Restoring the Urban Commons: Youth Activism and the Appropriation of Public Space in Kuwait

>In his discussion of the “urban commons” in his recent book Rebel Cities, David Harvey makes an important distinction between public spaces (e.g. streets, sidewalks, squares) and public goods (e.g. sanitation, water, public health, education) on the one hand, and the urban commons on the other. While the former are of course commonly shared, it takes political action on the part of the people, not the state, to appropriate such public spaces or public goods and make them part of “the commons” (Harvey 2012, 72-73). “The common is not to be construed,” he says, “as a particular kind of thing, asset or even social process, but as an unstable and malleable social relation between a particular self-defined social group and those aspects of its actually existing or yet-to-be-created social and/or physical environment deemed crucial to its life and livelihood.” There is, then, a social practice of commoning: a struggle by particular social groups to access, appropriate, and use the public spaces and public goods of the city for a common purpose.
Kuwait provides an interesting lens through which to unpack what exactly the commons is and how it can be created. Although Kuwait’s hydrocarbon resources are considered common property shared by all citizens, the state’s distribution of wealth in the form of goods and services removes oil resources from the realm of the common, along with the urban spaces and social relations produced by oil. Only when public spaces or goods are appropriated by particular social groups through political action does the common emerge. Kuwait today is witnessing an increase in commoning practices and struggles among a new group of urban activists who reflect a growing desire among diverse social groups to recreate an urban commons after more than six decades of privatization, segregation, and citizen estrangement from processes of city formation.