Saudi Arabia's NEOM project ranks among the largest megaprojects ever conceived. And cancelled, far from ever being realized.
The project to construct a 500-meter tall and 170-kilometer long city of nine million people in a straight line across deserts, mountains, and coastal plains in the westernmost corner of Saudi Arabia was both visionary and ambitious. This City of Tomorrow however was undone by the unrealistic assumptions that its planners adopted to try to keep it alive long after its true costs could no longer be sustained. The following 11-minute video from the WSJ provides a good overview of the unrealistic assumptions that ultimately led to the project's suspension on 16 September 2025.
In the year since, billions of dollars worth of contracts to build the city have been cancelled. Officially, construction on the project has been put on hold until after 2030.
But in truth, the dream of the City of Tomorrow will remain just a dream. An aspiration forever out of reach.
Even so, some parts of the project will go forward to completion. Amazingly, there are worthwhile things that can still be salvaged from NEOM, which is not a total loss. It's those parts that we find interesting because they answer the question of what becomes of a City of Tomorrow after the dream is abandoned.
We've queued the next video to start with what will continue after NEOM's story ends.
These much smaller, yet still significant projects all share one thing in common. They can generate a realistic and positive return on investment, on their own merits, without needing to be an inseparable part of the original, centrally-planned concept to survive.
We find the tale of the aftermath more interesting than the story of NEOM itself because that's how real cities come about. Not as the result of a single grand plan, but as a hodgepodge of varied endeavors by different groups of people who figure out what their City of Tomorrow should be a little at a time, keeping what works and is worthwhile and abandoning what isn't.
NEOM is just the latest case study in a very long history lesson for such discarded megacity projects. If their history tells us anything, it won't be the last.
Previously on Political Calculations
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