Visualizing the Desert

Abstract

This paper uses three different representations (aerial photograph, map, photograph) to shed light on how environmental imaginaries of the desert systematically created a “wasteland” that enabled an architecture of exploitation and extraction in which the histories, characteristics, and narratives of Saudi Arabia were replaced. Organized in chronological order, the images were produced in connection with US geologist Karl Saben Twitchell’s desire to extract resources from Saudi Arabia through his role as the Saudi King’s confidant and US expert. Here, representation and extraction allowed Twitchell and his company, Saudi Arabian Mining Syndicate, to frame the landscape as a “regime of emptiness” that enabled the systematic transformation of the Saudi desert.

Keywords:

• deserts
• Saudi Arabia
• representation
• environmental imaginaries
• wasteland

The Idea of the Desert

Opening Figure. The first settlement in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, 1936. Printed in “Aramco Communities—Then and Now,” Arabian Sun and Flare, April 29, 1953. Courtesy of Aramco.

The editors of the weekly publication Arabian Sun and Flare wrote in the April 29, 1953 issue:

Looking back, it seems that the sand blew more often, with greater velocity and that sandstorms were of far greater frequency than today. That is an assumption because now we have acres and acres of lawns and thousands of shrubs and trees. Sand control is effective, and vast areas have been stabilized. Then too, the hundreds of buildings provide windbreaks, all of which help to reduce the annoyance of the shifting sand and perhaps affect the temperature favorably too.¹

Accompanying this text is a grainy image, taken in 1936, of the US company town of Dhahran in Saudi Arabia (Opening Figure). Established to house employees and later their families, Dhahran was the suburban US² outpost of Aramco (the Arabian American Oil Company).³ The image depicts twelve prefabricated barracks, some bigger than others, with the vast desert serving as the background. The barracks, with their muted tones, seem to blend into the desert surrounding them, not yet hinting at the vastness of Aramco endeavors. At the same time, their monolithic rigidity stands in jarring contrast to the kaleidoscopic nature of the moving, shifting, and ever-changing desert around them. The larger barracks, called bunkhouses, housed a myriad of activities, serving as offices, dining halls, workshops, meeting rooms, and any other facility a budding oil company might require. The smaller structures, not yet part of Aramco’s hierarchal housing scheme, were used for accommodation.⁴ Aramco was based on exploitative extraction and the universality of the prefabricated barracks, along with the desire to green the desert, stand in for these larger imperial ambitions. In the accompanying text, the editors continue to describe the “sands that shift with every breeze… naked of greenery… surrounded by sea and sand, but no trees, shrubs or grass.” To their eyes, the Dhahran of 1936 was “barren” and “desolate,” but the Dhahran of 1953, although not pictured in the publication, was “green” and full of “charm and beauty.” This belief that the desert was barren, and only beautiful when green, has permeated the environmental imaginaries of the Arabian deserts, especially as those beliefs and imaginations pertain to the legacy of Aramco.

Environmental historian Diana K. Davis’s research explores the detrimental role that environmental imaginaries and historical images have played in shaping problematic and highly simplified understandings of these complex landscapes. Her work serves as a useful framework to more fully engage with careful readings of Saudi Arabia’s desert.⁵ The drive in the 1950s for Saudi Arabia to modernize and urbanize has shaped the belief that to be “green is to be modern.”⁶ Tropes of greening have always been prominent in Saudi Arabia, as Islamic connotations of the garden as a metaphor for Paradise are a part of everyday religious and cultural practice.⁷ Parallel to this are western notions of greening as modernization ushered in to help craft and justify colonial and imperial expansion during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, first through religious missionary practices and later through industrial and economic development efforts.⁸ Timothy Mitchell expands on this, noting that “the place to be colonized or controlled was described in contrast to a more verdant and fertile past, or a more prosperous, well-irrigated future, which European control would restore or bring about.”⁹ The three representations discussed in this narrative explore how the Saudi Arabian desert was constructed by US actors as an empty “wasteland” ready to be developed at the hands of US engineers, geologists, and planners. These visual representations have, as Samia Henni notes, developed a “misleading conceptualization of the desert [which] has served to legitimize its transformation, manipulation, toxification, and destruction.”¹⁰

