The Dust Up: Adapting Kuwait's Civic Infrastructure to SDS

Abstract

This thesis aspires to redevelop public infrastructural spaces in Kuwait to interact with the natural phenomena and challenges of local sand and dust storms (SDS) that disrupt the city, by embracing these processes to create unique social and ecological relationships for the city and its people. The research challenges the existing ‘greening’ strategies that arose from Kuwait’s 1952 masterplan developed by the foreign practice of Minoprio Spencely and Macfarlane. The work specifically explores the neighborhood parks and highway interchange networks. Today these exist as static landscapes that require excessive irrigation and resources to maintain their ‘green’ image, while disregarding the cultural and climatic context. As they currently stand, these networks have proven to fail at the scale of the ecological process, neither designing for or against these storms, but instead completely ignoring them.