Dissertation_Dr Faisal Almubarak

337
branches of the central government, coordinates bureaucratic functions to implement
national goals. 3 The new town's principality, the imarah, and municipality, the baladiyah,
and other central government branches served as surrogate organizations which
implemented progressive national modernization programs and urban planning legislation.
Consequently, local autonomy was gradually transformed into subservient administrative
parts of the central political order.
B. Economy
As previously mentioned, oil revenues have offered windfall income to the central
government. This has greatly diminished the significance of settlement revenues to the
central government, which abandoned reliance on towns' generated taxes (e.g. zakat) and
other sources of local revenue following the discovery of oil. Oil income has enabled the
central state to be a distributor of the natural resource, hence heralding an increasing role of
the elitist and paternalistic welfare state in modern urban economies. As oil revenues
poured into government coffers, the central state helped in the expansion of employment,
absorbing a large number of the working force, from the traditional sectors to the newlyestablished
public agencies (schools and health clinics, etc.). In addition, the massive
modernization programs helped in the creation of considerable jobs in the private sector,
and transformed traditional town subsistence economies into modern, diversified, yet
heavily subsidized urban economies.
Due to the expansion of employment outside the traditional sectors, new divisions of
labor ensued, which vastly contributed to the division of work and living spaces in the
contemporary city. Moreover, the booming decades of the 1970s and 1980s engendered
work opportunities which required the recruitment of skilled and non-skilled Saudis and
foreigners to the growing cities, bringing new lifestyles and values into every settlement,
hitherto closed to the outside world. The modern developments fostered the emergence of
a formal capital intensive economic sector characterized by regulated entry to the various
economic activities, reliance on imported resources (commodities, labor, technology)
corporate organization, large-scale operation. Indeed, the government underwriting of
local settlements' economies did transform the national network of settlements, changing it
from a patchwork of small villages thriving on agriculture and fishing into a national
complex of urban centers and settlements largely dependent on government aid.