![]() ![]() ![]() Instead, the techniques used to depict the city's changed condition harkened back to those used to capture Eurocentric modernism in the early twentieth century. Interestingly, therefore, while the aerial photographs reproduced representations of the local " other " in the myriad cli-chéd settings of the old town, the framing of the modern was largely empty of any signs of the contemporary forms of inhabitation that Kuwaitis already enjoyed. The modern images thus highlighted " Western " imported technologies and building techniques. 1 The guest editor, the British architect Raglan Squire, in turn set these images against photographs of realized and proposed " modern " buildings from which the city's residents and most of the urban context had been removed. A special section in the March 1957 edition of Architectural Design (AD), entitled " Architecture in the Middle East, " illustrated the transformation of Kuwait and other countries in the region partly through the presentation of aerial photographs and images that ro-manticized a traditional urban vernacular and the supposed everyday life of the old city. Support is drawn from an analysis of images of Kuwaiti urban modernity collected from both academic journals and the popular press. ![]() It argues that hegemonic narratives are regularly negotiated in everyday practices of living, and are constantly produced and reproduced to meet growing challenges to their legitimacy. The article locates this reading within debates on knowledge construction and legitimation and the ways the " other " may " speak back " against their authority. 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 connectedĪn examination of selected images used to illustrate Kuwait's mid-twentieth-century urban transformation reinforces the view that visual representations can reproduce or resist established socio-cultural narratives. Water has been celebrated with direct contact in ways petroleum was not because of oil's physical characteristics (toxic, inflammable, smelly). 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. Yet, the visual-spatial absence of oil has obscured the two fluids' interdependent conditions of existence. 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. 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. In Kuwait, the oil industry but also the oil revenue-financed government transformed the city-state's urban and desert landscapes, its architectural forms, and the built environment. One can trace petroleum's impact on twentieth-century Kuwait in many ways: airplane and automobile culture, gas stations, airconditioning, and the proliferation of plastics-all depend on petroleum. 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. " 2 Raudhatain's water (most of it fossil) and petroleum effectively sprang from the same geological formation and were accessed by similar technologies. Geologists described how "the fresh water gathered in a geological basin one side of which is an anticline of the structure forming the Raudhatain oilfield. Parsons company, which was conducting hydrogeological surveys on behalf of the government of Kuwait, was a US firm formerly active in building oil refineries. In early 1962, Kuwait's first substantial subterranean water reservoir was discovered at Raudhatain in northern Kuwait.
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