water
tower, including a transmitting station with antenna, a restaurant, and a viewing platform
for the town of Örebro, Sweden.39 For Kuwait, he adapted the design to function as a water
tower only, exchanging the TV antenna with a flat roof and changing the color.40 Placed in
groups of varying numbers and heights at five strategic locations across Kuwait, the “mush-
room” has become a landmark, an iconic element of Kuwait’s urban and environmental land-
scape that today serves in color or shape as inspiration for souvenirs, stamps, and postcards.
The government of Kuwait continued to enhance the great symbolic value of water tow-
ers not only with the “mushrooms,” but also with three water towers of even more elaborate
design known as abraˉj al-Kuwayt or the “Kuwait Towers” (Figure 9.6). This group of water
towers was built as the final phase of the VBB’s water scheme and is located at the eastern tip
of Kuwait City’s waterfront as part of an artificial leisure island. The Danish designer Malene
Bjørn of Bjørn & Bjørn Design developed the unique architecture after Emir Jaber al-Ahmed
168 Laura Hindelang

FIGURE 9.5  group of mushroom-shaped Kuwait Water Towers built in the 1970s in the neigh-
A
borhood of Abdullah Al-Salem, Kuwait City. Source: Photograph taken by author,
February 2018.

al-Sabah (r. 1977–2016) demanded a different concept for this sixth group, which would be in
sight of his residency—or so the story is usually told—and finally opted for Bjørn’s design.41
The Kuwait Towers consist of three white shafts of different heights made of reinforced
concrete and finished with silver spires of stainless steel that serve as lightning conductors.
The highest tower (185 m) combines the shaft with two spheres covered with a multitude of
enameled steel disks of blue and green shades that deflect solar radiation. The larger sphere
contains a restaurant, a banquet hall, and an indoor garden in its upper half and a water tank
in the lower, while featuring a horizontally extending shade much like a planetary ring.
The upper, smaller sphere houses a rotating café and a viewing platform; the sphere’s skin
consists of dark blue triangular glass shapes to allow for a view. The second, smaller shaft
(140 m) carries one sphere that serves as a water tank. Harnessed with lighting equipment,
the third and smallest needle-like shaft (100 m), with no sphere, illuminates the other two
and completes the ensemble harmoniously.42
Officially inaugurated in 1976 and 1977, respectively, the Water Towers (mushrooms)
and the Kuwait Towers were awarded the first Aga Khan Award for Architecture 1980, and
thus attracted much international attention to Kuwait. The award statement argued that the
Kuwait Towers, an impressive technological achievement, references mosque architecture
in its “minaret-like quality of the shafts” and green-to-blue steel disks, “recalling the tiled
domes of historic mosques and shrines,” and hence praised the architecture as a model for
the “Islamic world of tomorrow,” the designated scope of this award.43 However, designer
Malene Bjørn provided a different narrative of the design inspiration at the time:

I asked myself: What’s going on today, what’s life, what’s future? And so without
really being conscious of it, there was “the globe” the earthy human warmth, and
 Water and Oil in Twentieth-Century Kuwait 169

FIGURE 9.6 Kuwait Towers at the waterfront of Kuwait City. Source: Photograph taken by au-
thor, February 2018.

there were “the missiles” too, long sharp logic thoughts, fired against the heavens, and
suddenly the globe was pierced and there were more globes, speared by the rockets. It
was not my intention to make the towers look like minarets, but obviously they have
something in common.44

The statement suggests that the design reflected the global political events of the 1960s and
1970s, like the Cold War, space exploration, and the first images of Earth from deep space. It
contrasts sharply with the award committee’s interpretation, which has remained influential.
Even further, in light of Bjørn’s concept and the ramifications of the “oil crisis” (1973) around
the time of the towers’ inauguration in the mid-1970s, the referentiality between water towers,
oil rigs, and oil tanks is remarkable. Infrastructure of oil and water both stand out impressively
from their surroundings; they mark violent processes of extraction, storage, and distribution
of the Gulf countries’ most precious goods and in the case of Kuwait, they come to “represent
170 Laura Hindelang

the rise of an economic power.”45 When Kuwait’s new water infrastructure received an iconic
architecture that achieved an unprecedented spatial presence and visual prominence, Kuwait’s
“fabulous development […] from a small town to a modern capital” fueled by skyrocketing oil
revenues had indeed received a monument to petroleum as well as water.46

