Dissertation_Dr Faisal Almubarak

13
overview of the economic and political developments which enveloped the new nation-state
and ultimately determined its contemporary urban forms. This will help as an introduction
to the nature and peculiarities of contemporary Saudi urban development. To cope with the
rapid urbanization, the national government has heavily relied on central, authoritarian
planning practices for speed and control, leaving no space for private institutional
organization input and creative, autonomous localism. The decision-making process,
including urban planning, has increasingly become the domain of the central government.
With improved oil revenues, orders and central funds flowed down the bureaucratic chain,
while fealty and information worked their way backup. Under the auspices of central
government, new towns and cities grew from independent agrarian villages and trade posts
to new, dependent urban constellations.
Chapter four is an overview of urban planning activity in Saudi Arabia. The early
municipal regulations and kinds of land allocation that set the standards for development
will be discussed. The early models of growth controls, manifested in street platting, city
planning and regional planning which supplanted the culturally-based space organizer of
the past, will be highlighted. Urban planning, though applied mainly in its physical form,
has been influential in controlling urban growth. At the same time, urban planning activity
has been instrumental in conveying and sustaining the authority's commitment to promote
social well-being through enhancing order in the built environment. In Saudi Arabia, urban
planning takes the form of organizing and controlling physical growth through the
preparation of town and city master plans and regulation of development. Capital-intensive
mega projects are entirely funded by the national government, sometimes lavishly.
Countless urban developments, speedways, parkways, landscaped housing projects and
large-scale infrastructural development have marked this transformation. Examples will be
chosen from different towns and cities around the country. Information will be gathered
from primary and secondary data such as public documents and published urban literature.
In Chapter five I address major cultural attributes that characterized the traditional Arab-
Muslim built environment and shaped their production.
Chapters six, seven and eight are an examination in detail of the three case
settlements, Riyadh, Arar, and Huraimla. In these chapters, I will investigate decisionmaking
processes that helped transform the physical environment to its contemporary
forms. The last chapter is a summary and conclusion of the case study, emphasizing the
characteristics of the Saudi Arabian urban development model. This chapter contains the