Dissertation_Dr Faisal Almubarak

CHAPTER IX
CONCLUSION: ENVISIONING THE PLURALISTIC CITY
The essence of cities is not material accretion, but human action,
human institutions, human organizations.
- E.C. Monkkonen
During the last six decades, Saudi Arabian society has mutated from a predominantly
rural and nomadic society to an urbanized one, characteristically centered in cities and
towns. Even those living in rural areas have abandoned agriculture as the mainstay of their
previously subsistence economies and engaged in government and other service
employment, the major pillars of towns' modern economies. The previously tripartite
spatial system comprising the religious-trade towns of the Hijaz region, the scattered
agrarian settlements, and the nomads, has been transformed into an established network of
industrialized urban sub-systems. Yet the urbanization of Saudi Arabia was not simply the
result of population increase in cities. The concurrent rise in cities' share of the national
population depended on complex processes for which the concept of the nation-state offers
the beginning of an explanation, as I have shown.
Due to the dominant role of the state in urban process and the massive allocation of oil
revenues in modernizing the society, Saudi settlements evolved exhibiting a similar urban
pattern, character and landscape. Although largely modernized and distinctively
westernized technologically, the contemporary urban form has also been sparse and blind
to cultural values and physical context. The central argument of this study is that our
understanding of the Saudi city must consider the relationship between the state and the
society, for such a relationship determines the state's role vis a vis urban development.
This relationship has set the pace and character of state intervention in the urban process.
In Saudi Arabia, the emergence of the monarchic nation-state and government-led
industrialism has transformed the urban landscape so that the present Saudi city differs
dramatically from its historical predecessors.
I have argued that the promulgation of the nation-state in 1932 constituted the turning
point in the traditional stasis in Saudi Arabia. The consolidation of power under King
Abdul-Aziz and his progeny transferred the hitherto dispersed control over the nation's
isolated communities to the new political center, Riyadh, the seat of the Royal family. This