Dissertation_Dr Faisal Almubarak

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development. This requires the examination of the state's developmental policies, its
political economic contexts and their direct and indirect impacts on the built environment. I
explored the various apparatuses the state has developed to maintain order in Saudi
settlements undergoing rapid urbanization and to achieve modernization. This process has
been compatible with, and complementary to, the monarchy's power and status in the
society, a path the government deemed in the best interest of the population.
I. CONTEMPORARY URBAN FORMS
The dramatic episodes of the first three decades of development (1930s-1960s) rose
to a crescendo during the 1970s and 1980s, two decades in which the Saudi city exploded
into a far-flung, though inefficient and cumbersome sprawl. In the three case studies of
Riyadh, Arar and Huraimla I have focused on the scope and character of government
intervention in the modern urban development process in the Kingdom. Thus, for
example, the previously compact, pre-industrial walled town of Riyadh grew into a
bustling urban sprawl teeming with freeways, mega-projects and myriad specialized urban
functions. Arar grew from an industrial camp on the pipeline, transporting oil to the
Mediterranean Sea in the late 1940s, into a regional administrative center and military
"outpost" in the desolate northern region of the Kingdom. The socially representative and
environmentally efficient built form of Huraimla shed its traditional integument for a bipolar
urban form whose discrete parts lie at odds with each other.
The implications of the social, political and economic developments on the
Kingdom's urban forms have been profound. Oil wealth facilitated the miraculous
emergence of the metropolis on the desolate desert landscape, while the political character
shaped it and largely determined its growth pattern. At the same time, the Saudi
settlements' internal structures have developed from the pre-industrial traditional forms of
the Middle Eastern-Muslim settlements to new, modernized urban areas, with increasing
division of labor and specialization of land uses. Due to the new centralized control, spatial
stratification in the modern metropolis is no longer endogamous, that is chiefly based on
family, tribe or place of origin criteria, a factor which shaped the composition of traditional
settlements' quarters.
Rather, access to living in modern neighborhoods is economic- based on the ability to
pay, and, in the case of REDF housing loans and land distribution by the state, to secure a