UC Berkeley

This research primarily investigates Riyadh’s 1972 master plan, designed by the Greek urbanist Doxiadis. The larger goal is forming a solid analysis of master-planning approaches in the Gulf region. The 1972 plan has been previously discussed in numerous research endeavors, but often it is treated as an isolated project, in ways that reveal only dimensions of “What?” What were its specific features? What were its productive impacts on Riyadh? And what undesirable consequences did it unintentionally have? However, the work in hand takes a different lens. It moves beyond the “What” to understand the “Why” or the “How.” Why was the plan developed in the way that was finally approved? How did it reach that shape? And why did it impact the city in the way it evidentially did? Those questions sit at the heart of this dissertation.Specifically, it aims to inspect the 1972 master plan as a product of negotiations between many influential players and the culmination of dynamics that were in place long before the work on the plan had even started, and which were significant in shaping its outcome. Rapid developments, occurring internally in Saudi Arabia and externally on the global stage, were instrumental in determining the plan’s final form. This dissertation concretely connects those relationships to the plan for the first time. The work’s main contribution is thus to analyze the range of factors surrounding the decision to construct the plan and show how they influenced the creation process. Throughout this research, many field visits and interviews were performed, archival material was recovered and examined, maps were evaluated, observations collected, and media analyzed. The research also depended on the collection of oral histories from a number of sources; some are original, others were never connected to this topic. What this research revealed is that contrary to the familiar narrative, the plan’s process was not linear or one-dimensional, nor did it unfold in a vacuum or emerge from a lab. Rather, it was arrived at following a complex, multilayered process, and unpacking those layers is essential to fully comprehending and judging it. Finally, the 1972 plan may be seen as representing a timely response to a city that urgently needed a vision for its future, one that absorbed the enormous challenges it faced and created a system for instilling order through a period of unprecedented urban population and territorial expansion.