Shonagh Kinnaird MCIOB, Project Director at Misk City, is among the confirmed speakers on Big 5 Construct Saudi's conference programme. The Prince Mohammed bin Salman Nonprofit City opened its first phase in early 2026 against a 2035 completion target, giving the developer view of procurement an unusually long time base.
Among the organisations speaking on the Big 5 Construct Saudi programme this week, Misk City is the one with the most unusual brief. The Prince Mohammed bin Salman Nonprofit City is a development of about 3.4 square kilometres in Riyadh conceived as a nonprofit city, and it has just crossed the line from construction into operation while remaining, for another decade, a live construction programme.
Shonagh Kinnaird MCIOB, Project Director at Misk City, is a confirmed speaker on a programme framed around collaboration between stakeholders, digital transparency, procurement challenges and lessons from Saudi Arabia's major developments. What a session agenda establishes is the ground to be covered rather than the positions taken, and that distinction matters here. The value of a developer on this particular panel is the time base they can speak from.
Misk City's is long. Its masterplan combines commercial, educational, cultural, exhibition, hospitality, residential and retail space, designed to accommodate 18,000 residents and 25,000 employees, host 450 companies and attract eight million visitors a year, at an investment estimated at around SAR20.4 billion, roughly $5.4 billion. The first phase opened in early 2026, with full completion targeted for 2035, and the Mohammed bin Salman Foundation has relocated to its headquarters inside the city.
A programme with that shape produces a procurement problem that a single-phase project never encounters. Packages procured for phase one are commissioned and operating while packages for later phases are still being tendered, which means the same development is simultaneously a client for construction supply and a client for maintenance supply, often from the same vendors. Standards set at the start have to remain buyable for a decade. Products specified in 2023 have to be either still available in 2032 or substitutable without breaking a warranty, a service contract or a spare-parts holding.
The delivery structure adds a second layer. Mace, whose Mace Consult arm is also represented on the show's programme, is project manager for the first phase of construction. A consultant-led delivery model concentrates the procurement interface in a single organisation, which is how large clients manage risk and also how they inherit it — the consultant's supply-chain judgement becomes the client's exposure.
The wider programme this week has carried the same theme from several directions. ROSHN Group, SEVEN, Al Kholi Group, Saudi Binladin Group, Modern Building Leaders, Kabbani Construction Group and Dussman Ajlan & Bros were among the speaking organisations, alongside the Saudi Building Code Center. Between them they cover residential build-out, entertainment assets, contracting at scale and facilities services, which is close to the full span of the Kingdom's delivery machine.
What a developer running a decade-long build-out contributes to that group is a reminder that procurement decisions have a service life. The Saudi market spent several years optimising for award speed. Assets like Misk City, which will be operating and building at the same time until 2035, are where the cost of that optimisation eventually shows up, in the maintenance contract rather than the tender return.