Asseel Al-Ragam
Dr Asseel Al-Ragam is currently an Assistant Professor at the College of Architecture at Kuwait University. She was a visiting researcher at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Malaquais and Sciences Po Paris, France and her published work in international journals focuses on urban and architectural modernity, heritage production and the politics of urban and architecture representation and preservation in Kuwait. Her dissertation “Towards a Critique of an Architectural Nahdha: A Kuwaiti Example” explored the relationship between a cultural renaissance and the built environment.
Creative preservation and adaptive reuse
In Kuwait, recent efforts to hasten a post-oil economy have resulted in a second wave of historical erasure of Kuwait City, this time of its modernist urban landscape. While in many cities an urban palimpsest promotes a discursive relationship between memory, history and the built environment, in Kuwait the rapid cancelation of historical urban layers has created a wide social and cultural gulf between residents and the “urban.” The presentation proposes an alternative planning approach that takes into account the idea of creative preservation and adaptive reuse during periods of redevelopment. It argues that modernist and postcolonial tropes of loss, hybridity and ambivalence are universal urban phenomena that are not exclusive to European or North American narratives.