26 October 2017
Xanadu in Canada and Saudi Arabia
Stately pleasure domes decreed by Google and Prince Mohammed.
By Neil Tidmarsh
Last week President Sisi of Egypt donned the mantle of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan and announced plans to build his country a new capital city – “a miracle of rare device” no doubt – in the middle of the desert. As if that wasn’t amazing enough, another two modern-day Kubla Khans stood up this week and announced plans for the creation of even more stately pleasure domes – one in Canada and one in Saudi Arabia.
The technocrats behind Google have always wanted a city of their own, to see how their inventions could build and run and develop a whole urban environment. The idea may well make you want to “close your eyes with holy dread” and shout “Beware! Beware!” (in the words of Coleridge) but it’s happening – or about to happen. Google’s urban development company Sidewalk Labs signed a deal this week with the Canadian government and Toronto’s municipal authorities to re-build and run a whole district on the shores of Lake Ontario.
Toronto’s eastern waterfront is a more or less abandoned post-industrial wasteland cut off from the city by poor urban planning; hardly ‘twice five miles of fertile ground’, but Sidewalk Labs is planning to ‘girdle it round’ and transform it into a twenty-first century Xanadu. Its streets will be full of pedestrians and cyclists but no private cars; driverless buses will stop at every corner. There will be driverless ferries and floating parks and theatres on the lake. Automated systems will protect residents from the weather by melting snow drifts and opening shelters from the rain. Adaptable buildings will be designed to accommodate different kinds of use, from family dwellings to hi-tech offices. It will be the ultimate testing-ground for the “internet of things”.
But even these ambitious plans were upstaged this week by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. At an economic conference in Riyadh, he announced plans for a brand new mega-city to be built in virgin desert along his country’s northwest coast. It will be called Neom, cost $500 billion, cover 26,500 square kilometres, be powered entirely by wind and solar energy, and make full use of driverless cars, drones and other robotics.
But the most amazing and exciting thing about the whole project is that it promises to be not just a scientific and engineering breakthrough but a social and political one as well. Neom will be governed by different rules and regulations from the rest of the country. It will have an autonomous judicial system and its own tax and labour laws. Reading between the lines, one can believe that Prince Mohammed hopes that it will be a city where there is no place for religious extremism, where men and women can share space and equality and where the pleasures of music, singing, dancing, theatre and cinema aren’t forbidden.
The new city of Neom was only one of several momentous announcements which the crown prince made at that Future Investment Initiative conference (already nicknamed “Davos in the Desert”). He pledged to “end extremism soon” in his country, which will become a place of “moderate Islam that is open to the world and all religions”. He was behind last month’s decision to lift the ban on women driving, and is preparing the government to lift male guardianship over women. “We want to live a normal life” he said. “We want to co-exist and live with the world and contribute to the development of our country and our world”. He also announced more measures to transform and diversify Saudi’s economy away from its dependence on oil, including confirmation of the $2 trillion flotation of part of the state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco, and the investment of $20 billion by Saudi’s Public Investment Fund in new infrastructure.
The slow but careful social and economic reforms which the crown prince has been advancing since his appointment last year are picking up speed and pace. They are all part of his Vision 2030, his recognition of the problems facing his country (economic dependence on oil, the fall in the value of oil and the rise of alternative energy sources, international disapproval of its human rights record, the alienation of women from public life and the work-place, social repression, religious extremism) and his radical proposal of the necessary solutions. But he is performing a difficult and dangerous balancing act. (See Once There Was A King, Shaw Sheet, 26 May 2016.) Saudi’s conservative society is not wholly behind such reforms, and the clerical elite (upon whom the royal family has depended for its authority and whose Wahhabist sect has defined state ideology) is almost certainly opposed to them.
If Google’s new city beside Lake Ontario is to be a testing-ground and launch-pad for the technology of the internet, Prince Mohammed’s new city in the desert is to be a testing-ground and launch-pad for something even more exciting and valuable – liberal, secular, democratic reform in the Middle East.
Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan (“a vision in a dream”) during a drug-induced reverie (“For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise”). The poem remained unfinished; his vision of Xanadu collapsed when “a person from Porlock” came knocking at his door and woke him out of his opium daze. Let’s hope that no Gulf ‘person from Porlock’ manages to disrupt Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030. His Xanadu deserves to be built.
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