Water Coolers: The Symbolic Power of Giving Water as Long as Oil Lasts
Petroleum has acquired the status of Kuwait’s most precious property as a globally priced
commodity at the heart of petroleumscape’s value system. Meanwhile, the status of water,
the once sought-after commodity, has also shifted throughout the twentieth century. Sta-
bilizing its power as (oil) welfare state, the state deliberately “normalized” potable water as
ubiquitous and free of charge. This has given way to new social practices around water. To-
day, in front of many luxurious villas (which constitute much of the urban fabric of Kuwaiti
neighborhoods) and in front of some public and commercial buildings, a water cooler pro-
vides drinking water for free to anyone passing by (Figure 9.7). Connected to the building’s
water supply, some of these coolers have adopted various pop art-like sculptural designs, like
plastic bottles or even the striped mushroom towers.
These water coolers, called sabˉı l al-maˉ’, are not just erected by the state, but also by Ku-
waiti citizens, who consider their installation an act of charity in the memory of someone
deceased. Literally, sabˉı l means “a road” or “a path,” while its Quranic use “referring to a
work done on behalf of God” probably explains its use for charitable fountains.47 Water (al-
maˉ’) in Islam is essential for ritual ablution and spiritual purity and framed as a life-bearing
gift by God. The name might also derive from ‘aˉbir sabˉı l, meaning the one passing by.48
Giving water to passing humans and animals, especially to pilgrims on their way to Mecca,
is described as a Muslim charity in the Hadith.49 Yet, in a country notorious for its high
motorization, where even walking to the next kiosk can be socially questionable, usually
only migrant laborers use the water dispensers. Also, many water coolers are neglected.
Therefore, they serve a symbolic rather than a functional purpose, demonstrating the power
to give water, but their complex, multivalent symbolism gives rise to many more questions:
Does the social practice of the Kuwaiti sabˉı l echo the welfare state’s function of providing its
citizens with water? Are they miniature versions of the national water distribution system,
yet also symbolic of religiously inspired historical practices? Do they serve as visible tokens
of the enduring abundance of drinking water and therefore as symbols of petro-prosperity?
Have they become nostalgic reminders of a once-powerful oil state and its reassuring water
infrastructure, which has not received a contemporary update equally grand as the projects
of the 1950s and 1970s?

In Modern Kuwait, Life without Oil Is Life without Water

A full-page advertisement published in 1988 in Al-Kuwayti (the KOC’s Arabic language
magazine established in 1961) depicts a drawing of a mushroom water tower in the desert
framed by a desiccated tree, a historical oil tin water carrier, and the beaming sun (Figure
9.8). The water tower looms majestically above the landscape and—the way the viewer
sees it from below—serves as a sculptural monument to technical, financial, and political
power. The image brings to mind the modern history of potable water in Kuwait that has
 Water and Oil in Twentieth-Century Kuwait 171

FIGURE 9.7  ater cooler in Kuwait in the shape of a mineral water bottle located in Salmiyah,
W
Kuwait City. Source: Author’s photograph, taken January 2018.

manifested as the complex interweaving of the architectural, social, and symbolic layers
of the petroleumscape and the waterscape—from early practices of distributing water in
oil tins to the establishment of salt water desalination and the massive fossil-fueled plant
built in 1953 and its unclad distribution towers, to the mushroom-shaped water towers
and the sphere-shaped Kuwait Towers of the 1970s, and finally to today’s outdoor water
coolers. In the absence of petroleum as a fluid material, another commodified liquid,
water, has been celebrated as the harbinger of modernity and prosperity. The water in-
frastructure laid the foundation for petroleum infrastructure and the commodification
of petroleum as “precious property.” The water architecture and the social and symbolic
practices around it have spatialized oil, have fixed oil in Kuwait’s urban space. The
long-standing practice of physically erected structures, such as water infrastructure, has
served to uphold the image of Kuwait’s water and oil abundance, despite the finiteness
of these precious properties. Still, given the water structures’ spatial permanence and
sculptural beauty, it is difficult to overcome the inherent oil celebration and therefore
fossil fuel dependence.
172 Laura Hindelang

FIGURE 9.8  dvertisement by the Ministry of Electricity and Water, Kuwait. Source: Al-Kuwayti
A
magazine ( July 1988), 2.

