Development cannot be treated or dealt with as an isolated defining term in the absence of general measures to assess its importance in the progress of a society. In Saudi Arabia, there is a “revolution” in the concept of general development to actually mean restructuring of the state’s infrastructure. Here arises the question: Why restructuring the infrastructure? The reason is that when we try to apply the concept of development to the Saudi reality, we will discover that many of the basis and conditions of the development are practically available, but they were carried out unilaterally without any prior coordination or unified efforts. This has resulted in giving excessive attention to some aspects at the cost of others, as we could easily see in certain geographic regions in the Kingdom.
This situation doesn’t actually mean that mistakes were committed but that priorities were inaccurate. What we are witnessing in our country these days is that the government in the past decade started reconsidering the concept of comprehensive development. The idea behind this endeavor is to make improvements. Naturally, difficulties are unavoidable but they will disappear when projects come to an end.
Development is a major factor in stability and human and social progress. It is a sustainable operation, partially or fully, taking different forms aimed to achieve prosperity in a way that meets the citizens’ needs, and their economic, social and intellectual potentials.
When we talk about the Saudi society, we do not mean the Saudi citizens in particular, but rather everyone who is living in this country. It is worth mentioning that all projects and achievements couldn’t have had taken place in the absence of general stability. If we look around, we could easily see concrete social, human and scientific developments, but we aspire to reach the highest levels of progress, and this is what makes restructuring of the infrastructure inevitable.
Here we find that services are mainly concentrated in three major cities, namely Riyadh, Dammam and Jeddah. These cities are undergoing growing expansion at the various economic and social levels. But this time, development projects are properly planned.
There are also other things that could help in achieving comprehensive development, such as making use of several classes of the Saudi society and involving them in the social development process. Among them, there are people with special needs targeted by the comprehensive easy access project in order to activate their role and increase their contributions.
As I said in the beginning of this article, talking about a well-defined concept of comprehensive development is a difficult task, and this issue requires more evaluation and comparison. This comparison is possible only with similar environments in terms of effectiveness and flexibility, We cannot, for example, make a comparison between Dubai and Riyadh, because there is nothing in common between the two cities either in size, population, society or the chronological age. However, we can make use of the Dubai experience in the proper proactive preparations of infrastructure projects. In the meantime, it is natural that Dubai after many years could learn lessons from Riyadh experience.
