This paper addresses the interplay of oil production, urban development, and local and national politics in the Iraqi oil city of Kirkuk, beginning with a strike in which Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) workers demanded housing in 1946 and ending with the coup d'etat of 1958. It contends that the presence of the oil industry in Kirkuk created certain factors that shaped development there: the presence of a large number of foreign (especially British) workers and executives, a company camp of which the infrastructure was more advanced than that of the city itself, and the fact that a large number of the city's residents worked for a single, foreign-owned entity and had the potential to organize. Both the foreign-owned IPC, which was headquartered in Kirkuk, and the British Foreign Office, whose political interests predominated in the IPC, considered the pursuit of development projects in Kirkuk to be important for the promotion of good relations between the company and the city's populace. Kirkuk's municipal officials actively engaged in soliciting the IPC's help with infrastructural development; notably, the company provided the city with electricity and water directly from its own installations. The company's projects also included the construction of a new residential neighborhood for its Iraqi workers, conceptualized after the 1946 strike. This strike was spearheaded by Iraqi Communist elements based in Baghdad, a matter of particular concern to the British and the IPC. This paper analyzes how and why the IPC and the Kirkuk municipal government pursued these infrastructural projects. This paper also recognizes that British and IPC interests in Kirkuk paralleled the objectives of Iraq's nationwide economic development initiatives, which aimed to preserve the political status quo in Iraq -- that of elite rule and British influence -- in the face of growing popular discontent. The existing work on this subject tends to rely on the viewpoints of officials from Baghdad and examines Iraqi development projects, which were mostly focused on the agricultural sector, in a broad manner such that local, urban development is often overlooked. This paper therefore provides a fresh perspective on the sociopolitical objectives of Iraqi economic development in the 1940s and 1950s by focusing on projects undertaken in a provincial urban area. This paper relies on correspondences, memoranda, reports and other writings from the United Kingdom's Foreign Office (housed at the UK National Archives, London), the IPC papers at the BP Archives in Coventry, and the Doxiadis Archives in Athens, Greece.

This paper will argue that the emergence and the consolidation of the oil industry in Iran was only made possible by the making of a built urban environment and a modern working class. The discovery of oil in Khuzestan in 1908 was the starting point of the petroleum industry in the Middle East. The oil industry was, and continues to be, the largest industry in Iran. Yet its considerable and far-reaching social dimensions are overshadowed by the near exclusive theoretical focus--especially by the proponents of the rentier state and resource curse theories--on the (negative) economic impact of its monetary revenues on state behaviour and developmental processes. The paper will analyze the social and urban history of Abadan, Iran's first and largest oil company town, to demonstrate how the conception, the consolidation, and the continued existence of the oil industry are inextricably tied to complex social, political, and cultural processes that cannot be reduced to petroleum's economic revenues. Like any other large-scale modern industry mass-producing a commodity, the production and sale of oil requires a built environment and a reliable labour force capable of supplying the markets in a continuous and dependable way. The labour force and the spatial framework of the industry cannot be factored out once they have been produced; their maintenance and reproduction require sustained investment and social and political engagement by all parties involved. The oil industry and its workforce, its workplace politics and technical and managerial expertise, have never remained isolated from or irrelevant to the rest of the economy and society, despite continuous efforts by national governments and oil executives. The functioning of the oil industry is fraught with contestations, resistance, cooptation, and negotiation by workers, managers and state actors, national and international corporate interests. It involves local residents, family members, technocrats, social reformers, union organizers, and a host of other engaged and interested actors. Through a geographic analysis of the urban history of Abadan this paper will demonstrate how the city's physical development, its political economy, and its urban cultures have made enormous impacts on Iranian national politics and public life.

In 1983 the architect Stephen Gardiner wrote the following about Kuwait City: "There was no breathing space between ancient and modern, rags and riches ... The unique creation of oil, the story of this city is astonishing" (Gardiner 1983, p. 14). This paper re-examines the making of modern Kuwait City between 1950 and 1980 by complicating this popular "rags to riches" paradigm that permeates both official state discourse and much of the literature on Kuwait's urbanization. It argues that the "modern" city that replaced the demolished pre-oil town during the first three decades of oil urbanization was more of a spectacle than a lived reality. Although the state exerted much effort and expense between 1951 and 1971 in planning for the development of a capital city to celebrate Kuwait's newfound prosperity and progress, certain unexpected consequences of rapid oil wealth significantly hindered the production of the rational and usable city the state was hoping for. As this paper will demonstrate, a combination of skyrocketing real estate, land speculation, systemic corruption, and weak decision-making in the fifties and sixties rendered the city - whose inhabitants were relocated in new suburbs - an incoherent, undeveloped, and largely vacant space by the early seventies. This paper goes on to investigate an alternative approach to city-building initiated by the state in the mid-seventies, after the shortcomings of the previous two decades and particularly after the oil boom of 1973. During this period several world-renowned architects were commissioned to design a handful of architectural masterpieces for the city to serve as landmarks of Kuwait's modern capital. However, while certainly decorating the urban landscape, most of the spaces and interstices between these structures remained only minimally developed by the early eighties, making the city little more than an uninhabitable panoply of unconnected dots. Oil thus transformed Kuwait City into a spectacle to put on display rather than a space to be lived in and used by its inhabitants, whose own critiques throughout this period on the inconsistencies between the fatade and reality of Kuwait's "nahda al-'imraniya" ("urban awakening") certainly challenge the modernist success story of oil urbanization in Kuwait. The sources used in this paper include various master planning documents, architectural journal articles, and local newspapers, all published between the 1950s and 1980s, which collectively record and critique Kuwait's urban progress from the perspectives of the state, professional architects, and its own residents, respectively.

There has been a recent appearance of literature concerned with the "speed" of urban transformation and modernization in Kuwait. Whilst these efforts mainly concern themselves with Kuwait city proper, they fail to acknowledge that modernization occurred elsewhere in the nation as it both preceded and fueled Kuwait's development. This occurred in the Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) town of Ahmadi. This paper aims to trace an urban history of the KOC town of Ahmadi. It focuses on the period between 1946, which marks Kuwait's first export of oil, and 1975, when the KOC invited it's British and American partners to sell their shares and make way for KOC's total nationalization. It argues that what began as a modern Western-planned company town built exclusively for Westerners was later adopted by locals and in turn mediated a particular lifestyle through its urban and architectural form eventually assuming a nostalgic place in Kuwait's collective memory. The paper will begin by providing a brief description of Ahmadi's early years as an Anglo-American enclave. It will then explore the ways in which Kuwait's independence in 1961 brought about the town's gradual yet absolute demographic change from a largely British, American, Indian, Pakistani and Arab population to a primarily Kuwaiti and Arab one. Furthermore, it will analyze how urban and architectural form mediated a particular lifestyle on the part of the local by focusing on three scales. The first is the human social scale with reference to dress codes, for example, changes in female clothing which entailed the discarding of the Abaya (body cover) and Boshiya (face cover) in favor of tank tops and mini-skirts. The second is the architectural scale as reflected in the creation of residential units promoting a nuclear family structure. The third is the scale of the master plan with its introduction of greenery and public gardens. These changes took place gradually since the mid-1960s through the 1970s and all contributed to a nostalgic memory of Ahmadi as an ideal town in the Kuwaiti imagination. The study will rely on a variety of sources for its argument such as the KOC archives in Kuwait and the British Petroleum archives in Coventry which consist of master plans, planning reports, a company publication called "The Kuwaiti" in print since 1948, prolific photo archives, annual reports and old video documentaries. It will also make use of the Alqabas archives, a local Kuwaiti newspaper, and personal interviews.