It's also super similar to the dystopian cyberpunk of the 1980s. With the added dimension that it's ruled by an absolute monarch who presently deploys moral police to stop outrageous things like women stepping outside the house without male relatives accompanying never mind outrageous capital crimes like protest, journalism or homosexuality, which is the sort of society you really don't want to have smart autonomous systems monitoring everything. And a petrostate, so theoretical eco-credentials are going to be taken with a pinch of salt.
The actually built utopian housing and retail projects of the 1960s are widely regarded as dystopian in most Western countries too...
You should edit or remove parts of your comment. There isn't really the so called "moral police" existent to the level you're describing. Lots of my fellow Americans don't really seem to understand the changes Saudi is undergoing, so I'm not surprised someone would write a comment like yours.
By the way, everyone could be writing about how on every American or European-adjacent topic, those governments are involved in terrible things too (need we talk about torturing people, killing civilians, colonization, genocide, racism, etc.) Anyways, with American support for Saudi, everyone is "implicated" in this.
Let it speak for what it is, and stick to the topic. There's a place for these criticisms, and they are sometimes necessary, but they drown out the idea we should be discussing for low-hanging, emotionally-charged fruit.
How the government uses its surveillance and what is and isn't permitted is extremely relevant to the topic of a smart city proposal (and even more relevant to the subthread on whether it could be perceived as "dystopian").
Unlike the paragraph you devoted to "what about the US/Europe" (and discussion of US/European political problems seems to crop up in every discussion of smart city tech in the US/Europe anyway...), which is of no relevance to whether a culturally Saudi $500bn city designed for Mohammed bin Salman's needs would be a utopian dream or a stylish dystopian nightmare. City planning isn't orthogonal to politics either; ask anyone who's paid any attention to Nay Pyi Daw.
As for changes, whether the Crown Prince decision to reduce the formal powers of the "moral police" and make them subordinate to his civil police are characterised more by [slightly] liberalising an extremely illiberal society, window-dressing for Western observers or increasing his personal authority and whether such reforms would accelerate or sharply regress under his successor(s) might have been a more interesting tangent than whether I should shut up. I can understand if you don't wish to speculate on such things, though, especially if you can potentially see yourself living where such discussion is banned in future... in an efficiently monitored, fully-enclosed space shaped like a line.
The actually built utopian housing and retail projects of the 1960s are widely regarded as dystopian in most Western countries too...