Desert of Dystopia

Version Español
A blinding wind pummels an austere landscape of gently rolling sand, creating dust devils and whirlwinds that would suffocate the unwary. A merciless heat beats down upon the head of the unwary traveler as the sun makes its unconcerned journey across the sky. At the top of a dune, one can look out at a wasteland that stretches out for miles, as a hostile terrain threatens to overwhelm the unprepared. But across the sea of sand is a metallic oasis, a futuristic metropolis capable of defying the erosive forces of the badlands and filled with the best technology money can buy. The city gleams in the distance, but once you enter its asphalt streets, this urban center becomes a maze of indifferent humanity in a chipped, decaying environment, losing not only its physical luster, but its moral core.

While the first paragraph to this entry may sound like the opening to a cyberpunk novel set in the Middle East, in the next ten years, this will become reality. The rulers of Saudi Arabia, like the rulers of the neighboring United Arab Emirates, are fully aware of the fact that oil is a valuable commodity that will not last forever. Like the UAE, it has chosen to invest its lucrative oil profits into projects that will contain to sustain and grow their economy long after peak oil comes and goes. Unlike the UAE, which has chosen to spend its fortunes on converting Dubai and Abu Dhabi into the tourist trap of the Middle East, Saudi Arabia has elected to invest in a series of vast construction projects in the desert, creating advanced cities in defiance of a region famous for its hostility to man.

These Economic Cities, of which four have already begun construction, with one supposed to receive its first wave of new citizens in the coming year, are an extensive effort to diversify the oil dependent Saudi Arabian economy into something capable of prospering in a post-oil 21st century. In a country where more than half the people are under the age of 21, these new cities are seen as essential for both the controlled growth of urban sprawl and the opportunity to create conditions friendly to family lifestyle development. Each of these shining new urban centers will come equipped with hospitals, universities, and sport stadiums, with seaside villas for the wealthy and high-rise apartments for the middle-classed. Each city will be focused on a different essential of the Internet Age, with Knowledge Economic City (KEC) specializing in cutting edge scientific research while King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) will be an industrial center for plastics and aluminum, and so on.

What does this massive project mean? For one, they mean a construction boom in the desert, even during these tough economic times. Companies all over the world are competing for the privilege of supplying these new cities with everything from cell phone service to water supplies. For another, they mean work for hundreds of workers who will be expected to build everything from high-rises to reverse osmosis plants. Thirdly, they represent opportunity for firms all over the world, as the Saudi Arabian government is encouraging Saudi and international firms to build factories and offices to conduct business and bring in jobs. Lastly, they represent a playing field for the tech giants, who get to display toys such technology that creates holographic images at a distance.

The Economic Cities are certainly an impressive effort to meet the desert kingdom’s needs for employment for its younger generation and a stronger, less oil dependent economy. However, there is a reason why I chose to begin this article as a glimpse into a dystopian desert oasis, and that reason is that these Economic Cities will probably end up becoming exactly that. The current global economic morass was a direct result of the merger of ignorance and misplaced enthusiasm in the marble hallways of financiers and their institutions. These well-dressed figures chose to continue dabbling in instruments they did not understand, smug in the mistaken belief that the business cycle was obsolete, that there was a new economic standard of eternal upward expansion. In contrast to these winners, I actually stayed awake in my business classes, so I am well aware that all economies go through a repeating cycle of growth, prosperity, recession, and depression. The eternal upward expansion is the business equivalent of a perpetual motion device: flat-out impossible.

But what do the Economic Cities have to do with the business cycle? Quite a lot, when you apply the business cycle to the so-called Internet Age. As the dotcom bust demonstrated, not every idea with a website will make money. As the current economic crisis demonstrates, no matter how long the growth and prosperity cycles, there is inevitably recession and depression. No matter how much the Internet Age is touted as the future of the globalized economy, no matter how much the inevitable romantics begin to call out that the business cycle is an obsolete theory that no longer applies, the facts will inevitably rear their heads. There is a saturation point where the Internet does not apply a competitive advantage to a national economy. There is a saturation point where goods and services are equivalent, and there is no cheaper foreign production center to produce cheaper versions. During the flirtation with a peak oil scenario in the summer of 2008, industrial jobs began to trickle from China back into the United States because the rising cost of transportation reduced the economies of scale to the point where production in the United States was the more viable alternative.

This is what Saudi Arabia will discover soon enough. The Economic Cities are supposed to bring in the sort of business that places like Bangalore in India do, the so-called “knowledge workers” that bring in even more business. However, the point is that there will be a saturation point where these knowledge works will bring in no additional business in numbers that matter. Furthermore, by encouraging foreign businesses to set up factories and offices in the new metropolises, Saudi Arabia is becoming a part of the globalization craze. Foreign businesses will not only happily build new offices; they will bring in their particular staff and executives, with their families, to these urban oases. These foreigners will bring with them their particular sets of values and cultural mores, and will not take kindly to the sort of religious police that maintain order in Saudi Arabia. Especially in KEC, this will result in a break down of the barriers Saudi Arabia has erected to maintain its particular vision of Islam, since scientists expect, nay, demand, conditions of unlimited access to information and freedom to pursue its endeavors with a minimum of interference. To keep this foreign business, Saudi Arabia will be forced to make exceptions, which will be noticed by its citizenry and resented.

Cities, no matter when and where they are built, no matter how utopian the vision, are always hives of inequity. There will always be haves and have-nots, and the have-nots will always resent the haves. There will always be those who live on the edge of society, scraping a meager existence out of the leftovers of others. The Internet Age will not create eternal economic expansion, and eventually, economists and politicians around the world will scramble for alternatives when the realization dawns that the first mover advantage that India and China possess results in a lack of opportunity for them to mimic those successes. Oil will eventually peak and ebb, and the economic cities the desert kingdom is building will not be able to offset this enough to prevent a partial collapse of the Saudi Arabian economy. When that happens, the new urban centers will have millions of people, and be flooded with millions more, desperately seeking work and opportunity, only to be relegated to poorly built slums as the rich live in their villas, comfortably above it all. The future will be advanced cities with millions of urban poor scavenging the complex technologies tossed aside in favor of more sophisticated machines and computers, with extraordinary cultural ferment from the combined forces of globalization, foreigner communities, tradition, and Islam. Saudi Arabia’s future will become a troubled future of high tech and low life, ruled more by the corporations that create the economic value of these desert oases than the government itself.

Welcome to the future.

Sources
The Construction Site Called Saudi Arabia
Can the U.S. Bring Jobs Back from China?
Landlocked Saudi economic city to get seaport
Company wins water deal for Saudi mega project
Saudis Look Beyond Oil to New Economy in Desert
A New City in the Saudi Desert