Dissertation_Dr Faisal Almubarak

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HI. ENVISIONING THE PLURALISTIC CITY
What can be done to restore desirable traditional urban attributes as well as
authenticity and to promote economic independence while acknowledging modern time
exigencies (i.e. the political economic structure under the modem nation-state and
technology) is a crucial and challenging question which needs to be addressed in this
closing part of the study. In his analysis of modern housing development in Saudi Arabia,
Peter Rowe characterizes the contemporary urban landscape as "distinctly modern and
Western." 9 Yet the modernization of the built environment in Saudi Arabia has also
amounted to rigid, cumbersome urban sprawl out of sync with the culture and at odds with
the prevailing sterile desert ecosystem. The indulgence in Western suburbanization
conveyed a sense of prosperity which cloaked the increasing alienation of the desert
physical environment and masked the enormous social and economic cost of the bulging
sprawl.
Writing about the ramifications of modernizing traditional societies, C.E. Black stated
that, "at the heart of alienation is the impersonality of the societies in which the entire life of
an individual— work, home, nourishment, health, communication, recreation— is managed
by a variety of bureaucratic organizations that tend to treat individuals as numbers, bodies,
or abstract entities." 10 Anne Moudon (1988) contends, "A rigid or hard physical system
exists when the decisions of a few individuals affect the collective realm of the large
physical scale." 11 A major factor behind this rigidness in Saudi Arabia, I argue, has to do
with alienation, that is the distancing of residents from control over their immediate
environment.
Paternalism and a quest for socio-political order and oil wealth marked the Saudi
modernization process and shaped its urban form. Modernization theory presupposes a
positive relationship between socioeconomic development and political participation.
According to the theory, the spreading of political information and political awareness must
accompany socioeconomic mobility and urban modernization. 12 Yet central power has
accrued in Saudi Arabia at the cost of emasculating local communities' political
development. The government has orchestrated the society's change from traditional,
independent subsistence socioeconomic urban systems to consumer-based, service-oriented
and modernized ones highly dependent on government financial backing.