Literary scholars have yet to explore the significance of architecture and real estate in twenty-first century Arab detective novels. An investigation into how Arab authors engage with the themes of urban crime, political-economic corruption, social inequity, and real estate investment could reveal more about a new trend in Arab fiction where authors write about real estate and the politics of space. In this presentation, I analyze Raja Alem’s The Dove’s Necklace (Tawq al-Hamam 2010), a detective novel that explores the moral landscape of commercialization and gentrification in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. I argue that the novel interrogates the relationship between selfhood and the built environment by staging the tension between an individualist and elitist real estate market and a collectivist desire to preserve the historical built environment where socio-economic heterogeneity can exist. One way Alem stages this tension is by using corporeality--corpses and bodily decay--to signify the death of historical, communal space and the birth of commercial space for the elite. Alem navigates epistemological boundaries to answer the question How does the social--social ideologies like individualism, elitism, and collectivism--get mapped, built, or unbuilt by the built environment? The built environment’s mapping of the social is accompanied by the novel’s narrative techniques, which also map the social through polyphonic narration and multi-textuality. Alem’s polyphonic and multi-textual novel departs from the individualism of the traditional detective novel--where the singular detective takes responsibility for solving a single case--in favor of a collectivism in which multiple characters aim to solve a variety of cases. This polyphony and multi-textuality ultimately challenges the reader’s ability to imagine the social when the social has been mapped onto a built environment made by and for the individualist elite. My findings suggest literary scholarship on the Arab detective novel would benefit from a closer look at the relationship between narrative form and spatial politics, especially given the detective genre’s investment in mapping social ideologies. Throughout my study, I employ postcolonial critique to understand how this narrative about state collusion in real estate schemes echoes larger narratives about imperial state control. Finally, I briefly suggest how my analysis of Alem’s novel applies to other Arab detective novels, such as Ahmed Naji’s Using Life (Istikhdam al-haya 2014).