Dissertation_Dr Faisal Almubarak

229
While the foci of capitalist world cities exhibit a preponderance of business-dominated,
skyscrapers-dotting the bustling hub, the Riyadh skyline reflects a core with a torn identity:
on the one hand, struggling, sluggish commerce juxtaposed with ramshackle residential
quarters; on the other, strong government manifest in high-standard, new urban
development.
The second major ring comprises a limitless expanse of two-story residential units
constituting vanishing blocks of low density residential areas (34 units per hectare)
suffused with rows of apartment buildings lining the arterial roads. This ring was formed
during the decades of the 1950s and the 1960s. Its street network was rectilinear with no
conception of a city master plan. Street plating proceeded in the interstices formed by the
tarmac roads radiating from the center to the government-built suburbs of Nasiriyah, al
Murabaa, and al-Malaz. This section was to house the new mushrooming land uses
hitherto unbeknown to the traditional built environment such as governmental, suburban
commercial, office space, and green spaces. The negatively perceived traditional
architecture of the mud-core was replaced with the modern symbol of progress. This
ring's growth was more of a response to continued migration than that of the 1970s which
owes the majority of its growth to the improved life-styles of residents and to the
proliferation of government projects. It embodies the dramatic changes that necessitated the
use of alien (modem) architecture, government expansion and the institutionalization of
planning.
The third ring, the "outer city," encompasses the area built during the 1970s and
1980s within the framework of Doxiadis Master Plan of 1971. Though its projections were
deemed obsolete due to rapid growth, the Plan's broad guidelines and flexible system of
land subdivision has abided in directing new development by simply repeating the module.
This ring is a testimony of affluence, of broad avenues, parks, extensive open space,
barren parking lots, glass, and marble buildings, diversified and personalized boxes of
marble villas interspersed by opulent and colossal mansions, and the proliferation of largescale
development. Most prominent are the government buildings, conspicuous,
pretentious and futuristic mega-structures, asserting the preponderance of government input
in the city's economy. With fast-food restaurants and gas-stations at the major road
intersections and freeway exits, the resulting urban form is evocative of North American
decentralized, low-density sprawl with no relevance to the core, now senescent,
disemboweled, and haphazard. The new urban landscape epitomizes what Kenneth Brown