These images shed light on how the intricacies, histories, and complexities of the Saudi Arabian deserts were compressed into a flat two-dimensional static image that enabled imperial exploitation of Saudi resources. Hand in hand with this framing is the idea that modernization, in all its green glory, would be enacted by the skill and expertise of US know-how. This narrative traces the role of the US geologist Karl Saben Twitchell as the Saudi king’s confidant and how his status as a US expert allowed him and his company to develop a “regime of emptiness” that enabled the systematic transformation of the Saudi deserts.¹¹

Imagining the Desert: Aerial Photograph

Physically, it might have been Arizona, or New Mexico, with its flat crestlines, its dry clarity of air, its silence.

–Wallace Stegner¹²

Karl S. Twitchell’s role in the development of Saudi Arabia is often overlooked. He was a US geologist who was hired in 1931 by US businessman Charles Richard Crane to undertake an expedition to the Saudi kingdom in search of water and minerals.¹³ Twitchell had previously worked with Crane on similar expeditions in Yemen and was Crane’s natural choice to lead his Saudi Arabian initiative, first in search of water, and later for oil and other minerals.¹⁴ Not only would Twitchell ultimately help broker the concession that led to the establishment of the world’s largest oil company; he played a tremendous role in constructing the environmental imaginary of the Arabian desert.

Sponsored and vetted by Crane, Twitchell arrived in Saudi Arabia in the spring of 1931 to begin the first exploration of the western region known as the Hejaz, in search of water. The desire to secure access to water has always played a significant role in the Arabian peninsula. Desert settlements were established around oases, water springs, and water holes, with distances and locations measured in relationship to water sources. Twitchell’s search for water and his eventual ventures into resource extraction—both oil and other minerals—were two sides of the same coin. Historian Toby C. Jones’s Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia traces this precise relationship between the desire to secure access to water and the potent role that oil played in the nation’s modernization.¹⁵

While Twitchell’s water explorations came to naught, he did, however, find the promise and potential of mineral resources, and urged the Saudi king to consider concessions for oil and other mineral deposits. In 1933, Twitchell helped to successfully broker the oil concession between the Saudi kingdom and the US company Standard Oil of California (SoCal) which had recently discovered oil in nearby Bahrain.¹⁶ After serving as a liaison, Twitchell was quick to move on to Hejaz in the hope of finding mineral deposits.

In 1936, Twitchell and his company, the Saudi Arabian Mining Syndicate (SAMS), hired Joseph D. Mountain as the pilot and photographer to undertake the first aerial survey of the western region of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (Figure 2).¹⁷Mountain’s previous experience in the kingdom began in 1934 when he was hired by SoCal to undertake an aerial reconnaissance of the Eastern Provinces of Saudi Arabia which led to the discovery of commercial quantities of oil and eventually the world’s largest oil reserve, Ghawar Field. Mountain’s 1936 Aerial Reconnaissance focused on the Hejaz region of Saudi Arabia, aiming “to discover, locate, and photograph any remains of ancient mining activities, such as workings, tailings dump, or ruins.”¹⁸ On June 11, 1936, the first exploratory trip was made over the village of Beda in the northeastern part of the Saudi Arabia, about 20 miles from Gulf of Aqaba.

Figure 2. Photograph and caption of Saudi desert, Joseph D. Mountain, July 11, 1936 (No. 76), NASM.1991.0079-M0000046-00810, National Air and Space Museum Archives, Smithsonian Institute.

