Saudi Arabia is building a new megacity, called Neom, that will be 17 times the size of London, the capital of the United Kingdom. This site of the city is in the country’s north-western Tabuk province along the Gulf of Aqaba, along the Red Sea coast near the Suez Canal and spans Jordan and Egypt as well. During the October 2017 Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh, Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman (popularly known a s MBS) had announced the plan for building Neom.
The private city will be built along the Gulf of Aqaba, along the Red Sea coast and has been envisioned as a business as well as industrial zone. The city is said to be 17 times the size of London and 33 times the size of New York and will involve an investment of USD 500 billion. As per a report by Egypt Today, “Egypt would allocate more than 1,000 square kilometres of land to the project in the South Sinai governorate.” It is wholly owned by the country’s sovereign fund, the Public Investment Fund and is proposed to be fully powered by renewable sources of energy.
The city is part of the “Saudi Vision 2030” as per which the country will seek to diversify its economy, increase domestic and foreign private investments in the country and hence reduce its dependency on crude exports. In 2019, Crude exports accounted for the top export product from the country at USD 145 billion.
Neom will be a politically autonomous city, with its own legal system with judicial process set per international standards to attract foreign investors to invest and even settle there. As per sources cited by The Sun, the first buildings to be commissioned for development are the palaces of the King, the Crown Prince and other officials. This palace complex will also feature a personal marina, helipads as well as well as luxury golf course, the report further notes.
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The city will host a set of industries such as biotechnology, food processing, advanced manufacturing (such as semiconductors), entertainment and services sector. Crown Prince MBS cited the country’s demographic dividend and said that the youth of the country have no interest in espousing extremist ideologies.
The project however has faced several controversies. The city involved displacement of the local Huwaitat tribe who have been resisting their displacement. As per a report in The Guardian, over 20000 Huwaitat tribe people face eviction with uncertainty over their rehabilitation. “The death of Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti (tribal activist) on 13 April highlighted the tension between the tribe and the kingdom’s development plans,” the report further notes. International human rights activists have presented another reason to boycott the project, assassination of Washington Post Journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In 2019, an investigation by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights held the state of Saudi Arabia responsible.
