Dissertation_Dr Faisal Almubarak

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Such government intervention was predicated on the tacit conviction that the society
would be unable to transform itself without the active role and specialized organs of the
central bureaucracy. Ostensibly, the Monarchic government was skeptical that the mostly
illiterate and underdeveloped society could meet the increasing pressure for change brought
about by oil industrialization, without the commanding role of the state. Thus the decisionmaking
process, including urban planning, has increasingly concentrated within the central
bureaucracy, a realm under the control of the King. At the local level, the degree of control
over the environment was drastically diminished with the creation of the central
bureaucratic municipality, rather than the local community. To bring about change,
residents have had to rely on a ponderous municipal system and other constricting
procedures, a process entangled in a bureaucratic labyrinth.
In good city form, Lynch contends that the betterment of a city can be induced by
improving its "fit," that is "to put the control of it into the hand of its immediate users, who
have the stake and the knowledge to make it function well." 13 Lynch considers a "good
place" to be "one which is appropriate to the person and her culture, makes her aware of
her community, her past, the web of life, and the universe and of time and space in which
those are contained." 14 To mollify the rigid, bulging, environmentally incongruent and
impersonal Saudi built forms, a decentralization of central power is necessary and timely.
Centralized, technocratic and technical urban planning must gradually give in to local
control of urban development.
The delegation of power to local communities will help foster indigenous political
personality and, thus on the urban level, infuse pluralism in urban planning and design. In
the realm of urban design, an intricate system of organizing open circulation and built
spaces should adhere to formulas that both meet and guarantee neighbors' needs for
privacy and mollify the harsh desert environment of the Kingdom. This could be attained,
for example, by gradually empowering local municipalities to form local governments with
elected officials.
Local control might be attained by reestablishing traditional forms of city controls,
that is the notables' role (e.g. the mukhtar and the omdah) in shaping their districts or
quarters. Then community residents could propose creative measures reflecting their needs
in their immediate built environment as opposed to the existing impersonal, spaceless and
standardized regulations of the central bureaucracy. Within the new municipal