South Al Mutlaa: Kuwait's $20bn dream city spent nine years stuck at 'about to award'

In May 2016 Kuwait's housing authority told the MEED Construction Leadership Summit that a $1 billion contract for roads and infrastructure at South Al Mutlaa City would be awarded 'within the next two weeks' to an Italian-Turkish partnership of Salini Impregilo (now Webuild) and Limak. The $20bn city — 104 square kilometres, about 30,000 homes, an eventual 400,000 residents — was billed as the first of five new cities that would fix Kuwait's housing shortage. 'The money is already allocated,' the agency's planning director said.

The award did happen, but the 'two weeks' pace never returned. In November 2020 — four and a half years after that announcement — PAHW was still telling reporters it was 'set to start' Phase One, defined as roadworks and utility networks for roughly 12,000 residential plots, with 16 government and private entities due to inspect the site before the state would even take partial receipt of the package.

By 2023 the program needed rescuing: in March, PAHW hired France's Egis as project-management consultant for the whole city, taking over program-level controls, cost management and logistics interfaces. That August, the head of the Al Mutlaa Families Committee told Kuwaiti media that about 100,000 people would finally settle in the city 'over the next two years', once infrastructure was finalized and citizens finished building on their plots — seven years after the infrastructure award.

The pattern persisted into 2025: Zawya's projects desk reported that PAHW was expected to award the contract for infrastructure networks and public buildings in the N6 Suburb Centre in the second quarter of 2025 — nine years after the flagship's first billion-dollar package, the client was still buying basic roads and pipes, one suburb at a time.

Nine years on, no mass settlement: Phase One groundworks began around 2020, a new PMC arrived in 2023, and 400,000 would-be residents kept waiting.

The city was procured as dozens of separate packages (housing, roads, power, water, public buildings) across at least eight suburbs, so progress in one package could not make another usable.

Interface risk was never owned: taking partial receipt of a single package required convening 16 separate government and private entities to inspect the site together.

Program management churned — Hill International's city-wide PMC role announced in 2016 gave way to a fresh Egis appointment in 2023 — resetting institutional knowledge mid-build.

Announcement cadence substituted for schedule: officials repeatedly signalled 'about to award' and 'about to start', keeping the project politically alive while the critical path slipped.

Funding a megacity is not sequencing it. Dozens of parallel packages and no empowered program owner turned every interface into a delay — 'funded' and 'under way' are different things.

Egis's 2023 appointment brought program-level controls, and the families' committee projected around 100,000 residents by 2025 once infrastructure was finalized. The state kept budgeting for the city — the N6 Suburb Centre infrastructure package was slated for award in Q2 2025 — and Kuwait still markets Al Mutlaa as the centrepiece of its housing program. But the city meant to anchor a five-new-city program spent nearly a decade as a sequence of announcements, one package at a time.