Jaber Al Ahmad

Jaber Al Ahmad is a planned city built from scratch on empty desert 25 kilometres west of Kuwait City, designed to house roughly 80,000 Kuwaiti nationals in a self-contained community of schools, mosques, hospitals, shopping centres, and government buildings. Construction began in 2009, reached substantial completion by 2015, and cost over a billion dollars — almost entirely funded by the state as part of Kuwait's housing welfare programme, which provides subsidised homes to eligible married Kuwaiti citizens. The waiting list for public housing exceeded 100,000 applicants before the city opened, and a project designed for 80,000 cannot close that gap. The state builds habitats the way a beaver constructs a dam: niche construction through resource expenditure, engineering an environment that would not exist without deliberate intervention.

The citizenship requirement reveals the resource allocation logic beneath the welfare programme. Only Kuwaiti nationals — roughly 30% of the country's total population — qualify for public housing. The remaining 70%, predominantly migrant workers who operate the economy's service and construction sectors, are excluded by design. This creates a two-tier system where the resource (housing) flows to a defined population segment regardless of labour contribution. The allocation is path-dependent: it dates to the post-independence social contract of the 1960s, when oil revenue was distributed to citizens as housing, education, and healthcare in exchange for political stability. Sixty years later, the arrangement persists because the cost of extending it to non-citizens would exceed the state's fiscal capacity, while withdrawing it from citizens would violate the compact that legitimises governance.

Named after Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, the 13th Emir who led Kuwait through the 1990 Iraqi invasion and reconstruction, the city embodies the state's post-crisis logic: when the existing urban fabric cannot absorb population growth, build a new city rather than reform the allocation system that created the shortage. The waiting list has not shortened. The model has not changed. The state continues to construct because the alternative — restructuring the citizenship-based distribution of oil wealth — would require dismantling the foundation of the social contract itself.