Saudi Arabia’s Dystopian Futuristic City Project Is Crashing and Burning

It appears that Neom—Saudi Arabia’s hugely expensive, architecturally bizarre urban development project—is floundering and close to collapse. A new report from the Financial Times cites high-level sources within the project to paint a picture of dysfunction and failure at the heart of the quixotic effort.

Neom was envisioned as a vast series of fantastical urban developments spread across the coast of the Red Sea. At the center of the project is The Line—a proposed 105-mile-long city which developers had initially projected could house as many as 9 million people by the year 2030. The Line is defined by bizarre architectural flourishes that, as the story notes, have seemed impossible even to the execs tasked with making them a reality. One such addition is an upside-down building, dubbed “the chandelier,” that is supposed to hang over a “gateway” marina to the city:

As architects worked through the plans, the chandelier began to seem implausible. One recalled warning Tarek Qaddumi, The Line’s executive director, of the difficulty of suspending a 30-storey building upside down from a bridge hundreds of metres in the air. “You do realise the earth is spinning? And that tall towers sway?” he said. The chandelier, the architect explained, could “start to move like a pendulum”, then “pick up speed”, and eventually “break off”, crashing into the marina below.

Yes, that doesn’t sound great. Now, according to those sources the FT talked to, the project is looking more and more like a hugely expensive pipe dream that will never come to pass:

Today, with at least $50bn spent, the desert is pock-marked with piling, and deep trenches stretch across the landscape. But Prince Mohammed, who chairs Neom, has dramatically scaled back the first phase of the plans. Neom told the FT that The Line remained “a strategic priority” that would ultimately “provide a new blueprint for humanity by changing the way people live”. But they described it as a “multi-generational development of unprecedented scale and complexity”.

The outlet interviewed workers on the project who seem to feel that it’s only a matter of time before the project is declared DOA:

While Neom employees say that much of The Line might still be technically buildable, they are not convinced anyone is ready to pay for it. Construction work across Neom has slowed, with the desert ski resort Trojena, the intended venue for the 2029 Asian Winter Games, one of the few sites still moving ahead at pace…one former employee has said that everyone knows the project won’t work; it is now just a matter of letting MBS down gently.

Chief among the project’s problems is the fact that, as Neom’s bizarre developments have failed to materialize, it has become increasingly difficult to encourage investors to put up money for the absurdly expensive project. FT notes:

Senior executives were constantly asking for more money, but The Line was competing with other Neom projects. Some wealthy Saudi families put modest sums into the project, but the large investments Riyadh hoped to lure from foreign backers never materialised.

The lack of adequate funding coming in has led a senior construction manager to tell FT that he feels the Line will never be built.

The damage to the Saudis’ brand here could be quite bad. One of America’s closest regional allies in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia has long suffered from a public reputation that is… not great. Despite America’s supposed ideals of liberal democracy (ideals it says it wants all of its allies to share), the Saudis are still a theocratic monarchy that beheads people and, until a few years ago, wouldn’t even let women drive. The Kingdom’s ambitions for Neom were obviously about proving that it could, if not update its Old World approach to governance and human rights, update its PR, and thus present itself as a technocratic hub where the industries that the West has heavily invested in (AI, renewable energy, electric vehicles) could thrive.

Unfortunately, instead of a metaphor for renovation and adaptation, Neom is becoming a metaphor for the Kingdom’s failure to modernize—its inability to throw off the shackles of the past, and its delusion (which appears to be quickly dissipating) that it might somehow transform itself into a paragon of the future. At the same time, said floundering metaphor is being held aloft by thousands upon thousands of precarious workers, many of whom, according to a report from Human Rights Watch, have died for the project. There’s just something about a hubristic mega-project being built in the desert with the blood of countless laborers that doesn’t exactly speak of modernism.

The Kingdom’s other strategy—which, so far, seems to be much more successful than its urban development efforts—has been to make itself indispensable to the AI frenzy currently sweeping the globe. The Saudis have invested heavily in data centers and have been striking deals to act as an infrastructure provider to the ongoing computing boom happening in the West. That’s probably a surer bet (at least until the bubble pops) than a multi-trillion-dollar tourist hub.