Dissertation_Dr Faisal Almubarak

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bring more customers to the downtown, to beautify it, and to raise or maintain downtown
business property values and commercial vigor. In addition to the historical meaning, this
program is best characterized as modernizing the inner city, an effort to counter its
increasingly deteriorating physical appeal.
The GPP project was sought to enhance the "cultural and historical" meaning of the
nation. It was hoped that such a development would become a sacrosanct expression of the
nation's past, for it was from this precise location, that the campaign to consolidate the
nation took place. However, from a planning stand point, the project is based on a new
philosophy, that is the conception which sees the core as the center of a prosperous city and
vital to it's economic potential.
The upgrading of the deteriorating core resulted in an oasis of large-scale, modem
development in contrast to the surrounding tier, formed by ramshackle, low-rise apartment
buildings and stores, encircling scores of one or two-story mud houses, laying halfoccupied.
Unless an effective road network and other creative marketing concepts were
attempted to attract affluent shoppers at the periphery, the commercial activities of the core
were vulnerable to tough competition by the modern shopping centers, endowed with
ample parking areas and road systems, and, more importantly, closer to affluent
inhabitants. The success of the CBD program depends on active participation by
businesses, a role whose realization may necessarily result in the crossing of the political
threshold, hitherto severed from the economic sphere. The CBD's economic vitality hinges
on political progressivness and structural changes in the City's urban economy. Currently,
the City's economic growth owes its vigor to government spending which is strongly
related to a national resource, oil, a resource whose income fluctuates with world demand
for oil. Finally, the GPP's urban renewal lacks cultural diversity, viz museums,
restaurants, open and green space large enough to allow for cultural and entertainment
activities and ceremonial parades, all conducive to the 'pep' associated with historical cities
of the Middle East and Europe.
IV. THE CONTEMPORARY URBAN FORM
The confluence of political and economic developments since the inception of the
Saudi government has forged a new city form, the metropolis, in sharp contrast to the
traditional, 'medina'. Due to the rapid pace of development, urban forms have mutated