Qiddiya’s Journey: A case study in urban imagineering and image laundering

Some of the world’s most ambitious urban development projects today are first expressed as hyper-realistic, computer-generated images (CGIs). These fictional worlds increasingly shape megalomaniac visions and collective imaginaries about the future of cities. Digital media about speculative urban environments are often produced remotely by design professionals and subsequently employed to secure investment and finance. Disguising marketing media as planning documents deeply challenges the traditional role and responsibilities of the urban planning practice. In a spectacular and experiential proposition, Qiddiya’s master plan animation celebrates consumption and techno-utopianism, concealing forms of post(colonial) invisible labour and oppressive digital infrastructures. A careful analysis of ‘Qiddiya’s Journey’ illustrates how CGI-generated media doubles as a development strategy and propaganda, ignoring critical implications of building a theme park city in the middle of a desert. Beyond the neo-liberal agenda of tourism and entertainment, Qiddiya’s vision reveals ethical lapses in the use of CGIs for urban planning purposes. Moreover, it exemplifies how seductive aesthetics can enable an authoritarian regime to advance contentious development programmes that discretely launder its image clean of social and environmental controversies.