Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has announced yet another plan for a massive structure in Saudi Arabia in the Saudi capital Riyadh. The structure called the Mukaab, and which resembles the holy kaaba in Mecca, will be the center of The New Murabba, a neighborhood being built to entice tourists to a new kind of commercial Mecca. And because, as Saudi’s on Reddit are saying, mall culture is one of the only things to do in a hot and dry city.
Big enough to fit 20 Empire State buildings inside, consider the Mukaab a shape-shifting fantasy block where you enter realms of the multiverse, without the goggles.
This oil-funded plan does include green spaces as the renderings suggest and Saudi Arabia has been undergoing plans to plant 1 million mangrove trees. But instead of a multiverse, why not make your city center one of nature and trees like in Paris or New York City? Trees act as a carbon sink and can lower local temps by 5 to 10 degrees sometimes.
According to press material the Mukaab will serve as the focal point in the city’s new downtown, called the New Murabba and in total the land area will be about a third of the size of Manhattan, at seven square miles. The cube will “have it all” namely tourist attractions and smart hotels with 100,000 residential units and 1.4 million square metres of office space.
Below are some simulated images of how the Mukaab will look to visitors:
Like The Line on the Red Sea, the Mukaab promises that everything you need will be a 15-minute walk and just a 20-minute drive the airport. That part we like. But in experimental cities, even on small scale and in a more open-minded society like around Abu Dhabi, their $22 billion zero-energy city experiment known as Masdar failed.
Maybe the starchitects the Saudis have hired know something I don’t but the only way I can see humanity surviving the next 100 years is by getting out in nature, real nature, not a hologram of nature, and by getting away from building monoliths to smaller family-own farms and land. Support agri-tourism, boutique hotels run by locals. Like the Berber hotel I stayed at in Morocco. Owned by a British fellow, run by locals.
Maybe this is too much for the Saudis who in just a few decades have been so removed from their simpler ways of life thanks to oil wealth.
Can the Saudis help the world make a breakthrough on harnessing energy from nature (free energy for all! Instead we hear of human rights violations at places like Neom on the Red Sea.
Meanwhile, the Middle East Monitor has collected some interested quotes from Saudis and what they think of the new Riyadh. Some are against the similarity of the project to the Kaaba in Mecca, and others say that cubes are just common building shapes in Saudi Arabia – so don’t get excited.
As Saudi Arabia is fairly unaccessible to foreign journalists, we won’t know until the Saudi Prince invites us for a visit.
