Perhaps Jeddah is today the only major city in the Kingdom that has managed to maintain some of its unique character, as evident in its historical sites including the city’s old houses and other constructions.
Until very recently, the neighborhoods of the largest city in the Kingdom’s Western Province with their sand-covered and twisted streets inaccessible to cars kept their glamour and splendor while nestling sleepily on the shores of the Red Sea. Its inhabitants, having no premonition of the radical transformation their city was about to undergo, did their best to keep it clean while preserving its unique appearance.
Then came the oil boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s and with it came the changes that touched on everything in Jeddah. The traditional architecture and way of life that for decades distinguished Jeddah from other parts of the country gave way to the glitter and noise of industry, technology and cosmopolitan human life.
The expansion has not only been rapid and recent but also lifeless. The building boom lacked the typical Jeddah soul. What we have now is a hybrid of architecture borrowed from all over the world. It all came with the arrival of foreign second and third-class designers and architects and unskilled workers. The result is a city that can neither be classified as modern or traditional. It is a modern city where a luxury palace or villa costing over SR1 million lacks the very basic services like sewage.
What about Old Jeddah, the Kingdom’s principal seaport, the original gateway to Makkah and Madinah for pilgrims arriving by ship?
The fortified city is no more. Gone too is the walled town that remained so for centuries. The demographic structure has completely changed. Instead of having Jeddawis inhabiting the old quarters, the city’s elite citizenry moved out leaving only the low-income people who were unable to repair and renovate their city. It soon turned into a ghost town. A day may come when the entire Old Jeddah would be no more than ruins.
What is most dangerous is that many of the old buildings populated by foreign labor have been turned into breweries, hideouts sheltering illegal residents, criminals and terrorists and into warehouses for the storage of outdated goods that are re-labeled and then sold to the public.
We need to save Jeddah from all this, and to begin with we must first work to get rid of all the social distortions and then embark on restoring the old city. The projects laid several years ago to salvage the city have to be revived. We don’t lack the necessary funds but we lack the brains that think differently and innovate, especially among municipal officials.