Between June 1935 and February 1937, Mountain and his team undertook 100 flights over Hejaz, capturing 963 aerial photographs to map and locate potential mineral prospects. From their elevated viewpoint in the sky, they sought to identify just one type of geological feature: igneous rock, which they believed held the promise of mineral riches. Thus, areas with “no signs of igneous [rock] were…. of no interest.”¹⁹ Ultimately, thirty sites were located and the aerial photographs were used as a guide for on-ground teams, “to correlate the appearance of the prospects from the ground with their appearance from the air.”²⁰ Mountain and his team superimposed a square block grid onto the landscape, to allow for what Laura Kurgan describes as “looking close up at a distance.”²¹ The distance and scale of the resulting images were framed as a snapshot of the Saudi desert, using what we now call remote sensing methods, and were stripped, as a result, of any tactile and sensorial qualities.

The plane’s distance from the ground enabled Twitchell, and those after him, to do two things: first, Twitchell was able to justify Saudi Arabia’s desert as a wasteland, devoid of sensorial, tactile, and human scaled-experience; and second, partially due to his select, dispassionate surveying and gridding, his work helped define the desert as a separate and contained environment. ²² Twitchell, as an embodiment of colonial and imperial imperatives, found in Saudi Arabia a land full of resources that needed to be exploited, harnessed, and improved. In establishing Saudi Arabia as an underutilized, flat, and barren wasteland, he posited that the capitalist development of its natural resources would enable Saudi Arabia to become a modern state on par with its western counterparts.²³ In his 1958 volume on Saudi Arabia’s natural resources, Twitchell devotes several chapters to the potential for economic resource “development.”²⁴ It seems that for Saudi Arabia to be modern and useful, its resources had to be exploited. Moreover, through his involvement as an expert on behalf of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), Twitchell helped construct the Saudi desert as a wasteland, defined by what it lacks: water, food people, vegetation, buildings, and so on. ²⁵ While the relationship between the “wasteland” and the “desert” had been established long before Twitchell arrived in Saudi Arabia, Twitchell was able to transform the desert into an underutilized and improperly managed wasteland through his photographic documentation and mapping.

The distances afforded by the airplane, and the singular focus on prospect-finding, reinforced the classification of the desert as an environment that is separate, and different, from what was seen on the ground. The desert’s dunes, people, settlements, and histories were reduced to indistinguishable specks that stripped them of their significance and agency. Twitchell’s desert, in turn, became a contained environment upon which he, Mountain, and SAMS could project an environmental imaginary that included ideas about its state. Essentially, by separating themselves from the desert as an environment, they were able to conjure and craft a narrative about how the desert became a wasteland. This phenomenon was further amplified with the move from photograph to map.

Compressing the Desert: Map

A hand-drawn map was constructed from the aerial photographs in the spring of 1937 (Figure 3). Two years later in 1939, Twitchell “rediscovered” the mines of Mahad ad Dhahab (Cradle of Gold) marked on the top of the map near the square in Figure 3. Productive until 1954, Mahad ad Dhahab symbolizes an era of imperial exploitation in which the kingdom was mined for gold, oil, silver, and other minerals. These, and other “discoveries” celebrated and framed US experts like Twitchell and others as “pioneers” who helped usher the kingdom into an era of modernization, rather than a more accurate characterization of exploitative ambition and extractive aspirations.²⁶

Figure 3. Aerial Reconnaissance Map of Concession, Saudi Arabia, 1937. Copyright unknown, map drawn by Joseph D. Mountain and T. P. Larken, March 5, 1937, while under the employ of the Saudi Arabian Mining Syndicate (SAMS), based on photographs taken by Joseph Mountain. Courtesy of Karl S. Twitchell Papers, Public Policy Papers, Mudd Manuscript Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

The photographs depicted the various rock formations, their altitudes (through shadows), the graininess of the landscape, and varied flora, seen from on high. The map, however, further eroded and excised many of the remaining details. By tracing the photographs and selecting what to include and what to omit, Mountain deliberately constructed the environmental imaginary of the Saudi desert as a wasteland. When describing the removal of these types of details, Kurgan points to the problems of these images, “because the[y] have been stripped of their data and presented to us as pictures already (emphasis added) interpreted by experts.”²⁷ Thus, the ideas of Mountain and Twitchell, and the rest of the SAMS team, were already implicit in the fabric of the drawing. Beyond the sites excluded from the concession areas—shown as emphatic black holes—the map flattened mountains, erased settlements, and eroded the complex desert landscape into a series of lines, patterns, and prospects. In doing so, the map helped bolster the environmental imaginary of emptiness and of a foreign “other,” an unproductive and unyielding landscape.

