Saudi Arabia’s NEOM Futuristic City Looks Like an Impending Disaster

The futuristic city of NEOM was supposed to be the crown jewel of Saudi Arabia’s turn toward a more advanced and diverse economy, but eight years into the project, the Financial Times revealed, cost overruns and engineering failures are piling up.

The Financial Times (FT) all but pronounced last rites over NEOM, calling it a “dream unraveled” in a lengthy article last week that made it clear almost everything has gone wrong – from the rude discovery that hanging a 30-story building from a titanic arch was a lot harder than concept designers thought it would be, to the biggest rookie mistake of architects since time immemorial: forgetting that poop flows downhill. The executive director of the project decided to build a network of hundreds of shuttle cars to handle the pu