Saudi Arabia’s NEOM is marketed as the city of the future, but it is being built on land with a long human past — including Huwaitat communities whose displacement has become one of the project’s darkest controversies

Saudi Arabia’s NEOM is marketed as the city of the future, but it is being built on land with a long human past — including Huwaitat communities whose displacement has become one of the project’s darkest controversies

The promotional language around NEOM keeps returning to one idea: a clean start. A blank stretch of desert. A place to build the future without the weight of the past. The land the project now occupies in north-west Saudi Arabia was never blank. People had farmed it, buried their dead in it, and carved their names into its sandstone for thousands of years before it was renamed as a site for the city of the future. NEOM is the flagship of Crown P…