This map and others subsequently produced for oil exploration, along with later representations produced for agricultural development, scaffolded the idea that the “drive for territorial supremacy… is imperial insofar as it depends upon the process of ‘othering’ those over whom supremacy is exercised.”²⁸ The process of “othering” was constructed by associating “civilization with the city, [and making] explicit the idea that extension of territorial authority beyond the confines of a city is over ‘other’ people, either another civilization or uncivilized beings.”²⁹ The act of excoriating the desert actively “others.” This drawing, thus, cannot be divorced from the conceptual projections embedded into it. The map is, as a result, an act of territorial and imperial supremacy.

This map is also architecture. As Samia Henni reminds us, “architecture is not only what is designed and built but also what is indebted, destroyed, dismantled, contaminated, displaced, buried, unearthed, and wasted.”³⁰ Through the systematic construction of a flattened image, SAMS created an architecture of exploitation and extraction in which the histories, characteristics, and narratives of Saudi Arabia were dismantled and replaced. The desert as a constructed “wasteland” and a “regime of emptiness” perpetuates the camouflaging, erasing, and replacing of histories with more convenient (and productive) narratives. The desert’s three-dimensional fluctuations and cycles were compressed into a two-dimensional representation that stripped away its complexity and fullness. The map enacts imperial ends, not only by encoding the desert as “empty” but also by laying the foundation for mineral exploitation.

Not only was the desert revered, romanticized, and exalted by the inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula; parallel sociospatial relationships were intricate, interwoven, and symbiotic.³¹ The desert for the Bedouin was so much more than a landscape. It was a source of income, a home, a history, and an integrated part of being, and not just of their “imaging.”³² Colonial and imperial ideas of the environment, and the desert specifically, shifted this relationship to declare the desert as a separate, different, and “other” environment that required controlling, managing, ordering, and to be made productive. Representing the desert as a wasteland was the ultimate expression of environmental racism in which the landscape and its inhabitants were “other” and without what is deemed useful.³³ It is representations such as these that dismantled centuries-long understandings of the desert and constructed new, imported ideas of how it should operate, how it should look, and how to improve it.

Greening the Desert: Photograph

Almost a decade after the “rediscovery” of Mahad ad Dhahab, Twitchell, an avid photographer, documented what he labelled as “Home” and Garden at Mahad (Figure 4). The garden had captured his attention in his trips around Mahad ad Dhahab in the late 1940s. Beyond his involvement with SAMS’s mining operations, Twitchell, at the urging of the Saudi king, played an integral role in orchestrating the USDA mission to Saudi Arabia in 1942 to carry out additional surveys of natural resources.³⁴ Similar to the process of surveying at Mahad ad Dhahab, Twitchell and the USDA team undertook a systematic mapping and analysis of the Saudi desert to “discover” the potential of agricultural expansion. In particular, the USDA mission aimed to utilize US scientific ingenuity to develop Al Kharj in Nejd, at the heart of the kingdom.³⁵

Figure 4. Karl S. Twitchell, “Home” and Garden at Mahad, Saudi Arabia, April 1, 1948. Karl S. Twitchell Collection, courtesy of Special Collections, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.

Established in 1930 by Aramco at the request of the king, the Al Kharj farm was a site to test the possibility and potential of making the desert bloom. Spearheaded by Twitchell and overseen by Aramco, Al Kharj became emblematic of the political, economic, and technical development of the fledging Saudi state (Figure 5).³⁶ Depicted as a mechanized and perfected modern garden of Eden, Al Kharj’s productive agriculture was heralded as a US triumph over the desert and considered a model for spatial and social transformation. Al Kharj was documented in Twitchell’s 1954 survey volume, which included fifty-three images, and of those, twenty-eight included irrigated land, productive agriculture, and water transportation methods. Remaining images focused on housing, SAMS, and overall modernization schemes that included roads, houses, and various infrastructural scenes around Saudi Arabia. Twitchell’s focus on water irrigation and agricultural improvement exemplifies both his ambitions to find and exploit Saudi Arabian natural resources, as well as the imperial desire to transform the desert from wasteland to an improved, engineered Eden (Figure 6).

