Royal Dream: City Branding and Saudi Arabia’s NEOM Hend Aly Saudi Arabia Corporatization Creative New City Urban Development NEOM Branding In 2017, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia announced the new mega-city NEOM. The city is envisioned to be a “start-up the size of a country”, and it aims at attracting the “best talents”, offering them “technology with livability at its core.” The paper foregrounds city branding to understand what NEOM is all about: its imagined society and proposed governance. It further explores how city branding strategies position NEOM and the Kingdom regionally and globally and reaffirm the Crown Prince’s power. It also questions the conceptual nature of the branded object itself, as branding documents show that NEOM alternates between being a city, a start-up, a country, and the Crown Prince’s legacy. Philipps-Universität Marburg Marburg Deutschhausstraße 9, 35037 Marburg 2019 2019-06-25 2019-07-03 Text article urn:nbn:de:hebis:04-0003-2019-230-79377 eng 2714728-9 12 1 https://journals.uni-marburg.de/0003/article/download/7937/7873 10.17192/meta.2019.12.7937 https://journals.uni-marburg.de/0003/2019/230/7937 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0