This video was made possible by CuriosityStream and Nebula. This is the Sabah Al Ahmad Sea City, an infrastructure project with a very unusual approach. Because in this city, pretty much every resident has their own beach access on a lagoon that leads directly into the sea.
But constructing such a city meant overcoming tremendous engineering problems, as project planners battled the forces of nature. But why did they choose this costly approach of making a city? Kuwait in the late 1980s was faced with a problem.
There was a great need for luxurious housing in the country, which had become rich through the export of crude oil. But the small nation lacked the space to meet this demand. The northern and southern ends of Kuwait’s coast are just 105 miles (168km) apart.
And by 1989, when plans for a new city began to take shape, much of the coastal area was already built up. The capital, Kuwait City, with its adjacent outskirts and industrial suburbs, already stretched all the way from from Kuwait bay to far south down the coast. Building further inland in the desert is not very desirable for a variety of reasons, after all there are no usable resources here to supply cities, the ground is unstable and hardly suitable for construction and above all there is an extremely dry heat here.
Living along the coast is more desirable as the sea breeze ensures a milder climate with temperature fluctuations between day and night being reduced. The idea to fix this is simple, instead of building directly on the limited shoreline and creating a few new beachfront properties, one could instead dig channels that run inland, snaking through an area in such a way that there is far more water access. If you pull both these cords straight, you can see just how massively the coast can be extended using this method.
Two potential project sites were considered for the construction of this new city, one area adjacent to the Shuwaikh district in Kuwait City and the other one, Al Khiran, not far from the Saudi Arabian border. But just before the plans really could take shape, the entire project had to be put on hold, as the nation found itself entangled in conflict. On the second of August, 1990, Iraq began invading Kuwait.
With ground troops coming from the border, as well as helicopters and boats from the water. The Iraqi forces were able to advance to Kuwait City within just hours, where British citizens in a room overlooking their Embassy captured footage of the moment these forces arrived. What followed was a several month-long Iraqi occupation of Kuwait and the eventual Gulf War that ended with the liberation of the country in late February 1991.
Even if the occupation was overcome, tremendous suffering had happened, and there was no money, time or need for costly new construction projects. The war also caused massive environmental damage, from a huge oil spill to long lasting fires clouding the country for months. It ended up taking another 6 years until the plans for the Sea City were resumed.
And as environmentally destructive as the past phase was for the country, this project should now focus on dealing well with the environment. The developers chose the area in Al-Khiran and decided on an approach in which the exact form of the project is strongly guided by the natural forces of sea and wind. The project site was characterized by two existing tidal creeks, with water levels rising and falling with the tides.
And aside from the Al Khiran Resort, a popular recreational destination, this piece of land had not been developed. Based on the natural currents of these tidal creeks, a master plan was drafted to create a complex channel system with two additional sea entrances. But as simple as this approach seems, a number of difficulties quickly became apparent.
One of them is that the water quality could easily becomes poor due to a lack of circulation in these channels. If the water is not regularly exchanged, this promotes algae growth and the channels could become foul-smelling salt ponds unattractive for residents. At the same time, the water flow flushing these channels should also not be too fast, because residents are supposed to swim here comfortably.
And how can you be sure that these geometrically shaped canals designed on plan will not be deformed over the years by the powerful natural forces of the water threatening residential buildings with flooding? In order to prevent these issues, planners developed a complex computer model simulating the natural currents. Extensive data was collected at the project site, about wind speeds and directions and ocean currents.
With this data, a schematic computer model could be created which simulates the hydrodynamic properties of the entire system. This way, additional connecting channels where introduced in areas where the simulation showed that the water flow was too fast. Because if you introduce another channel, the water has more space to go, the flow slows down and as a side effect, the risk of coastal erosion is also reduced.
But even if the adjustments based on the computer model promised improvement, it still appeared that the water exchange was too irregular in certain areas, which would result in bad water quality. One possibility to fix this would be by pumping the water out from these areas. But pumping stations require a lot of energy and are expensive.
