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.
That, and the fact that the Saudis gave lip service to Palestinian rights, while cutting deals with Israel on the DL for decades (and now continuing to do so in the open). The Islamic Republic is full of shit in lots of ways, but they’re definitely in opposition to Western interference in the region, and to states taht collaborate with the west in that interference.