Figure 5. Karl S. Twitchell, various scenes from Al Kharj, Saudi Arabia, March 23, 1949. Karl S. Twitchell Collection, courtesy of Special Collections, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.

Figure 6. Improvements in water infrastructure: Karl S. Twitchell, Contrast in Water Carriers. Mule Cart and White Tanker, Jidda, Saudi Arabia, June 14, 1949. Karl S. Twitchell Collection, courtesy of Special Collections, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.

Twitchell’s fascination with “making the desert bloom” permeated his approach to the so-called “development” of the natural resources of Saudi Arabia. While the concept of “making the desert bloom” was utilized to enact political ends by various entities and has clear religious connotations, Twitchell’s desire was slightly more nuanced. US “experts” like Twitchell understood the greening of the desert as emblematic of US scientific ingenuity, encapsulating capitalism and consumerism more than any religious or political mindset. The media has also appropriated the same poetic narrative in describing US projects in the region where “Eden” was found in every greening project. Like many others, Twitchell’s “Edenic visions of agricultural development… arose from this broader moral and racial geography that assigned value to certain landscapes as wastelands or Edens, and people managing them as full human subjects or less valued ‘others.’”³⁷ The aerial photograph and the map had successfully established the desert as other, but Twitchell’s on-the-ground photographs actively othered both the people and environment. As the farm was mechanized and (imperially) optimized, so too were the Saudi Arabs and their local environs (see Figure 4). The young boy seen in the foreground of the image in his simple, Arab garb, under the photographic and expert tutelage of Twitchell and other US experts, will be brought into the shade from out of the sun. He will be made modern, and adorned in western clothes. He will bloom, mechanized, ordered, perfected (see also Figure 6).

Moreover, in captioning the image as “home,” Twitchell did two specific things. First, he equated the idea of the home with its garden as a secure bastion against the desert, as if the garden was what made the house a home. This echoes US ideals of the single-family home as a contained unit that both orders society, while also creating a sense of security and safety (however artificial), behind smooth lawns bordered by white picket fences.³⁸ The garden and fence were both present in Twitchell’s “Home” and Garden at Mahad. Second, the type of home also played a critical role. For Twitchell, a ‘home’ was a bungalow with a pitched roof that must be painted white. This was seen all over the imperial world, with colonial architectural imprints serving as idealized expressions of living, but also of control and authority. The bungalow, which emerged as “a symbol of the new imperial power” in India, as an example, was the colonial architecture par excellence.³⁹ The proliferation of the bungalow as a housing type was “explicitly racial and cultural, and implicitly political.” ⁴⁰ The bungalow design circulated into oil company towns like Dhahran, and in other British colonies, before becoming the symbol of “development” across each continent.⁴¹ The architecture, and its environment, became a tool of not only “othering,” but ordering. The messy, illegible built environment was rationalized and racialized using this neat, recognizable design.

The desert, remade now as lush, blooming green, was made commercially profitable during the interwar and postwar years. The garden became a critical frontispiece of both US housing in Dhahran and Arab housing in the neighboring towns of Dammam.⁴² The green lawn became emblematic of “the domesticated dimension of imperial settings,” while pushing back the sweeping desert and creating an ordered piece of Eden.⁴³ Where Al Kharj, despite its environmental ramifications, represented scientific control over the vast desert, the domestic garden demonstrated scientific and social triumph.⁴⁴ Twitchell’s garden represented more than a mere Eden in the desert; it is a desert rendered productive, a house hermetically sealed, and a nation harnessed into modernization, all while rendering climate, dust, heat, and discomfort as mere legacies of a distant (primitive) past.

