Why it looks like this

In 647 the caliph made Jeddah the port of Mecca, and for thirteen centuries pilgrims have landed here on their way to the holy city. The old town, Al-Balad, was built of Red Sea coral stone — tall merchant houses with carved wooden window screens along shaded lanes — and was UNESCO-listed in 2014.

Oil-era Saudi Arabia grew a completely different city around it: a grid of superblocks and highways running dozens of kilometres up the coast, with a seafront corniche — so the map is a tiny organic knot inside an enormous drawn net.