Dissertation_Dr Faisal Almubarak

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Whilst steps toward integrated national, urban and regional planning are now
apparent in the Kingdom, city planning is hampered by the very solutions which were
ostensibly devised to solve city problems and guide its growth: a sprawl marked with
indifference to environment, efficiency, and popular scrutiny. It is tempting to blame the
haphazard jumble of half-built land uses on the involved government agencies, but the lure
of suburban life- with its modern, tree-lined streets, spacious lots, sense of rising living
standards, generous free land and subsidized, pro-ownership housing programs- was too
enticing to government officials and inhabitants to await the development of a genuine
urban model. 4 Obviously, higher standards of living (better, spacious houses, potable
water networks, water-refuse systems, modern transportation and telecommunications,
social mobility in vastly expanding economic sectors) prevail now as compared to a few
decades ago, and surely millions of people have been comfortable housed. To a large
extent, the government, paternalistic as it has been, proceeded with what ever planning
expertise it deemed necessary to the betterment of the settlement physical and social
standards.
D. Land Ownership and Distribution
The booming decade of the 1970s witnessed unprecedented population growth and
deployment of considerable sums of capital in the building of cities. Initially, surgical
programs for the redevelopment or conservation of existing communities resulted in the
relocation of scores of city center inhabitants to the commercialized land of the suburb. In
effect, a process of displacement occurred in which ruralites and non-professional laborers
inhabited the dated traditional cores as nationals moved to the periphery. 5 New public and
public-private housing programs and large-scale government urban developments were
vigorously launched during this decade and the decade of the 1980s.
To comply with energetic development plans, which called for allocation of large
outlays in infrastructure, large tracts of land were moved from the public to the private
domain, subdivided and sold or distributed free of charge according to several criteria.
Real estate speculation became a grand obsession, in part because property was one of the
few secure forms of investments open to many. Virtually all social groups were engaging
in building and selling of property as a speculative venture, some as a secondary venture
besides their permanent occupation. By the mid 1980s, the Saudi government had
distributed 2.5 million parcels of land and lots, averaging one lot for every four citizens. 6