Coda: Legacies of Visualizing the Desert

The systematic representations produced by Twitchell and SAMS not only bolstered imperial expansion and exploitation, but perpetuated a long legacy of the desert as wasteland. These representations had profoundly damaging and lasting implications: they enabled a singular environmental imaginary to dominate almost all understanding of the Saudi desert, largely under the control of western actors. The images, already interpreted and imbued with exploitative intentions, established an archive of “facts” that erased local histories, narratives, and meanings, and created, in turn, a series of fabled realities. As an “expert,” Twitchell was able to cast the Saudi desert as a place of unharnessed potential and as a land full of precious resources that would be profitable under his guiding hand. This (over)reliance on western expertise has caused significant environmental, social, and economic changes which are not always positive.⁴⁵ Twitchell’s “improvements” in infrastructure, agriculture, and mining resulted in the depletion of natural aquifers, the loss of Indigenous knowledge, and significant transformation (not always positive or in the interests of the local population) of the country. In his position as an expert with clout with the king, Twitchell’s visual representations were not questioned but were instead taken as holy writ, cloaked in and colored by his “expertise.” They were fact, an opportunity to overcome the desert and a way for the nascent nation to modernize.⁴⁶

The desert, once intricately woven into the social, economic, and political histories of Saudis, was an “othered” environment requiring control. Infrastructure, agriculture, and architecture positioned the desert, and its dust, as problematic deterrents, and capital obstacles to be managed by expert technology and expert know-how. Twitchell, through his photographs and maps, manufactured a very particular environment into a western productive landscape, ripe for extraction. His 1930 photographs depicted a static, stagnant desert. His maps excised the desert of its complex entanglements. His photographs depict a possible future: ordered, productive, green, shiny. Twitchell, Mountain, and SAMS have long been forgotten, but their legacies, immortalized in photographs, maps and drawings, remain as hidden figures, shaping the desert into a little piece of a very particular kind of Eden.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dalal Musaed Alsayer

Dalal Musaed Alsayer is an assistant professor of architecture at Kuwait University. Her research lies at the intersection of architecture, environment, and development in the context of Arabia during the twentieth century. She is the coauthor of Pan-Arab Modernism 1968–2008 (Actar, 2021) and the cofounding editor of Current: Collective for Architecture History and Environment (www.current-collective.org). She holds a B.Arch. from Kuwait University, postgraduate degrees from Columbia and Harvard, and a MSc and PhD in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. She is an academic visitor at St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford for the academic year 2022–23.

Notes

1 “Aramco Communities—Then and Now,” Arabian Sun and Flare, April 29, 1953: 2.

2 The author uses the term US in lieu of America/American in an attempt to decolonize the writing of histories. On this, see Samia Henni, “Norms and Forms of Dispossession: The Politics of Naming,” Pidgin 23 (February 2018): 16–29.

