Dissertation_Dr Faisal Almubarak

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highly technical one, in the sense that it is devoid of formal public participation (see the
majlis forum in chapter two).
The practice of contracting foreign expertise also extends to the domain of urban
planning. Constrained by time and contract costs, foreign planning consultants tend to be
inattentive to the host society's history, culture and the institutional framework. Many
consultants either rely on mediocre studies or stay aloof from studying local culture and
confronting local politics. These studies' effectiveness depends upon the host country's
governments' willingness to implement the plans and to subject findings and outcomes to
public and professional scrutiny. It also depends on local planners' capabilities to handle
the implementation stages and feedback process, which is usually of long duration. In this
chapter, I will focus on decision making processes that are directly related to the
organization of spatial development, which loosely constitutes the field of urban and
regional planning.
In the Saudi urban domain, the transformation of the built environment and the
resulting rigid character it came to embody was a function of several factors including (1)
the unguarded application of Western planning architecture and planning models, (2) the
lack of local adept expertise and well developed indigenous institutions capable of offering
solutions for the emerging transitional problems, and (3) the overall dismal political
environment incapable of advocating independent initiative and allow for self-evaluating
mechanisms, based rationality and open to popular scrutiny. 29
Faced with a phenomenal rate of urbanization that has been running from 10 to 12
percent per annum during the booming decade of the 1970s, the Saudi government has
resorted to various forms of planning practices to assuage urbanization's negative
byproducts- overcrowding, substandard housing, lack of sewage systems, public and
social services. Between 1950 and 1985, the level of urbanization in Saudi Arabia
increased from 10% to 75%. 30 For example, Dammam, at the center of the oil industry
activity in the Eastern Province, has transformed from a sleepy settlement of 300 huts in the
1930s to a teeming city of 450,000 people in 1986. Ninety percent of Dammam's housing
stock was built during the last twenty years and 35 percent in the last five years (Table, 1).
Riyadh, the capital of the country, sprang from a burgh of 19,000 inhabitants in the 1920s
to a bustling metropolis of an estimated 1.3 million people in the mid-1980s. The
discovery of oil in 1938 has become the catalyst for an unprecedented urbanization process.