my friend salman’s office is located on one of the upper floors of a tower on ahmed al jaber street, overlooking the sea. salman sees in front of him a beautiful view of the beautiful calm colorful sea, but as soon as he looks a little below, he is deeply saddened by the sight of the vast dusty squares that surround the building from three directions, a bleak landscape after thirty years of the expropriation of old houses and demolitions which has left the place in ruins in the heart of the capital.
these open grounds are often used as random car parks by visitors to the banks and insurance and investment companies located around the commercial capital of kuwait, where the stock market and the central bank and others are located.
salman says that he has been suffering for twenty years. each time he looks at the sight of thousands of vehicles parked under the scorching heat of the sun he feels sad, because it makes difficult to open the doors of these cars with bare hands.
we spend billions of dinars in the development of real estate and i am sure a car owner will not mind paying for safe car parking – the car parking to be built on these ‘waste lands’ as he thinks structural and organizational plans is only a matter of time to move the wheel of implementation.
strange, or funny, we think, plan, seek and allocate billions of dinars to build a city or a silk region more than 100 kilometers from the heart of the capital. this heart, the smallest capital in the world half of it still needs development where most places remain unused for three decades.
the demolition of al-sawaber buildings was a serious mistake from the ‘heritage’ point of view, the environment and the identity of the capital, which has become the only one in the world that is not inhabited by its people, although its area is not more than 13,000 square meters and extends from the dasman palace in the east to the catholic church and the sheraton hotel in the west, the ministries complex in the south and al-seif palace in the north.
salman asked me why this neglect and indifference to the development of the capital and not make it the most beautiful, and fi nd a solution to all these vast spaces that have remained unchanged for decades, and why not fi ll the need of the capital to multi-storey shaded parking, or underground, using the latest engineering ideas in building?
i told him that the reason was in the position taken by the national assembly and the government of the ‘personal initiative’ which died after the loud voices of the ‘defenders of public money’, preferred to remain in their offices instead of being accused of stealing public money.
there is no doubt that the experiences of kuwait with the personal initiative projects, such as the project of the jaber al ahmad marine city, was disastrous, but the mistake was not from the initiator as it was from the government which was lenient with the investor and did not develop its legislation enough to close the gaps to prevent exploitation of some to the state projects to make fast money and abandoning the project at the mercy of the state.
the main cause is the slow mechanism, bureaucracy and interventions in the government decisions. many vital projects in the heart of the capital are still waiting to be activated; therefore there is no solution but to encourage personal initiatives, whether from investment and real estate companies or individuals after setting up rules and regulations.
the last bot project was still born, and above all we must pay more attention to build modern car parks that are major financial resources for the state and relieve the population suffering for six months each year in the hottest and most desert city in the world.