“The challenge is to stay focused because the boom here is well beyond anything in the UAE. The scale of projects is like nothing anyone has ever seen. My first tour of the Neom site in 2018 took three days! And that was just an overview. Traditional site monitoring techniques don’t work on these massive programmes in Saudi, so they moved to drone technology and now they use satellite imagery on certain sites. You almost have to be here to understand that it’s real.”

-Rick Hopper, new managing director for Mott MacDonald in Saudi Arabia, and the new chair of the CIOB’s MENA region hub. [Construction Management]