Kingdom is creating an architecture of national identity

There is a particular blindness that afflicts commentary on ambitious infrastructure projects in the developing world. When Western journalists survey a grand railway station rising from the Kazakh steppe, a gleaming airport terminal in Rwanda, or Saudi Arabia’s Diriyah project, they reach instinctively for a familiar verdict: white elephant. The calculation seems obvious — cost divided by utilitarian return yields a number that does not add up.

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