Urban margins in Kuwait and Bahrain: Decay, dispossession and politicization

Gulf cities are portrayed as being in a state of constant development. When areas lag behind in the process, their decay strikes immediately as a false note. This is the case in disaffected centers, populated by foreigners usually living on borrowed time, as well as in some peripheral areas, where nationals or long-term residents live. The later urban neglect, in terms of infrastructure upgrade, has remained less known and studied. This paper fills the gap by developing a comparative analysis between the bidun areas or popular housing in Kuwait and the so-called 'villages' in Bahrain (in their older cores). While the rapprochement of these two cases may seem odd at first sight, commonalities exist nevertheless based on the common perception of a stigma attached to the place, a feeling of marginalization and neglect, on the part of the inhabitants, that goes hand in hand with the conviction that the situation results from a deliberate government policy. Through the central notion of 'urban decay', the paper explores the type of relations people of these degraded areas have with their living environment. In the first case, the bidun see the residential areas where they live as a 'humiliation' and at the same time as evidence of their fathers serving the country, in support of their application file for naturalization. In the second case, after agricultural/fishing activities ceased with the employment offered in the oil sector, urbanization by encapsulation and land reclamation completed the deprivation of most villages' idiosyncrasies: the popular meaning of the term drifted and mostly refers to the destitute areas that form the core of Baharna identity and since the 1990s and all the more so since 2011, hotbeds of the rebellion.