It will be a narrow urban strip 106 miles long with no roads, no cars and no pollution.
Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, has announced one of the greatest and most complex construction projects in history, which involves transforming a desert the size of Belgium into a high-tech city-region called Neom.
Here are 5 points on the futuristic city being planned by MBS:
- The Saudi Crown Prince is showcasing Neom as a city that would overhaul Saudi Arabia's economy and serve as a testbed for technology that could revolutionise daily living, with a $500 billion budget.
- There are many intriguing features, which make the city stand apart from anything that has been built till now. According to Bloomberg, the Neom "style catalogue" features flying elevators, an urban spaceport, and structures styled like a double helix, a falcon's spread wings, and a flower in blossom.
- It will be a narrow urban strip 106 miles long with no roads, no cars and no pollution. MBS calls it a "civilizational revolution", which will one day be home to one million people "from all over the world".
- The Crown Prince's vision is straining the employees involved in planning the city. According To Wall Street Journal (WSJ), MBS has ordered them to construct 10 palaces, each bigger than a football field. The outlet reviewed the project's plan, which showed that the houses could list at up to $400 million each.
- The futuristic megacity is touted to be 33 times the size of New York, with an area of 26,500 km square extending along the Aqaba Gulf and Saudi Arabia's Red Sea coastline. The name Neom is a combination of Greek term Neo and Arabic word for "future".
