Abstract
The Saudi capital, Riyadh, underwent rapid urban growth in the decades that followed the discovery of oil in 1937. From a small town of 19,000 inhabitants in 1920, it was a city of more than 600,000 inhabitants in the late 1970s. This paper examines the mechanisms of this growth. It explores the housing decisions of everyday people, the investment strategies of the merchants and the bourgeoisie, and the city's planning policies. Its author—who worked on planning operations in 1970s Riyadh—shows that urban planning followed the dynamics of a real estate market fuelled by cheap state loans, public wages and rivalries between various branches of the royal family. In the 1970s, the Saudi elite invested oil money in real estate and literally turned oil into stone. As this paper suggests, they could have made other decisions: it is political choices, not oil determinism, that created the built environment of Riyadh.
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