This ‘Metropolitan’ takes Neom as its theme, a colossal urban architectural project currently being constructed in the remote deserts of Saudi Arabia, causing fiction to imitate reality. Due to its bold objectives (‘to build a city to “reset” urban living’) and the financial and technological resources it mobilises, this complex project is subject to both great aspirations and controversies, raising fundamental questions which have important ethical, cultural, social and political implications. The author, João Bravo da Costa, is an architect with a recognised international career which began in the studios of three Pritzker Prize winners: Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid. Knowing this region of the world well, he combines personal experience with innovative theoretical reflection in this essay written for Electra.