Dissertation_Dr Faisal Almubarak

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paying consideration to the center as a "Central Business District" (Figure 15).
The historical core, on which stood the walled town of 1909 housing a population of
17,000 on an area of 273,400 square meters, has been undergoing massive urban
redevelopment to rebuild the traditional center since 1979 (Figure 16). The administrative,
cultural and commercial project (The Governance Palace Area) is a three-phase construction
program of which the second phase is estimated to cost $119.4 million, and is government
funded. 56 A special task committee, the Office for the Development of the Governance
Palace (ODGP) was inaugurated in 1979 to oversee the urban redevelopment project.
Council of Ministers' Order number 221 in 2/9/1403 (1983) authorized the creation of a
new planning authority, the High Authority For Riyadh Development (HARD) whose one
of its tasks the ODGP project. Originally, HARD was inaugurated in 1975 with
exceptional powers and financial backing on behalf of the state to supervise the
construction of a housing development for the Ministry of Interior and the Diplomatic
Quarter. It was agreed that a higher government body must be established to focus on
long-term urban planning, research and coordination between the various building
programs by the government and private sector. HARD was created independently from
the Municipality (the Amanah), which was already inundated by the everyday details of
growth control and building documentation. Following its creation in 1975, HARD
presided over the design and construction of the new, lavish Diplomatic Quarter (DQ) built
to house foreign embassies. As the DQ experiment was deemed successful by state
officials, HARD was given power and cash to handle large-scale public projects and to act
as a state arm in striking private-public partnerships and promoting private investment, one
of which is the Governance Palace Project (GPP).
By the late 1970s, the center was so crowded with structures that modernization
could only be achieved by the enormously cumbersome, disruptive and expensive method
of urban renewal. HARD embarked upon a program of physical design aimed at
rejuvenating the downtown, essentially the construction of new headquarters for the
Governor, the police department and the Municipality (Amanat Madinat Arriyadh), several
office and commercial buildings and shopping malls in various phases. It was given
exceptional powers to design and contract to cut wide, straight boulevards and create
squares and parks through the maze of narrow streets, buying up and demolishing any
building that stood in the way. All projects, in one way or another, were downtown
oriented; Less emphasis was paid to the other remaining parts of the city. The goal was to