Development versus deterioration of traditional settlements of Southwest Saudi Arabia: Government policies and possible courses of action

A program of genuine urban development concepts is critical to the future urban development of formerly isolated rural areas of southwest Saudi Arabia. Recent top-down approaches by government planning agencies, however, faced difficulties to achieve successful planning solutions to the deteriorating traditional villages. New government policies are needed to enhance the success of such a program. This paper offers an overview of experienced development in the villages of the southwest Saudi Arabia, as an example of the difficulties planners face. Economic change and central-government policies of the last 30 years have looked differently to the traditional socioeconomic structures of the villages, once based on the reclamation of land for agricultural purposes and the sustained development of local forests to meet subsistence needs. Today, the villages are caught between the past and the present, represented locally by two competing socioeconomic hierarchies. The paper argues that in order to gain local cooperation in developing new patterns of urban development, innovative steps must be taken to facilitate local participation in program design, implementation and evaluation. This may depend on finding ways to connect present mechanisms of central-government control of urban development to older, traditional systems of local control of past urban development.