The 1988 advertisement also contained a caption. It reads, “Handle the water in accordance
with its measure of scarcity because there is no life without it,” and includes greetings from the
Ministry of Electricity and Water. The government’s advertisement called for moderate water
use by imagining the water tower not in a booming modern urban environment, but instead
in the desert, which still covers most Kuwait’s territory today. This collage-like Verfremdung
recalls the pre-oil, pre-desalination life world of Kuwait, asking the reader to be humble in
view of Kuwait’s history. But the image could also be read as a menacing future vision of
Kuwait, which has one of the highest water consumption rates worldwide, without the fossil-­
fueled means of extracting and commodifying petroleum to maintain the current hydrological
 Water and Oil in Twentieth-Century Kuwait 173

lifestyle inherent in the petroleumscape. A bitter taste of precisely such a future came with
the first Gulf War, two years after the advertisement was published. The war turned Kuwait’s
oil fields into one big burning oil lake and brought the oil industry to a standstill. Several de-
salination plants were destroyed by Iraqi forces or severely damaged by crude spilling into the
Gulf. It is said that there is life without oil, but not without water, but in modern Kuwait, it
seems, there is no life without oil or without water; the two go hand in hand.

Notes
1 Political Agency, Kuwait, to Arabian Department, Foreign Office (FO), London, December 6,
1960, in Anita L. P. Burdett, Water Resources: In the Arabian Peninsula 1921–1960, two vols., Vol. 2:
Kuwait (Slough: Archive Editions, 1998), 605.
2 British Embassy, Kuwait, to Foreign Office (FO), London, March 10, 1962, in Burdett, Water
Resources, 611; see also P. Beaumont, “Water in Kuwait,” Geography 62, no. 3 ( July 1977): 190.
3 British Embassy, Kuwait, to Foreign Secretary, FO, London, September 26, 1962, in Burdett,
Water Resources, 622.
4 Maria Kaika argues convincingly that modern city building always demands the transformation
of nature, especially of water sources and waterways. Maria Kaika, City of Flows: Modernity, Na-
ture, and the City (New York: Routledge, 2005).
5 Carola Hein, “Oil Spaces: The Global Petroleumscape in the Rotterdam/The Hague Area,”
Journal of Urban History 44, no. 5 (2018): 887–929, doi:10.1177/0096144217752460.
6 Ibid., 903. The academic debate on “oil urbanization” or “petro-urbanism,” which started in the
1980s, usually situates the watershed moment between pre-oil and post-oil periods in the 1970s
rather than in the 1950s. See, for example, Mohamed Riad, “Some Aspects of Petro-Urbanism in
the Arab Gulf States,” Bulletin of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, no. 4 (1981).
7 “Note on the Drinking Water Available in Kuwait and the Immediate Vicinity,” Political Agency,
Kuwait, December 1933, in Burdett, Water Resources, 4.
8 British Consulate-General, Basra, to British Embassy, Baghdad, November 17, 1950, in Burdett,
Water Resources, 104. On APOC’s development of Khorramshahr as petroleumscape, see Carola
Hein and Mohamad Sedighi, “Iran’s Global Petroleumscape: The Role of Oil in Shaping Khu­
zestan and Tehran,” Architectural Theory Review 21, no. 3 (2017): 349–74, doi.org/10.1080/13264826.
2018.1379110.
9 “Note on the Drinking Water,” Political Agency, Kuwait, December 1933, in Burdett, Water
Resources, 3.
10 Ibid.; Tom G. Temperley, “Kuwait’s Water Supply,” Journal (American Water Works Association) 57,
no. 4 (April 1965): 419–20; Ministry of Energy, Electricity and Water, Water and Electricity in the
State of Kuwait (Kuwait: Center for Research and Studies on Kuwait, 2005), 23–24.
11 “Note on the Drinking Water,” Political Agency, Kuwait, December 1933, in Burdett, Water
Resources, 4.
12 Temperley, “Kuwait’s Water Supply,” 419; Yuˉ suf ‘Abd al-Muhsin al-Turkıˉ, Lamahaˉt Min Maˉdıˉ
Al-Kuwayt ([Kuwait]: [s.n.], 1979), [Glances from Kuwait’s Past], 54.
13 In contrast to Saudi Arabia, where water was of crucial agricultural importance, in Kuwait, po-
table water was an urban commodity in the first place. On Saudi Arabia, see Toby Craig Jones,
Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2010).
14 Political Agency, Kuwait, to Political Residency, Bushire, November 13, 1912, in Richard
Trench, ed. Arab Gulf Cities: Kuwait City, Vol. 4 (Cambridge: Archive Editions, 1994), 81. On the
continuous use of kerosene tins, see Burdett, Water Resources, 4.
15 Sir Percy Cox, Political Residency, Bushire, to Secretary, Government of India, Foreign Depart-
ment, Shimla, November 26, 1912, in Trench, Arab Gulf Cities, 79.
16 Trench, Arab Gulf Cities, 79. The “political resident” in the Persian Gulf was in charge of manag-
ing British India’s relationship with the Gulf region.
17 Ibid.
18 See Laura Hindelang, “Photographing Crude in the Wild: Sight and Sense among Early Oil-
men,” in The Life Worlds of Middle Eastern Oil, eds. Nelida Fuccaro and Mandana E. Limbert
(forthcoming).
174 Laura Hindelang

