Saudi Arabia has announced plans to build an eight-sided city that will float on the Red Sea.
The proposed construction, called Oxagon, is set to be placed on the edge of the country’s newest region in the northwest – Neom.
Neom, the flagship project of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is a planned $500 billion city-state that would cover 10,000 square miles of Saudi Arabia’s Tabuk province, near its borders with Jordan and Egypt.
Neom is a combination of the Greek word neos, or ‘new,’ and mustaqbal, Arabic for ‘future.’
The proposed construction (pictured), called Oxagon, is set to be placed on the edge of the country’s newest region in the northwest – Neom
Neom, the flagship project of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is a planned $500 billion city-state that would cover 10,000 square miles of Saudi Arabia’s Tabuk province, near its borders with Jordan and Egypt
It’s part of an ambitious plan to wean Saudi Arabia off oil dependency and transform the country into a tech hub like Silicon Valley, while also incorporating towns, research centers, education zones, and tourist attractions.
But constructors are yet to reveal how much the project will cost or how Oxagon will float.
Plans for Neom show it will be 33 times the size of New York City and will have a ‘smart’ city at its centre, also called Neom.
Neom posted a video to Twitter last Tuesday claiming Oxagon will be ‘home to the world’s first fully automated port and integrated logistics hub.’
Neom posted a video to Twitter last Tuesday claiming Oxagon will be ‘home to the world’s first fully automated port and integrated logistics hub’
The project is being funded by the country’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, which the Crown Prince is the chairman for.
‘Neom is an accelerator of human progress and a vision of what a new future might look like,’ according to a release from January.
‘It will be a destination and a home for people who dream big and want to be part of building a new model for exceptional livability, creating thriving businesses, and reinventing environmental conservation.’
Plans include flying drone taxis, a Jurassic Park–style amusement park with robotic dinosaurs, and the highest density of Michelin-starred restaurants in the world, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The region’s stark landscape would be transformed by cloud-seeding machines, the world’s largest coral garden, glow-in-the-dark sand, and a giant artificial moon that lights up nightly.
‘Today if you go to Neom you will see construction all over, you will see earthworks going on all over, you will see regions that are being developed,’ Al-Nasr told Bloomberg.
He added that 1,500 Neom employees are already working and living on site.
Plans for Neom, a $500 billion, 10,000 square mile high-tech development, reportedly include flying drone taxis, a Jurassic Park–style amusement park, and a giant artificial moon that lights up nightly.
Neom will rely on wind farms, solar power, and cutting-edge technology that transforms water into oxygen and hydrogen for fuel
Touted as the planet’s largest carbon-free system, the 16-borough metropolis would rely on wind farms, solar power, and cutting-edge technology that transforms water into oxygen and hydrogen for fuel.
But Neom’s developers faced some obstacles in the beginning, Al-Nasr told Bloomberg, as engineers tried to design a city around tech that don’t exist yet.
Construction was originally reported to start in the first quarter of 2021.
Now that it’s finally underway, the next step for Neom is to get the city-state declared a ‘free zone’ with different laws than the rest of Saudi Arabia.
According to Al-Nasr, that may be accomplished as early as the first few months of 2022.