Saudi Diaries — Part 7: KAEC — The City That Shouldn't Exist

King Abdullah Economic City, Saudi Arabia
Before visiting the city, it is recommended to pre-register for entry. You can do that online or even at the city gate.

​The gate appeared first.
Modern boots rising from the flat earth — clean lines, steal and stone, the kind of architectural confidence that doesn't ask for your approval. We passed under it, and then: nothing. Empty road. Empty sky. The desert pressing in from both sides, patient and unbothered, as if the gate were simply a mistake someone had built and abandoned.
I looked at Abdulaziz. He kept his eyes on the road and smiled the way you do when you already know the punchline.

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We drove for a little while through that silence, and then — as if someone had lifted a curtain — it appeared. A skyline. Sleek, angular buildings catching the afternoon light, their glass facades throwing the sun back at us in hard, brilliant flashes. A marina. Broad boulevards. Promenades lined with young palms that weren't yet tall enough to give shade. Everything is too neat, too new, too geometric to have grown naturally from anything.

My first thought, half spoken, half just felt: This is not a city. This is a statement.

​The hotel was called The View, and it earned the name. Big, spacious, beautiful in a way that felt almost absurd given where we were — not absurd in the sense of wasteful, but in the sense of unexpected, the way a concert hall in a small town is unexpected, the way ambition always slightly exceeds its immediate surroundings. We dropped our bags and went to stand at the window.
The Red Sea glittered in the distance. Below, the boulevards were wide and quiet.
I thought of Al Balad, where we had wandered just yesterday through Jeddah's old city — those coral towers that had grown over centuries, layer on layer, each generation adding a balcony or a window or a shade screen to the building the last generation left behind. Al Balad had that lived quality, the accumulated weight of human time. It smelled of spice and salt and old wood. It creaked under your feet.
KAEC smelled of fresh concrete and sea air. It did not creak. It had not yet had the chance.

​We walked that evening, Abdulaziz and I, through streets built for thousands that were now almost empty.
Walking those wide, quiet streets, something kept tugging at the back of my mind — a memory or just an idea I couldn't quite place.
And then it clicked: A Hologram for the King. The 2016 Tom Hanks film, based on the Dave Eggers novel, where a washed-up American salesman is sent to pitch a holographic teleconferencing system to the Saudi king — with the whole deal anchored, dramatically and symbolically, to KAEC. The empty city as a metaphor for the empty man. The half-built future as a mirror for a half-dismantled life. I watched it few months ago partly because it was about Saudi, partly because Tom Hanks in another of his drama-comedies. :-)
Here's the thing, though: they never actually filmed here. Not a single scene. The Saudi sequences were shot in Morocco and Egypt — stand-ins for a country that, at the time, wasn't really open to that kind of production. The film conjured KAEC from imagination and other people's deserts.
Standing now on its actual pavements, I understood both why they had done that and exactly what they had missed. The movie got the idea of KAEC right — the eerie quiet, the too-wide roads, the sense of a city waiting for its own future to arrive. But it couldn't capture the texture of actually being here. The specific quality of the light off the glass. The sound the wind makes moving through a city that is real, and built, and simply not yet full. The film needed KAEC to feel like a mirage, a backdrop for a man's existential unease. The reality is more interesting than that. The reality has warmth in it.
It was, I decided, much more fun to be here than to watch Tom Hanks be there somewhere in Egypt pretending to be here.
The roads were wide. Not merely wide — proportioned for a metropolis, the kind of road you design when you are thinking not about today's traffic but tomorrow's. The pavements were immaculate, so clean and unscuffed that I found myself walking carefully, as if I were the first person ever to step on them. The buildings — offices, residential blocks, commercial spaces — were all there, all gleaming, all waiting. Lights on in some windows, dark in others. More dark than not.
It was quiet in a way that had a certain heaviness to it. Not the quiet of emptiness or neglect, but the quiet of anticipation. The wind moved between the buildings and made a soft whistling sound, as if the city were humming to itself, rehearsing for the moment when it would finally be full.
In Europe, cities are built around history. Here, they build history around cities.
I don't know exactly when that thought formed, but it stayed with me as we walked. Jeddah happened over a thousand years — it grew the way all great old cities grow, organically, argumentatively, each era layering itself onto the last. KAEC was drawn on a blank page by engineers, planners, and vision documents. It was, in its way, entirely fictional — an act of imagination so forceful that it had somehow become three-dimensional.
And yet it did not feel arrogant. That surprised me. In another country, a city built from nothing for millions who hadn't arrived yet might feel like overflowing with confidence, like a ruler's vanity project. Here, it felt like something else. It felt like inescapability. Like people deciding, collectively, that the future was not something that happened to you. It was something you built.