19 Historical descriptions of discovering the first oil field in Kuwait and of geophysical prospecting
of water indicate similar methods of surveying. Paul D. Foote, “The Discovery of an Oil Field,”
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 92, no. 1 (March 1948); Aubrey T. Hobbs, ed. Man-
ual of British Water Supply Practice (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1950), 123–26.
20 The concept of producing purified water by evaporating sea water can be traced back to Aris-
totle. The polymath Abu Muˉ saˉ Jaˉ bir ibn Hayyaˉ n (c. 721–815) wrote one of the first treaties on
the distillation of liquids through evaporation. For an historical account of purification through
distillation, see Moses Nelson Baker, The Quest for Pure Water: The History of Water Purification from
the Earliest Records to the Twentieth Century (New York: American Water Works Association, 1948),
357–60.
21 Political Residency, Bushire, to Secretary, Government of India, Foreign Department, Shimla,
November 26, 1912, in Trench, Arab Gulf Cities, 81.
22 Political Residency, Bahrain, to India Office, London, July 24, 1947, in Burdett, Water Resources,
72; Ministry of Energy, Electricity and Water, Water and Electricity in the State of Kuwait, 38.
23 Burdett, Water Resources, 72.
24 Mr. Kemp, London, to Middle East Secretariat, FO, London, May 2, 1950, in Burdett, Water
Resources, 93.
25 Political Agency, Kuwait, to Eastern Department, FO, London, November 13, 1950, in Ibid.,
105; FO, London, to Political Residency, Bahrain, December 6, 1950, in Ibid., 107; Gwilym
Roberts and David Fowler, Built by Oil (Reading, MA: Ithaca Press, 1995), 103.
26 Mr. Kemp, London, to Middle East Secretariat, FO, London, May 2, 1950, in Burdett, Water Re-
sources, 93; William Kitson, “Kuwait’s Distillation Plant for Domestic Water,” The Times Review
of Industry and Technology, December 1951, 22.
27 Roberts and Fowler, Built by Oil, 104. Apparently, 1950 was the last year of Shatt al Arab water
imports; see Faˉ tima Husayn Yuˉ suf al-‘Abd al-Razzaˉ q, Al-Miyaˉh Wa-L-Sukkaˉ n Fıˉ Al-Kuwayt ([Ku-
wait]: [s.n.], 1974), [The Waters and the Inhabitants in Kuwait], 153.
28 Political Agency, Kuwait, to Political Residency, Bahrain, July 5, 1947, in Burdett, Water Re-
sources, 71.
29 English translation of Abdulla Mulla Saleh’s speech, in Trench, Arab Gulf Cities, 96.
30 On the persuasiveness of development discourse since World War II, see Arturo Escobar, En-
countering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1995).
31 Most big development contracts of the time were given to British firms. This reflects the strong
influence of the KOC and the British government, represented by the Political Agency in Kuwait,
in the British quasi-protectorate Kuwait.
32 [s.n.], “Power Station at Kuwait, Architects Farmer and Dark,” Architectural Review 120, no. 714
( July 1956).
33 I thank Bader Al-Anzi, Ahmad al-Azmi, Noura al-Deffeeri, Mr. Pallayat, Paul Frain and Fahad
Alzuabi for organizing and facilitating my visit to the plants of Shuwaikh and Shammal Azzour
in January and February 2018.
34 Elizabeth Monroe, “The Shaikhdom of Kuwait,” International Affairs 30, no. 3 ( July 1954): 278.
35 Hobbs, Manual of British Water Supply Practice, 420. Reference given by Gwilym Roberts, Chelsea
to Cairo, ‘Taylor-Made’ Water Through Eleven Reigns and in Six Continents: A History of John Taylor &
Sons and Their Predecessors (London: Thomas Telford, 2006), 363.
36 Roberts, Chelsea to Cairo, 364.
37 Hein, “Oil Spaces,” 899.
38 See my work on Kuwaiti stamps: Laura Hindelang, Iridescent Kuwait: Petro-Modernity and Urban
Visual Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022), (forthcoming).
39 Developed by Lindström for VBB, the “Vattentornet Svampen” (water tower mushroom) opened
in May 1958. It is vertically striped in two different shades of grey and its top is capped with a
dome-shaped antenna.
40 Additional offspring of the mushroom series are the water towers in Riyadh and Jeddah, Saudi
Arabia. VBB completed them in 1970 and 1977, respectively, for the Ministry of Agriculture and
Water based on the Lindström design. Udo Kultermann, “Water for Arabia,” Domus, no. 595
( June 1979).
41 Malene Bjørn, The Light and the Airy: How It All Began in Sweden in 1945 (Växjö: Baltic Books,
2013), 24–35.
 Water and Oil in Twentieth-Century Kuwait 175

