Dissertation_Dr Faisal Almubarak

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such a dynamism to suburban growth. Because of these programs, most Saudi households
have managed to move to modern housing, leaving their traditional mud and stone houses
to deterioration in the traditional cores.
F. Public Infrastructure
The influx of workers from the various Saudi regions and foreign countries has
rendered traditional rules of responsibility obsolete: modern cultural heterogeneity defied
collective responsibility among neighborhoods' residents. This has posed a challenge to
traditional roles collectively played by neighborhood members. With the suburbanization
of contemporary Saudi settlements, access to modern neighborhoods became a function of
land market pricing, receivability of free government land, or employment agency as
opposed to kinship. 8
Instead, without efforts to develop localism, that is buttressing traditional institutions to
accommodate modern technology and urban needs, traditional attributes and hence urban
continuity were disrupted; the state has assumed the leadership to modernize the society. A
first step was to improve the well-being of the population, as the basis for economic
revival. Economic development required the allocation of an enormous portion of oil
revenues to upgrade Saudi settlements' infrastructure systems and public services,
inevitably necessitating the importation of technology. The laying of new platted annexes,
equipped with electricity, telephone networks, sewage systems, piped water, and increased
automobile accessibility, all required the creation of specialized bureaucracies to handle the
new services. These modern functions would not have been possible through the meager
surplus offered by the traditional economies of towns. The national government has
emerged as the agent to pick up the slack.
With the coordination of other central government departments, the municipality has
presided over the maintenance and the construction of streets, parks, schools, fire stations,
police, bridges and other public projects and services all paid through the central state (not
through the waqf institution). Instead of allowing the development of local systems of
governance that could utilize centrally-supplied funds based on government-set quotas, the
government has expanded the tentacles of its bureaucratic apparatus to determine the needed
funds for development for every settlement.