Dissertation_Dr Faisal Almubarak

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exhibiting decentralized sprawl, owing largely to the nation's political and economic
imperatives, modern technology, and adoption of Western programs. The contemporary
urban form is characterized by: i) Architectural hybridism; ii) 'no man land'; iii) dispersed,
low-density, leap-frog pattern of growth; iv) high proportion of government land use; and
v) large-scale, government development.
A. Architectural Hybridism
As noted earlier, the introverted courtyard, mud house design has been supplanted
with the 'International Mediterranean' villa and apartment buildings. They were built of
concrete and were introduced to help ease the surmounting demand for housing. The eight
kilometer diameter core is a mixture of rundown mud houses and old, smaller maisonettes
currently occupied by predominantly male foreign laborers, multi-story, multi-unit
residential, office and commercial uses interspersed with second rate hotels. Currently, the
center is undergoing a massive 'clean-sweep planning' development, a public-private urban
renewal program to rejuvenate its cultural, administrative and commercial vitality. The
advent of and excessive reliance on the automobile emancipated residents from clustering in
the small core. The increasing use of the automobile has led to the development of
commercial strip and other related paraphernalia of the highway, that is the and the low
density in the new periphery. 57 The density of modern urban forms is one fifth that of the
traditional ones; technological means, such as the automobile helped save time, though at
the expense of devouring space.
The resulting landscape is a hodgepodge of architectural styles built with myriad
building materials. On the old labyrinthine, narrow road system, an orthogonal road
network was superimposed to alleviate the center's chronic vehicular congestion. The
familiar Western urban ecology, has materialized in the Saudi city with the migrants
occupying the center of the main city and the affluent living in the suburbs. Three major
rings comprising Riyadh's urban form can be discerned.
First, the teeming, compact core contains most of the city's ramshackle buildings and
housing stock within an eight kilometer diameter of the center. On this area of 50.2 square
kilometer (or 10% of the city's 495 square kilometer developed area) lives an approximate
40 per cent of the city's population. 58 The core also houses many married expatriates,
teachers, skilled laborers, and professionals mainly in the low-rise apartment buildings.