With the beginning of oil exploitation in Kuwait in the mid-20th century, the old city was bound to an inevitable urbanization process used as a tool for absorbing surplus wealth generated from the oil industry. The old souks were demolished due to an infrastructural renewal plan created by the British firm Minoprio, Spencely, and McFarlane in 1951. For a decade, spatial production was centered on expansion beyond the ancient walls and complete refurbishment and commercialization of the center. However, following the birth of nation (1961) and the establishment of a municipal body (1962), new markets—often called ‘souks’—were created. Envisioned by a newly founded local planning board functioning under the aegis of a technocratic rule, the new ‘souks’ endeavored to bring back physiognomies of the traditional souks lost to foreign modern development. The board sought to index a new national image whose contours were a product of indigenous and regional forms and modernist aesthetics. As this study traces the evolution of modern souks in Kuwait in the last fifty years informed by the political and economic developments, it suggests that the architectural discourse of the last two decades greatly overlaps with treatises put by Kuwaiti municipal members in the 1960s in its way to promote commercial projects that bring back local identity as they embrace the global. Unlike the 1960s though—when marketplaces were a collaborative production between private investors and a newly formed state with a nationalized economy—the developments of the 1990s were generated within the framework of a neoliberal economy and a new national commitment to Islamic solidarity and conservative social mores that arose in 1991 after Kuwait’s liberation from the Iraqi invasion and the establishment of the Islamic Constitutional Movement. Spatial production thus became more excessively imitational claiming to derive its forms from the pre-industrial linear market structures. I argue that the 1960s’ nationalism has shifted to what may be called exhibitionist nationalism. A traditionalist, caricaturist, and spectacular architecture has been employed since 1990 to disguise supreme forms of globalization and a rigorously consumer market. This is the foreseeable result of the growing participation of national economic actors in global markets. While new souk-like malls seem to be private developments independent of the state, many are in fact owned by the ruling class—a global economic elite which, while dictating national politics, performs meticulous spatial calculations in its incessant attempt to increase its wealth.