When I read about it a week or two ago it struck me as an incredibly dumb idea. However KSA has hired some pretty big global architecture firms to design this city and I have to imagine they know better than I do.
And what they know is “we have a fantastically rich client and an ego-driven vanity project to milk”.
Maybe so, but they might just be willing to take MBS's money to nod and make cool designs that will probably never get built. Which, can't really blame them.