Saudi Arabia's ambitious Neom megaproject, once heralded as a revolutionary urban development, is struggling to deliver on its grand promises eight years after its announcement. Despite reportedly spending $50 billion across the region's 10 massive developments, the project has little to show for its investment, with reports suggesting funding has dried up and officials acknowledging the need to "reprioritize" amid mounting deficits.
The centerpiece of Neom, the proposed 170-kilometer-long linear city called The Line, remains little more than a scratch across the desert landscape. Originally planned to house over one million people by 2030, projections have been drastically scaled back to 300,000 residents, though even this reduced target appears overly optimistic. Austrian architect Wolf Prix's prediction that a stunted version of The Line will become merely a high-end hotel is increasingly looking like reality.
Other key components of the Neom vision are facing similar setbacks and delays. The Trojena ski resort in the mountains, originally scheduled for completion by 2026, has encountered significant construction complications. The Olympic organization has expressed doubts about whether the development will be ready by 2029 to host the Asian Winter Games—three full years past the original deadline. A Saudi official recently acknowledged that the project "will be three or four years late."
The luxury island destination of Sindalah represents the one Neom project that initially appeared to achieve some success, opening earlier this year with a celebrity-studded launch party attended by Tom Brady, Will Smith, and Alicia Keys. However, the resort lacks the ambitious innovation of Neom's headline-grabbing schemes, consisting merely of high-end hotels and villas surrounding yachting marinas. Despite its official opening, reports from the Wall Street Journal indicate that the luxury resort has actually closed, though the reasons remain unclear, potentially highlighting another challenge facing Neom: a lack of demand for what is being built.
The project's troubles deepened with the removal of Neom's chief executive Nadhmi al-Nasr, who had led the initiative since 2018, amid reports of worker fatalities and human rights abuses. Following this leadership shake-up, a complete review has been ordered to assess the feasibility of The Line and other key projects. This review is expected to result in widespread staff redundancies and relocations, signaling a significant scaling back of the original vision.
While Neom struggles with its futuristic ambitions, it has found success in creating much more conventional infrastructure. Across the desert, numerous worker camps have emerged to house the 140,000 people employed on the project, with many more under construction. These settlements, visible in satellite photography, function as isolated small towns located hundreds of miles from any existing urban centers, surrounded by fences and accessed through guard houses.
Within these secured perimeters, the town designs follow what can best be described as basic suburban planning principles. Each camp employs a standard organizational formula, featuring blocks of seemingly identical housing units arranged around clusters of central communal facilities. Photos uploaded to Google Maps reveal sparse, shared rooms equipped with multiple bunk beds where the vast workforce assembled to build Neom's promised marvels currently live.
The centers of these purpose-built, semi-permanent communities feature canteens, shops, and administrative buildings. Images from inside the dining facilities, which resemble budget all-inclusive resorts, provide insight into the daily lives of the thousands-strong workforce. The settlements also include various recreational amenities, with each housing district served by swimming pools, gymnasiums, tennis courts, and cricket pitches. However, complete with sterile versions of American chains like Starbucks and Dunkin', these developments represent what appears to be the most uninspiring version of suburbia transplanted to the desert.
These worker settlements stand in stark contrast to the "civilizational revolution" promised by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who directly backs the project through Saudi Arabia's $925 billion Public Investment Fund. Instead of delivering radical new urbanism, Neom has primarily produced sterile desert suburbia that falls far short of its revolutionary aspirations. The repetitive, uninspiring housing blocks highlight the disconnect between the project's sci-fi promotional materials and the mundane reality of its actual construction.
Eight years after its initial announcement, Neom has yet to deliver anything truly innovative or radical. With the project's fate now under serious review and its future uncertain, these bland desert towns may end up representing the entire legacy of what was once billed as a transformative urban experiment. This outcome underscores the fundamental flaws in many future-focused megaprojects that often ignore the actual needs of the people they claim to serve.
Critics argue that rather than pursuing unrealistic urbanistic solutions for Saudi Arabia's growing population, the country should prioritize improving and enhancing the existing infrastructure of its established cities, where actual demand and need exist. With the massive resources Saudi Arabia has invested in Neom, the kingdom could have transformed Riyadh into one of the world's most livable cities. Instead, the project has created what amounts to a massive financial sinkhole alongside some of the most uninspiring urban development imaginable, raising serious questions about the direction of contemporary architecture and urban planning.
