Dissertation_Dr Faisal Almubarak

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The combined effects of oil exploitation and the state's modernization programs have
drastically altered the traditional urban system. A new urban network has emerged with
minimum reference to the physico-cultural environment In the urban literature of
Developing countries, the restructuring of the national economy to adapt to the needs of the
international economic imperatives, it is argued, has resulted in the spreading of
nationalism, economic development and urbanization in traditional societies. Five
repercussions in the national urban development can be pointed to for their relevance in this
study. 71 First, by accelerating the process of industrialization and integration to the
international economic system, the rate of metropolitan growth increases. Industrialization
induces migration to the urban centers which undermines traditional forms of production in
rural areas. For example, between 1974-84 the area of Jeddah has multiplied 49 times its
previous size. Doxiadis Consultants estimated that by the 1960s, 85 percent of Riyadh's
household heads were born outside the city and that migration accounted for 70 percent of
the city's annual growth rate. 72
Second, the internal pre-industrial structure of the national economy was weakened
while the international linkages were strengthened. The ramifications of such restructuring
are profound. In most developing countries, the concentration of industrial development in
growth poles is encouraged as economic strategy by national authorities to reap maximum
benefits of economies of agglomerations (benefits which expected to accrue when
economic activities take place near each other). A duality in the economic structure emerges
as an urban center witnesses rapid growth whereas a rural periphery's economy is either
stagnant or declining. This results in an influx from the periphery to the center creating a
situation of "over-urbanization" characterized by acute shortages in urban services, severe
unemployment and the emergence of marginal population working in the informal sectors
of the economy. In some developing countries, such factors result in primacy where a city
dominates the national urban structure. In Saudi Arabia, the allocation of oil revenues
outside the oil-rich regions in the form of modernization programs followed political
criteria, that is political stability and national security. Thus, Saudi cities which had had a
major role in the- traditional urban economy such as Makkah and Madinah have lost rank to
the administrative city of Riyadh; and the fishing settlements of Dammam, Khobar and
Dhahran prospered owing their growth to the oil industry. The industrial complexes of
Jubail and Yanbu witnessed unprecedented growth in lieu of the government's effort to
diversify the national economy based on petrochemical industries. Table 3.5 illustrates