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The Saudi project will likely not live up to expectations. Saud youth have really low levels of higher education for such a rich subsidised country. You will need hundreds of thousands, if not low millions of people to populate NEOM to make any kind of return from it. Your not going to get hundreds of thousands of westerners moving there which it seems is what they are trying to aim for with their liberal laws for NEOM.
Suadi Arabia is a rich country, but 500 billion dollars is a lot for any country to spend. It would need a GDP growth of a sizeable developing country to make that sustainable by 2025. Apparently it's going to be 33 times the size of New York. They don't have the pool of workers from their own country to populate it as i said due to the poor education of their youth and your not going to get millions of people from around the world with the right qualifications to immigrate either.

It kind of reminds me of the Soviet created city of Magadan. It was built by the soviets to house 1 million people. They designed the city and all the networks to sustain such a population. It was going well during the Soviet era, especially with all the resources in the Far East providing jobs and attracting workers. Then the SU collapsed, and with the rest of Russia there was huge population declines. Despite Putin's best efforts to draw people to the region the population is still dropping. Because of the way the city was designed entire neighbourhoods are connected to the grids even if they are empty. It ultimately becomes more costly to run the city the smaller the population gets, becoming a drain on the country rather than a contribution.
If the Saudi's plan a city this big and fail to even get a fraction of it up and running, then I would worry about the running costs for such a grand city.

Instead the Saudis should just create an autonomous technology park. Sizeable enough to draw local companies and encourage foreign companies to invest. Expanding the boundaries in the future along natural growth rates.

It will be interesting to watch it develop. It is a good thing to invest locally in the region and all the countries around it will benefit from this venture.
 
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Its not the first city they tried to create: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Abdullah_Economic_City

This one failed too so far. I get that they are trying to create a non-oil economy and I see they have understood that with the current repressive system they wont get far. So instead of changing they want to build cities that are out of the repressive religious juristiction, but good luck getting people to live and open companies there.
 
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Planned Saudi city called "Neom": 26.500 km²

Istanbul Province: 5.343 km²

Istanbul GDP: ~ 300 billion USD

Quality matters.

There is something going on in Saudi Arabia. $ Multi Billion arm contract with U.S. Drive license for women. Some civil reforms and now the mega city.
 
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Its not the first city they tried to create: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Abdullah_Economic_City

This one failed too so far. I get that they are trying to create a non-oil economy and I see they have understood that with the current repressive system they wont get far. So instead of changing they want to build cities that are out of the repressive religious juristiction, but good luck getting people to live and open companies there.
What makes you say that it failed? Isn't the construction still ongoing?
 
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Yes ! He was missing the port that is vital - lung of the city -, finally it is operational.

afaik there were supposed to live tens of thousands people there already. But perhaps you can share some new information, thats what I gathered from an article from Bloomberg about the new city.
 
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afaik there were supposed to live tens of thousands people there already. But perhaps you can share some new information, thats what I gathered from an article from Bloomberg about the new city.

It reminds me of our domestic ''mega'' projects, all talk & fancy new buildings but quality inside = often missing. Not the first mega city to be announced in the area.
 
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