​We passed a long waterfront promenade, empty except for a single family — a couple, two small children who were running along the edge of the path while the parents sat on a bench and watched the sea. They had a small picnic spread between them on the concrete. One of the children stopped, looked at us with that frank curiosity that children have, and waved.
We waved back.
There is something about a small human scene set against vast ambition that does something to you. The great empty city, and these four people having their evening — the future in the background, life happening in the foreground, indifferent to the scale of the dream surrounding it. I wanted to take a photograph but couldn't bring myself to intrude. Some things you just let happen.

​For dinner, we asked Google, as one does when the streets give you no clues.
One area on the map looked promising — a block of buildings with residential and commercial addresses clustered together. We drove over, parked, and walked around the perimeter. Nothing. Closed shopfronts. Dark windows. The city's emptiness pressing in again, and I thought: maybe we were eating at the hotel after all.
Then we turned a corner.
A kind of courtyard opened up, tucked behind the outer face of the block like a secret that hadn't been announced. A handful of restaurants and cafés arranged around a small plaza, lights strung above, tables outside. People — actual people — sitting and eating and talking. Music from somewhere. The smell of garlic and something rich and slow-cooked drifted out from an open kitchen.
We'd found an Italian restaurant. In KAEC. In the desert, a hundred-something kilometres from Jeddah.
We sat down, ordered, and the food was genuinely good. Not "good for here" good — just good, full stop, the kind of meal you'd be happy to find anywhere. Around us, the other tables filled gradually: a group of young professionals, another family, a couple of friends. These were the pioneers — the people who had decided to be here before here was ready for them. There is always something quietly extraordinary about that kind of person.
For a moment, sitting there with a plate of pasta and a pizza in the middle of a half-built city in the middle of the Arabian Peninsula, I could see it. The future version of this place. The courtyards full, the promenades alive with evening walkers, the children from that bench having grown up here, telling people this is my city with the easy confidence of someone who has never known it any other way.
KAEC is a city of not yet. And there is something deeply moving about that — a place that dares to exist before its time, that sets the table before the guests have been invited.

You know the food was good (and I was hungry),
when I forget to take pictures before we started eating :-)
​

​Later, we walked to the edge of the city — not far, because the edge came quickly. A few blocks beyond the development, the desert resumed without announcement. Sand crept up to the pavement. Empty fields rolled gently in the middle distance, amber in the last of the day's light. The ancient landscape that had been here for millennia, still here, still patient, waiting out the ambitions of the century the way it had waited out every other.
I stood there for a moment at that border — new concrete on one side, old sand on the other — and felt something I hadn't expected to feel in a place so new. A kind of continuity. Saudi, I was beginning to understand, did not experience its past and its future as opposites. It carried them simultaneously. The desert was not something to be conquered, escaped, or paved over. It was simply there, the permanent background against which everything temporary unfolded. And the cities — even the ones created from a blank page — were built on it, not against it.
The wind came off the desert and pressed the heat against me. The glass towers behind me caught the last light. Neither one acknowledged the other.

​We ended up on the waterfront, Abdulaziz and I, sitting on a low wall and watching the sea go dark. The Red Sea at dusk is a particular kind of quiet — the water losing its colour slowly, the horizon blurring, the first lights of the city coming on behind you.
"I'm coming back," I said. Not as a plan, exactly. More as a realisation arriving out loud.
Abdulaziz looked at me.
"Not just to Saudi," I said. "Also here." I gestured vaguely at the city behind us, the half-built skyline, the empty promenades. "I want to come back in ten years. I want to see if I recognise the streets."
He smiled — not surprised, but pleased in a quiet way, the way people are pleased when someone else sees what they see.

The buildings, I thought, were impressive. Of course they were. Glass and steel and vision and money and sheer, stubborn will — you can't help but be impressed. But impressive was not what made KAEC remarkable. What made it remarkable was the belief. The belief that something better was possible. The belief that you did not have to wait for the world to hand you a city — that you could decide, with enough conviction and enough patience, to build one.
That belief is contagious, it turns out.
I was already catching it.