A new city in Saudi Arabia

Nicolai Ouroussoff writes from Jidda, Saudi Arabia: "Just off a desert road about an hour's drive from this port city, an enormous arched gate capped by three domes rises out of the sand like the set for a 1920s silent film fantasy. It is, instead, a fantasy of contemporary urban planning, the site of what one day will be King Abdullah Economic City, a 65-square-mile development at the edge of the Red Sea."

"The city is one of four being laid out on empty desert around this country, all scheduled for completion by 2030. They follow on the heels of the country's first coeducational university, which opened last year next to the King Abdullah site, and a financial district nearly the size of Lower Manhattan that is rising on the outskirts of the capital, Riyadh."

A computer rendering of the King Abdullah Financial District on the outskirts of Riyadh.

Mr. Ouroussoff writes: "With a projected population of two million, the city is a Middle Eastern version of the 'special economic zones' that have flourished in places like China."

"Architecturally they couldn't be more dreary and conventional — bloated glass towers encircled by quaint town houses and suburban villas decorated in ersatz historical styles. Their gargantuan scale and tabula rasa approach conjure old-style Modernist planning efforts like the creation of Brasília in the 1950s or the colossal Soviet urban experiments of the 1930s, but these are driven by anxiety over the future, not utopian idealism."

"The idea is to create islands from which change would seep out, drop by drop, without antagonizing powerful conservative forces within the country."

"If the plan works, at best it would transform Saudi Arabia into a technologically advanced society controlled by a slightly more tolerant religious autocracy. Or it could provoke militant violence and government crackdowns."

A Baskin-Robbins at King Abdullah Economic City.

"Several people here expressed outrage that the government was pouring billions of dollars into the creation of entire new cities while large areas of existing ones had deteriorated into slums."

"Jidda, for example, already has a port in desperate need of upgrading. Its historic center is a medieval slum inhabited by foreign laborers. The city has no sewer system, only septic tanks that regularly spill into the streets. And people who live there will have to continue living by the old rules."

"If the government's vision fails — if it cannot manage the forces of liberalism within its planned developments — it could set off more intense clashes with militant forces that could ripple across the Middle East and the West."