3 On Aramco, see Dalal Musaed Alsayer, “Anywhere, U.S.A.: Aramco’s Suburb in Saudi Arabia’s Desert,” in Deserts Are Not Empty, ed. Samia Henni (New York: Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, 2022), 269–314;Abd al-Raḥmān ibn ʻAbd Allāh Thāmir Aḥmarī, “Dawr Sharikat Al-Zayt al-ʻArabīyah al-Amrīkīyah (Arāmkū) Fī Tanmiyat al-Minṭaqah al-Sharqīyah Min al-Mamlakah al-ʻArabīyah al-Saʻūdīyah, 1363-1384 H/1944-1964 M : Dirāsah Fī Tārīkh al-Tanmiyah/دور شركة الزيت العربية الأمريكية (أرامكو) في تنمية المنطقة الشرقية من المملكة العربية السعودية، ١٣٦٣-١٣٨٤ ھ/١٤(The Role of the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) in the Development of the Eastern Province (K.S.A.), 1944-1964 : A Study in Development History)” (PhD Dissertation, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, King Saud University, 2007). Saʻd ibn Saʻīd ʻĀʼiḍ Qarnī, Al-Mamlakah al-ʻArabīyah al-Saʻūdīyah Wa-Sharikat Arāmkū, 1352-1401 H/1933-1980 M : Dirāsah Tārīkhīyah/المملكة العربية السعودية وشركة أرامكو، ١٣٥٢-١٤٠١ هـ/١٩٣٣-١٩٨٠ م : : دراسة تاريخية (Saudi Arabia and Aramco, 1352-1401 H/1933-1980: A Historical Study), Sixth Edition (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: al-Jamʻīyah al-Tārīkhīyah al-Saʻūdīyah (Saudi Historical Society), 2008). Chad H. Parker, Making the Desert Modern: Americans, Arabs, and Oil on the Saudi Frontier, 1933–1973 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015); Chad H. Parker, “Transports of Progress: The Arabian American Oil Company and American Modernization in Saudi Arabia,1945–1973” (PhD diss., Indiana University); Toby Craig Jones, Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2010); Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2007); Abdulaziz Alshabib and Sam Ridgway, “Aramco and Al-Malaz Housing Schemes: The Origins of Modern Housing in Saudi Arabia,” Histories of Postwar Architecture March 21, 2022, 147–66, https://doi.org/10.6092/ISSN.2611-0075/11738.

4 On Aramco’s housing hierarchies and approaches, see Alsayer, “Anywhere, U.S.A.”

5 Diana K. Davis, The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge, (History for a Sustainable Future) (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016); Diana K Davis and Edmund Burke III, eds., Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa, Ecology and History (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2011).

6 See Natalie Koch, “Sustainability Spectacle and ‘Post-Oil’ Greening Initiatives,” Environmental Politics 32:4 (September 27, 2022): 1–24, https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2022.2127481.

7 On the role of the garden in Islam, see for example Emma Clark, Underneath Which Rivers Flow: The Symbolism of the Islamic Garden (London: Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture, 1996); D. Fairchild Ruggles, Islamic Gardens and Landscapes (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Sara Provins, “Islamic Gardens: Growing Cosmological Ideals,” The Fountain, July 1, 2003, https://fountainmagazine.com/2003/issue-43-july-september-2003/islamic-gardens-growing-cosmological-ideals; Chuanbin Zhou and Lanxi Guo, “Rose, Tulip and Peony: The Image of Paradise and the ‘Localized’ Islam in China,” Religions 11:9 (August 29, 2020): 444, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11090444; Michelle Catherine Adlard, “The Garden as a Metaphor for Paradise” (Master’s thesis, Rhodes University, 2001).

8 See Ruggles, Islamic Gardens and Landscapes.

9 Timothy Mitchell, afterword to Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2011), 266.

10 Samia Henni, “Against the Regime of ‘Emptiness,’” in Deserts Are Not Empty, ed. Samia Henni (New York, NY: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022), 1; emphasis in original.

11 Henni, “Against the Regime,” 18.

12 Wallace Stegner, Discovery! (Beirut: Middle East Export Press, Inc, 1971), 59.

13 Folder 6, box 22, Karl S. Twitchell Papers, Public Policy Papers, Mudd Manuscript Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library (hereafter KST).

14 On Crane, see Norman E. Saul, The Life and Times of Charles R. Crane, 1858–1939: Businessman, Philanthropist, and a Founder of Russian Studies in America (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013).

15 See Jones, Desert Kingdom, particularly chaps. 2 and 4.

16 On how SoCal came to Saudi Arabia, see Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, reissue edition (New York: Free Press, 2008), chap. 15; Jones, Desert Kingdom, chap. 1; Irvine H Anderson, Aramco, the United States and Saudi Arabia: A Study of the Dynamics of Foreign Oil Policy, 1933–1950, 2014, 22–23.

17 Folder 7, box 1, Joseph D. Mountain Papers, National Air and Space Museum Archives (NASM), Acc. 1991–0079, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC (hereafter JDM).

