Part II examines Riyadh through the intertwined lenses of representation and urban history, arguing that the city’s contemporary condition can only be understood by connecting how it has been seen with how it has evolved. Chapter 4 foregrounds photography as a critical mode of urban inquiry, challenging persistent stereotypes that depict Riyadh as closed, abstract, or dominated by spectacle. Moving from early Orientalist and foreign documentary images to the work of contemporary Saudi photographers, the chapter highlights everyday scenes—streets, parks, walking paths, informal markets, and migrant spaces—to reveal a city animated by human presence, appropriation, and encounter. These visual narratives restore agency to residents and expose forms of urban life often absent from official representations. Chapter 5 situates these lived scenes within a longer historical trajectory, tracing Riyadh’s transformation from a mud-walled settlement to a sprawling, car-oriented metropolis shaped by modernist planning, oil-driven expansion, and successive master plans. Rather than invoking nostalgia, the chapter emphasizes continuity, adaptation, and change, positioning the humanization initiative as a corrective response to decades of suburbanization and spatial fragmentation .