Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced last week that the country is going to spend billions of dollars constructing a planned commercial downtown in Riyadh by 2030. It’s an effort to diversify an economy that has long been dependent on oil.
Called New Murabba, the plan was launched alongside a website and videos promising wildly ambitious sci-fi concepts. The centerpiece of New Murabba will be the Mukaab, a gigantic cube big enough to fit 20 Empire State Buildings that will feature fantastical vistas, an asymmetrical tower of stacked dunes and what appear to be larger-than-life holograms, all in an effort to bring “hospitality, retail and leisure” to the city.
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The country would build the almost 12-square mile development into the southwest of Riyadh, transforming its skyline. The feature attraction would be a giant cube in whose center lies a spiraling building and whose interior walls will be floor to ceiling video screens used for fantastical projections, making it potentially the world’s largest Xbox.
The government looks to be building out these plans in time to host the World Expo in 2030, for which it is a candidate, along with South Korea, Ukraine and Italy.
Bin Salman has been trying to remake the country’s economy in a bid to bring in outside industry. It has led him to loosen some rules in the country while also violently cracking down on dissent, including the brutal 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Kashoggi, which the U.S. intelligence determined Bin Salman had carried out.
Diversifying the country’s economy so that it is not reliant on oil seems like a pretty common sense idea, given that the world is slowly transitioning to renewables. But investing this much into what is essentially tourism seems suspiciously short-sighted, given how much damage tourism-based economies took during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
New Murabba is also not Saudi Arabia’s first sci-fi megaproject. The Line, a megacity in the desert that is designed to be in the shape of, well, a straight line, has been previewed for years. In October of last year, drone footage appeared to show The Line under development.