42 [s.n.], “Wassertürme in Arabien (VBB),” Deutsche Bauzeitung, no. 4 (1979); Udo Kultermann,
Contemporary Architecture in the Arab States: Renaissance of a Region (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1999), 176–78.
43 Renata Holod and Darl Rastorfer, eds. Architecture and Community: Building in the Islamic World
Today (Millerton: Aperture, for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, 1983), 173–81 (Kuwait
Towers), 180.
44 Ibid., 252.
45 Mokhless Al-Hariri, “Water Towers on-Site Review Report” (prepared for the Aga Khan Award
for Architecture, 1980), https://archnet.org/publications/213. On oil and violence see Nelida
Fuccaro, “Reading Oil as Urban Violence: Kirkuk and its Oil Conurbation, 1927–1958,” in Ur-
ban Violence in the Middle East: Changing Cityscapes in the Transition from Empire to Nation State, eds.
Ulrike Freitag, Nelida Fuccaro, Claudia Ghrawi, and Nora Lafi (New York: Berghahn, 2015).
46 Jan Östlin, “Architect’s Record of Water Towers” (submitted to the Aga Khan Award for Ar-
chitecture, 1980), https://archnet.org/system/publications/contents/214/original/FLS0218.
pdf?1384747203.
47 Mostafa L. Saleh, “The Cairene Sabil: Form and Meaning,” Muqarnas 6, no. 1 (1988): 34. Saleh
establishes his argument based on Quranic textual sources and historical examples the sabıˉl as part
of mosques.
48 I thank Deema Al-Ghunaim for this comment.
49 Saleh, “The Cairene Sabil,” 34–35. See also Mandana Limbert’s work on the moral, religious and
social ideal of providing drinking water in Oman, sometimes in form of water coolers (as signs of
development): Mandana E. Limbert, In the Time of Oil: Piety, Memory, and Social Life in an Omani
Town (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 123–28.