Dissertation_Dr Faisal Almubarak

154
However, lying in one of the backwater regions of the aging Ottoman empire, most of
Arabia's traditional settlements floated in a semi-political vacuum. Generally speaking,
settlements were ruled by tribal dynasties. The larger princely settlements reflected the
magnitude of power nodes, such as Riyadh, Diriyah, Buraidah, and Hail in the north.
These settlements of petty traders, craftsmen and peasants and other smaller settlements,
in one form or another, joined other major centers in mutual economic and security
agreements. The politically dominant towns served as centers of sub-regions which
included their own hinterland of smaller villages. Also, the traditional system of
affiliations and loyalties between the inhabitants of Najdi towns ascribed to an intricate
network of tribal associations.
In this chapter, I will discuss dominant cultural attributes of traditional built
environments in Arabia. In the following chapters, I will examine how the modernization
programs under the new nation-state have substituted centralized forms of bureaucratic
organization, government-subsidized urban economies, and Western forms of architecture
and urban design and planning for traditional cultural attributes. It must be emphasized,
however, that the modernization of the contemporary Saudi built environment is a result
of the emergence of the national political economic structure which relied on Western
technology to appeal to the rising aspirations of the population and to tackle rapid
urbanization.
I. TRADITIONAL CULTURAL URBAN ATTRIBUTES
Traditional Muslim built environments exhibited several characteristics. They
included (1) a considerable degree of autonomy in the running of local affairs, (2)
subsistent economies, (3) traditional forms of land ownership marked with spontaneous
conversion of undeveloped land, and treating land as a social resource, (4) socially
informed and environmentally compatible organic growth, (5) self-help and communitysupported
production of mixed-income houses, and (6) a great degree of the
responsibility for providing public services fell on the shoulders of the inhabitants with
minimum intervention by the governing body.