Learning from tradition: land provision and population growth, Saudi Arabia

Professionals in Saudi Arabia and many other Muslim countries are trying to learn from past experiences to resolve contemporary problems.

Accepting such societal strategy, this paper will illustrate one example of how history could be used to present an argument to change the attitude of decision makers. The argument is that the population of Saudi Arabia will double in the next few decades, this means that the built up area will double if the society decides to keep the same standard of living, which will cost the society.

To minimize such cost, the paper proposes the search for a self-built system to construct infrastructure and the search for self-managed systems of controlling the built environment with the least possible intervention.