Dissertation_Dr Faisal Almubarak

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C. Urban Design and Planning
Under pressures of urbanization, the state scrambled for expertise in urban
development. First, it sought oil companies' planners and, later foreign planning
consultants, to design communities for workers enlisted in the oil industry. Gridiron land
subdivisions were laid outside the traditional medina, in a hectic response to the
proliferation of shanty towns and squatter settlements. The flexible and socially-responsive
mechanisms that fostered the traditional built environment were overlooked.
The centrally funded and well-staffed municipality was soon to take over the
responsibility of maintaining neighborhoods and assumed the duties of providing public
works and services traditionally handled by settlements' populations without external
intervention. As an organ of the central bureaucracy, the municipality implemented
standardized technical regulations in the conversion of new land into developable lots en
masse.
Relying on foreign expertise and Western-educated Saudi professionals, the
municipality has, since its indoctrination, used secular (that is, technical and legal urban
practices largely molded after those developed under colonial powers in nearby Arab
countries) rather than developing local urban growth mechanisms based on local values in
the design of new communities and in the upgrading of old ones. Platted rectilinear blocks
containing large lots and wide boulevards shaped the post-traditional growth, outside the
traditional walls and in the new planned towns.
Newly laid boulevards were constructed besieging the compact cores, occasionally
and mercilessly ripping through their historical sanctity. Setbacks, partially a result of
acculturation as well as imposed municipal legislation, were widely adopted. Municipal
codes ignored issues of privacy. Under municipal and other prescriptive bureaucratic
procedures, neighbors could not object to openings that infringed on their privacy.
Likewise, the environmentally compatible traditional built environment with its
macroclimatic solutions stood in contrast to the modern metropolis, largely blind to the
harsh climate of the desert. In the metropolis, modern transportation and
telecommunications made it possible for the different land uses to scatter in space. A
relatively authoritarian, planning-by numbers approach has become the norm, substituting
technical know-how for local participation.