Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism and Road Revolt

by Pascal Menoret

(Cambridge University Press £19.99)

Riyadh is a city of six million people in the richest country in the Arab world but it remains a mystery to outsiders.

Pascal Menoret’s book, the first in English to analyse the Saudi capital’s rapid development into a mass urban society, goes some way towards providing enlightenment.

He does this by entering the world of its marginalised and alienated youth who respond to the city’s huge expanses of tarmac and the lack of any alternative forms of expression by burning rubber.

Joyriding — or, as it is more popularly known, drifiting — is a form of revolt against the House of Saud’s conservative, alienating model of corrupt consumer capitalism. It is also deadly — many of his subjects recount tales of road carnage.

Menoret spent years researching the book among Riyadh’s drifters and it is the voices of these young men — unsurprisingly he meets no women drifters — that shines through the book.

It also includes fascinating history of how the modern city was conceived by Greek urban planners whose futuristic vision of a radial grid and slum removal was only partially realised.

What emerged in the boom years of the 1970s was an isolating and car-dependent suburban sprawl reminiscent of Los Angeles, bringing to an end the pre-capitalist system of communal land use and close-quarter living.

Inspired in part by Planet of Slums author Mike Davis, Menoret brings a Marxian insight to the overarching system of monopoly rents in oil and land that has concentrated wealth in the social elite.

He shows how a combination of pervasive repression and state welfare distribution has so far prevented revolt from exploding as it has done elsewhere in the region.

JOE GILL