Saudi Arabia is giving itself an extreme makeover with 'giga-projects.' Will it work?
JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia — Crowned with cranes, the Jeddah Tower emerges in the distance as an under-construction 826-foot-tall spaceship presiding over Saudi Arabia's second-largest city. Through the desert haze you can almost see the more than 3,000-foot height it was supposed to reach, the lively business district its innovative design was meant to inspire and the tens of thousands of people filling the palm-tree-lined boulevards at its feet.
Planners envisioned the tower as the piece de resistance of a full-on economic revitalization with the declared aim of nothing less than "changing the mind-set of Jeddah."
Instead, six years after it was to open, it remains a construction site with no construction — at the moment, anyway — and looms like a question mark over Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's gamble to overhaul his country of 36 million people.
Enlisting some of the world's star architects, Saudi Arabia is launching mammoth development projects by the dozen that it says will remake the country's oil-based economy, cement its claim as the region's commercial superpower and supercharge its cities' ascent to global status.
With the powerful, $600 billion Saudi sovereign Public Investment Fund behind him, the crown prince is intent on eclipsing rivals in a region that is no stranger to Ozymandian-scale
