Dissertation_Dr Faisal Almubarak

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attention to economic determinants. Typically, the city was conceived in Doxiadis' report
as a center of industry and traffic, which translated into a rationalized system of land use
and transport network, all confirming the trend to depart from historical traditions. It also
reflected Saudi planners' interest to rationalize growth according to new imperatives
brought about by modernization. The Plan advocated the idea of a city, worthy of national
esteem and meaning. The plan was justified on the basis that it advocated a rational city, a
concept planners avowed to be in the best interest of the state and the population. Planners
focused on the practical arrangements of the physical city, embracing such elements as
streets, transit, parks, open space and playgrounds, urban renewal and design, as well as
planning and construction of communities within the city. By underestimating the political
nature of planning, Saudi planners, working for the government and various agencies
conducting decisions related to urban development, conceived of the city as a passive
depot, far from being an area of equitable and positive political interaction between city
actors. So, planners took the governmentalizing of the city as being in the collective
interest of city dwellers.
The subject of the Plan was growth, while its theme was the orderly programming of
the Capital's activities of government and private investment according to a scheme which
took into account the projected growth over the next thirty years. The goal was to establish
order by imposing specialized land functions, such as open (green) space, housing,
government, industry and transportation. It was hoped the Plan, which came with a
package of zoning ordinances, would assure beneficial future growth. The plan forbade
industrial activities in residential areas which were sorted into sub-zoned districts allowing
for different lot sizes, encouraging growth-by-income segregation. The "goodness" of the
future was now purely based on an idealized notion of orderly, specialized arrangements of
zones in space, all in the new blueprint charted by Doxiadis Associates of Athens, Greece.
The key to this plan's successful outcome lay in the construction of new communities
serviced by schools, open space, and commercial facilities at the center of each 2-by-2
kilometer super block. All hoped this would attain the production of coherent communities
marked by single-family housing units served by wide boulevards, in contrast to the tiny
homes of the compact mud communities, an embarrassing, anachronistic reminder of
poverty and backwardness. The resulting landscape was miles upon miles of semideveloped
grid blocks extending the city's area inefficiently over the desert plateau, a form
which was neither governed by competitive market processes nor conformance to