Editor's Note

I had an opportunity early this year to attend a conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, afterward visiting the UAE cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Knowing little about the oil-rich kingdoms on the Persian Gulf, it was a most educational trip. Almost everything encountered, the people, the culture and the physical environment, was an eye opening experience.

Planning for expansion of Riyadh in the 1950's was much influenced by the urban planner Constantino Doxiadis. The plan, unfortunately, was simply a large infinitely expandable grid of low rise buidlings, which has allowed a city of 200,000 in 1960 to grow laterally into a city of 7.5 million today. Comparisons to a Los Angeles in the sand were not hard to make. The grid, roughly 1 mile square, is made up of six to nine lane highways. Riyadh is built around the car, with few accommodations for pedestrians beyond the promenades of large shopping, business and dining malls and driving destinations. Visitors have to use Uber services to go anywhere, even if the destination is directly across the highway. (Before a recent law allowing women to drive, women were always dependent on men to leave the house.) Unsurprisingly perhaps, we saw few electric cars. During rush hour, the vast highways are often congested and the air is always tinged from pollution. Part of the vast building boom that is going on in the region, there are plans to double Riyadh's population in the next 7 years. Construction sites are everywhere and the city's first metro system is to open soon. Most impressive was the extent of recent urban high-rise development, and the glitziness of the new buildings.