Mud City: Perceptions and Misconceptions of Diriyah

Abstract

This project investigates contemporary practices tapping into Saudi Arabia’s powerful past by deploying the ‘heritage’ label to promote new developments. More precisely, this thesis looks at recent re-development plans centered around Saudi Arabia’s 18th century capital, Diriyah, which envisions a new ‘mud city’ building upon the UNESCO-inscribed World Heritage Site, and evokes a nostalgic commemorative perspective of the past to steer its future. In the face of materialistic, neoliberal motives of revenue-seeking through the heretofore untapped local market of heritage tourism—aided by global cultural guardians claiming exclusive stewardship over ‘universal sets of values’—as well as non-materialistic motives relating to identity-creation and the construct of a ‘collective memory’ by the utilization of the built environment, the need for a paradigm shift becomes a necessity. By merely sponsoring a unifying aesthetic appearance that is based on subjective interpretations of a selective past, and by creating an aesthetic confusion—which bets on the untrained eyes’ inability to differentiate between what is actually original and faux facades that are new but made-to-look-historical, the projected development is jeopardizing the very principles which it ostensibly seeks to protect. Instead of reducing Diriyah’s professed historical significance and confining the local understanding of what constitutes ‘heritage’ to the mere aesthetic surface layer of UNESCO-registered ruins, this thesis project argues for a more expansive paradigm which reflects Diriyah’s processual and prolonged past, to locally guide its future in a comprehensive and an equitable way.