The cultivation of small plots, often no bigger than one hectare, typical of the Oasis, is traditionally organised across three levels: under the protection of the date palm tree grow olive and fruit trees and, at ground level, seasonal crops, cereals and forage. The so called “garden” of the Oasis, is a productive unit which has preserved a variety of autochthonous plants and provided, offering a rich and varied diet, a livelihood for entire communities. The abandonment of these agricultural practices, in recent decades, is due to both technical reasons, such as lack of water or the deterioration of hydric infrastructure, and socio-economic reasons, such as the rural exodus. The direct consequence is the progressive reduction of agricultural land, with the disappearance of many plant and animal species, but also the impoverishment of people’s diet. This is about small communities with a prevalence of elderly, women and children, whose income is now largely based on remittances.

In the Oasis, the loss of the scenic and environmental quality of landscape, of its original beauty, shaped by an age-old alliance with nature, is also caused by the mass exodus of residents towards new neighbourhoods, often to the side of the traditional villages. The relocation is largely a result of government policies that have made new areas attractive by providing them with some services. To this we can add a change of cultural models: the new houses, despite being modest concrete agglomerates, are perceived as more desirable and prestigious than the traditional ones, which come to signify backwardness and poverty. In such way, local customs and the material culture of the past are disqualified and lose dignity. Similarly, the ancient extended family structure, accustomed to occupy one single large building, loses ground in favour of mononuclear family units. Most of the time only the last generation of elders keeps living in the old village, in the ancient house now close to falling into pieces. It so happens that the ancient rammed earth edifices with their compact structures, perfectly suited to the desert climate, progressively disappear. Inside, the passive cooling and heat insulation were always ensured, but nobody is there anymore to perform the annual maintenance. Entire structures begin to crumble and drag others down with them. In a domino effect, what is left of a millennial architectural heritage turns to dust.

The Saharan and Arabian Oases appear within many different political boundaries and are subject to different laws and regulations. When it comes to the protection of their architectural heritage, however, one can make some general considerations. Regarding the abandonment of the ancient villages, as an example. This phenomenon has often been driven by state planning policies, that have provided schools and some services in newly constructed neighbourhoods. These have become centres holding attraction, despite the lack of sites enabling the inhabitants to gather, their aesthetic shortcomings, and the energetic inefficiency of the buildings. People are driven away from the places where the architecture mirrors the community’s social organization. The small nuclear family, enclosed within a single housing unit, is proposed as the reference model. The new structure of the urban space reduces in fact, not only symbolically, the power of traditional authorities who had designated places in the village to carry out the residual government functions. Generally speaking, the absence of State policies aimed at rescuing the architectural heritage in the Oases, is to be seen, with a few exceptions such as Oman. For those who want to intervene preventing the destruction of entire settlements, problems often start since the beginning. In the villages, to a large extent abandoned, buildings or neglected areas, are not listed on the national land registry. That is how, crumbling neighbourhoods can totally disappear, opening unclaimed gaps in the ancient urban fabric. As a consequence, much of the work carried out by international research centres such as Archiam while operating in Oman, is prior to restauration. It concerns in fact the acquisition of a documentation which is provided by a complete urban and architectural survey and the recovery of information about the ownerships, including interviews with the last inhabitants as a tool of investigation.