Also, such a solution means pumping will be required indefinitely, so it's less of a solution to the problem than an elaborate workaround. So the engineers came up with another idea, that would allow the lagoons to be completely flushed only by natural forces. They achieved this by strategically placing so called tigal gates.
These gates are opened up at high tide simply due to the water pressure pushing them open. However at low tides, with the water flowing the opposite direction, the water water pushes these gates to a closed position. This way, the system is completely self regulating and the computer simulation shows how the flushing of fresh water can be significantly improved using the gates.
While the project was finally beginning to take shape in the early 2000s, with excavators digging the first canals and flooding the first section with water in 2004, another project also in the Persian Gulf suddenly attracted lots of attention around the world. The huge Land Reclamation projects of Dubai, most notably Palm Jumeirah began to take shape. What was done in Dubai at the same time as the Kuwaiti project took shape is a very different approach to essentially the same problem, creating additional coastline.
While in Kuwait channels were dug into the barren desert, in Dubai sand was dredged from the seafloor to create artificial islands. There are major differences between these two approaches, especially when it comes to the effect on the environment. While in Kuwait the already existing natural currents and tidal creeks informed the shape of the design.
In Dubai, the form of the islands was playfully chosen to resemble the shapes of palm trees or a world map. And constructing such land reclamation projects involves a difficult to solve contradiction. On one hand, the man-made islands must be protected from the forces of the ocean currents, which is done with rigid breakwater rings.
It’s necessary because in the long run these islands are not stable by themselves. As the shape of coastal land is not formed by chance but results from complex natural forces oftentimes continuously evolving coastal landscapes over the years. The contradiction is that by building such a protective breakwater, this also prevents the regular water exchange.
For example, while the more exposed islands in Dubai’s The World project struggle with coastal erosion, the Palm Jumeirah, which is better protected by the extensive breakwater, struggles with water quality problems, as the water in the inner part of the palm is almost stagnant. In Kuwaits Sea City, on the other hand, the beaches located near the sea entrance were set up with clearance, so that they can be shaped naturally, while the canals inside the land are not subjected to the strong ocean forces. It turns out that dealing harmoniously with nature was a major focus at Kuwait's Sea City.
While the dredging and creation of land reclamation represents a harsh encroachment on the species-rich marine habitat, the digging of new channels in Kuwait’s arid desert actually creates new additional habitats for marine life. The stony breakwater in Sea City was only filled with mortar above the waterline, leaving open underwater spaces which offer ideal habitats for marine life. In addition, mangroves and other plants that can grow in dry conditions were planted on specially created islands in order to structurally strengthen the marine bay and create natural habitats.
Instead of bringing the desert into the sea, Kuwait’s Sea City brings the Sea into the desert. Still, the transformation of such a large area was an enormous challenge and is intrusive. Countless hours of dredging were required to remove material to build the canals.
With the project growing over the years and new sections being opened regularly, the planners hope to eventually house 250,000 people in this city. Today, along the canals you mostly find residential villas, high-income apartments, as well as some hotel resorts and several marinas, while many plots also remain undeveloped. If one understands the word city to mean a diverse coexistence of living spaces, office space, cultural institutions, as well as public space, this city is not that.
It is a car-dependent development that focuses entirely on private living space with direct beach access. While they have literally moved mountains to achieve this, it appears that other aspects of modern city planning have been much less of a priority. The Sabah Al Ahmad Sea City has completely transformed the land here.
And despite the project being constructed in Kuwait, a country which owes its economic prosperity to the trade with petroleum products, there has been a strong focus on environmental solutions. Notable also, considering that the construction of this project had to be put on hold during the gulf war that stood out for its unprecedented catastrophic environmental impact. When, instead of digging artificial canals, Kuwait had to spend about 1.
5 billion USD just to extinguish fires all across the country. As Iraqi soldiers withdrawing from the country in the final stages of the war had set countless oil wells on fire, an act of sabotage with far-reaching consequences, because once such a fire has been set, it was almost impossible to extinguish it. If I were to make a video on YouTube about the Gulf War and the oil fires, there's no way it's ever going to be monetized, and you probably wouldn’t ever see it.
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