IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/cityxx/v18y2014i6p708-722.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Real estate and political power in 1970s Riyadh

Author

Listed:
  • Paul Bonnenfant

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Paul Bonnenfant, 2014. "Real estate and political power in 1970s Riyadh," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 18(6), pages 708-722, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:cityxx:v:18:y:2014:i:6:p:708-722
    DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2014.965890
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13604813.2014.965890
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13604813.2014.965890?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:cityxx:v:18:y:2014:i:6:p:708-722. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/CCIT20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.