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Barrak Al-Babtain

Barrak Al-Babtain 8
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Metro
October 24, 2010

Kuwait Metro: Progress

Kuwait signed an $8 million contract with Ernst and Young to provide "consultancy services" for the Metro project. It's weird, because E&Y are an auditor, as far as I know, and they're not really the first name one thinks of for master-planning expertise and designing…
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Other
October 17, 2010

Twitter

re:kuwait is now on Twitter. You can follow me by clicking on the link in the sidebar. The most recent tweets will be on there as well. I'm not sure how it will be used eventually, but it seems like a great tool for quick…
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Barrak Al-Babtain 9
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October 17, 2010

Old Salhiya

In a recent post, Dr. Thomas Modeen talks about his observations of old Salhiya. He describes its ambience and says that because the place is truly cosmopolitan and free that you can just be yourself there: "It's the only urban locale in Kuwait that, at…
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Architecture
October 16, 2010

Desert Architecture

Kuwait is a desert, yet you wouldn't know this by looking at our architecture. What does it mean to design for a desert climate? The most important thing is to understand three basic rules: Understand the movement of the sun Know how different materials react…
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Barrak Al-Babtain 3
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Urban
October 15, 2010

City Traffic Alternative

That previous post by Jasem got me thinking about a solution to the traffic and parking problem within the city. Most of the cars that are driving around are actually people looking for a place to park. That's a fact. The problem is made worse…
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Barrak Al-Babtain 2
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Urban
October 15, 2010

First Ring Road

Kuwait has grown over the past five decades with rapid speed. The growth was tied to its financial prosperity. During the first boom years of the independence days of the early 1960’s till the late 1970’s, Kuwait grew as a vast urban sprawl to accommodate…
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Neighborhood
October 6, 2010

Crowdsourced Activism

Wikipedia works because of the energetic voluteerism of a dedicated core of users. We can harness this same crowdsourced dedication in Kuwait to help improve our public spaces. Everyone has a camera-phone now, and most newer models have the ability of adding geotagging information on…
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Barrak Al-Babtain 0
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Urban
September 21, 2010

Transit-Oriented Development

The video is from the always interesting Design e2 series and is about the way we can slowly go back to an urbanism that is human scaled. A city should be designed for people, not cars. Kuwait City has unfortunately developed into extreme automobile dependency.…
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Other
August 28, 2010

Gray Water Ablution

The topic of tonight's episode of the brilliant MBC show 'khawatir' was about water conservation. They showed how much water was being wasted during ablution. Changing attitudes towards consumption would be great, but to push this even further we need to reuse the water that…
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Barrak Al-Babtain 3
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Urban
August 15, 2010

Free Parking

If shawarmas were free, we would always have a shawarma shortage. Parking is free, that's why there's never any free parking spaces. Most people driving around are usually just looking for a place to park and would be willing to pay a fee to park…
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