When in 1967 Constantinos A. Doxiadis, a Greek urban planner and architect, was called by the Riyadh municipality to plan the Saudi capital, the best of his career was largely behind him. The discipline of Ekistics (or “the science of human settlements”) he had created had proved a useful tool to advertise his talent in cities across four continents, from Athens to Islamabad to Accra and to Philadelphia. Inspired by the modernist principles expressed in the 1933 Charte d’Athènes, Doxiadis became after WWII, accordingly, one of the first global urban planners. In full possession of his art, he started working on the transformation of Riyadh from a snug city radiating around an old core to what the Saudi elites envisioned as a “modern” capital. They expected the master plan to solve pressing traffic and housing issues and to put Riyadh on the global map as a model of “city of the future” for other Arab and Islamic cities. King Faisal, Prince Salman, and the mayor of Riyadh were confident in the ability of the Saudi state and the urban planners to shape national and transnational political and religious identities. But things didn’t quite go as planned, and Doxiadis’s collaborators were soon entangled in local networks of power and knowledge that rendered their task more difficult than they first thought. Their vision of the city was blurred and partial; their action was hampered; their attention was diverted toward unexpected commissions. By following the meandering story of Doxiadis’s men and women in Saudi Arabia, this paper examines the problematic emergence of global urban planning and the role of spatial politics in the shaping of political identities.