Dissertation_Dr Faisal Almubarak

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SUMMARY
In what seemed at the beginning a mere escapade, King Abdul-Aziz A1 Saud
commanded a successful campaign to reaffirm the King and his family's control in the
political affairs of Arabia. The emerging political structure as established by Abdul-Aziz
has been essentially traditional: a monarchy immersed in the values of an Islamic based
tribal and agrarian society. In the Saudi political structure, the monarch rules as well as
reigns and the actual powers of the government are symbolically shared with other
traditional institutions and groups, but in all respects the King has the final say. The King
is vested with absolute power carefully intertwined with religious legitimacy as defined by
the state and supported by the religious body.
Especially during the last two decades, due to excessive government sponsorship,
economic development has progressed at a rate unmatched by most other nations. The
economy has grown to a rank within the 20 largest economies of the world, while the
Saudi population accounts for only .02 of the world's population. In the Saudi Arabian
model, urban development and urbanization owe their impetus to the profound
repercussions brought by the oil economy. Whereas, their character and intensity have
been imbued by the society's political context, urbanization and urban development
followed closely the political system's vision of how to modernize the country in line with
its political leaders' interests. The modernization programs have been replete with the
monarchy's efforts to maintain legitimacy, security and control, while appealing to the
preservation of Islamic traditions conducive to its sustenance. The distribution of oil
wealth has also been a function of the society's developmental stage. To a large extent, the
urban process has become the means to maintain political stability and to attain economic
prosperity rather than the by-product of development itself.
Such socio-political and economic contexts have forged a peculiar urban planning
paradigm. The confluent effects of the cultural context at the macro level- political,
economic and social- have resulted in the making of an urban planning model at the micro
level consistent with the national political and economic culture. In the following chapter, I
will explore the evolution of urban planning in Saudi Arabia. Urban planning has evolved
to reflect the country's centralized decision-making political framework at the national level.
Urban planning has also been wrought under the imperatives of rapid urbanization amidst
considerable influence of foreign planning practices.