Field of Dreams Urbanism: Why Neom's Failure Was Structural, Not Just Financial
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Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 drew an implicit lesson from Singapore's economic transformation — that a state can build its way into a post-resource future through sufficiently audacious infrastructure. The lesson, development economists argue, was the wrong one. Singapore's transformation was built on institutions, rule of law, education policy, and strategic trade positioning; the buildings and airports followed the economic logic. Neom inverted the sequence, assuming that economic activity would follow spectacular construction rather than precede it.
This model — sometimes called 'field of dreams urbanism' — has a poor track record precisely because economic clusters form around existing comparative advantages: talent pools, research institutions, regulatory environments, market access. Those assets can be attracted to a new location over time, but they cannot be constructed out of poured concrete, however spectacular the architecture. The number of organizations that have successfully delivered a complex megaproject on time and within reasonable budget variance is small; the number that have done so while building a functional city from scratch in a desert, without a pre-existing population or economic base, is essentially zero in the modern era.
The political stakes for MBS are considerable. Neom has been identified with him personally in ways that leave no comfortable off-ramp if the project's original vision is quietly abandoned. One adaptive strategy available to Riyadh is to accelerate other, more achievable Vision 2030 components — entertainment sector deregulation, domestic tourism to sites like AlUla, sports investment — as proof points for transformation that do not require Neom to succeed on its original terms. That is strategically sound but symbolically deflating, since Neom was explicitly framed as the proof that Saudi Arabia could do what no country had done before.
The capital question remains open: what happens to the funds committed to a project that has stopped? Redeployment to smaller domestic projects, absorption into the PIF's international portfolio, or partial write-down are all plausible outcomes. The silence from Saudi official channels suggests the answer has not yet been decided — or that it has been decided but not yet framed in language the government is prepared to say aloud.