18 Joseph D. Mountain, “Report of Aerial Reconnaissance, Saudi Arabia, 1936–1937,” pg. 1, box 3, JDM.

19 Mountain, “Report of Aerial Reconnaissance,” pg. 11, box 3, JDM.

20 Mountain, “Report of Aerial Reconnaissance,” pg. 12, box 3, JDM.

21 Laura Kurgan, Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2013).

22 Vittoria Di Palma, Wasteland: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); see also Natalie Koch, “Wastelanding Arabia: America’s ‘Garden of Eden’ in Al Kharj, Saudi Arabia,” Journal of Historical Geography 77 (2022): 13–24.”

23 See also Caitlin Blanchfield, “Envirotechnical Lands: Astronomy and Land Use on Maunakea,” in Technical Lands: A Critical Primer, ed. Jeffrey Nesbit and Charles Waldheim (Berlin, Germany: Jovis Verlag, 2022), 188–203.

24 Karl Saben Twitchell, Saudi Arabia: With an Account of the Development of Its Natural Resources, 3rd ed. reprint (New York: Greenwood Press, 1958).

25 Ahmed Omar Fakry and Karl Saben Twitchell, “Report of the United States Agricultural Mission to Saudi Arabia” (Cairo, Egypt: US Department of Agriculture, 1943).

26 Thomas Lippman, “The Pioneers,” Saudi Aramco World, June 2004; see also Parker, Making the Desert Modern.

27 Kurgan, Close Up at a Distance.

28 Denis E. Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination, paperback ed. (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 17.

29 Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye, 17.

30 Henni, “Against the Regime,” 20.

31 See for example Yahya Ahmed Mohammed Al Saad, “Ab’ād alṣora alṣaḥrawīa fī alqaṣida als’oodīa (Dimensions of the desert image in the Saudi poem),” Majallat Midad Alādab (Midad Al-Adab Magazine) 22 (2011): 43–62; ʿabd āllh ibn mḥmd bn rwās, shāʿirāt min al-bādīa (Female Poets from the Desert), Eighth Edition, vol. Part I (Sharjah, UAE: al-rāwy, 2002).

32 See for example Mahmoud Na’amneh, Mohammed Shunnaq, and Aysegul Tasbasi, “The Modern Sociocultural Significance of the Jordanian Bedouin Tent,” Nomadic Peoples 12:1 (2008): 149–63; Daniel Da Cruz, “The Black Tent,” Aramco World 17:3 (June 1966): 26–27.

33 See Traci Brynne Voyles, Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

34 The USDA mission is documented in detail in Jones, Desert Kingdom, chap. 2; Koch, “Wastelanding Arabia”; Fakry and Twitchell, “Report of the United States Agricultural Mission.”

35 See Natalie Koch, Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia (London New York: Verso, 2022).

36 See Koch, “Wastelanding Arabia.”

37 Koch, 16.

38 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, 20th anniversary edition (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2008); Dianne Suzette Harris, Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America, Architecture, Landscape, and American Culture Series (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

39 Anthony D. King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 15.

40 King, The Bungalow, 1.

41 King, The Bungalow, 8.

42 Alsayer, “Anywhere, U.S.A.”; Alshabib and Ridgway, “Aramco and Al-Malaz Housing Schemes.”

43 Munira Khayyat, Yasmine Khayyat, and Rola Khayyat, “Pieces of Us: The Intimate as Imperial Archive,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 14:3 (November 2018): 282, https://doi.org/10.1215/15525864-7025385.

44 See Paula Weathers, “Those Beautiful Green Lawns,” Al-Ayyam Al-Jamilah (Pleasant Days), Fall 1996.

45 See Diana K. Davis, “Indigenous Knowledge and the Desertification Debate: Problematising Expert Knowledge in North Africa,” Geoforum 36:4 (July 2005): 509–24, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2004.08.003.

46 On this, see also Parker, Making the Desert Modern: Americans, Arabs, and Oil on the Saudi Frontier, 1933-1973 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015).