But what is The Line?
It is an extremely ambitious urban development project launched by NEOM, which aims to create precisely that: a sustainable and technologically advanced city. Stretching 170 kilometres in length, The Line is designed to be a linear city that prioritises human needs and environmental sustainability over traditional urban planning methods.
The key features of The Line
First of all, we are talking about a vertical city: the overall structure will consist of two mirrored buildings with an open space between them, divided into 135 modules, each 800 metres long and 500 metres high, designed to house 9 million residents in a compact area of just 34 square kilometres (at least according to the initial estimates, which now seem to have been scaled back). The aim is to minimise land use while maximising living space.
The city will run entirely on 100% renewable energy. No cars and no roads. It will preserve 95% of the surrounding land as nature reserves, promoting biodiversity and improving the quality of life of its residents.
Residents will have access to all essential services within a five-minute walk, and a high-speed rail system will make it possible to travel from one end of The Line to the other in just 20 minutes, significantly reducing journey times and congestion.
All this will be possible only thanks to the use of the most advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence and autonomous transport systems. Data analysis will underpin everything, optimising daily operations and improving the living experience of its inhabitants.
On paper, the project will create around 460,000 jobs and contribute about 48 billion dollars to Saudi Arabia’s GDP, making it a key element of the country’s Vision 2030 strategy, which claims to prioritise economic diversification and sustainable development.
The estimated construction cost is 100–200 billion dollars (400–700 billion SAR), with some estimates reaching 1,000 billion dollars.
And yet it is precisely on this point that, it seems, the preparatory works have partly, to use a pun, ‘run aground’ (literally, ‘got buried in sand’).
Last April, in fact, Bloomberg News published a ‘scoop’: despite the utmost secrecy about the progress of the works, the project has reportedly been significantly scaled back because of funding restrictions from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF), which was supposed to provide half of the money.
Bloomberg claims that the current goal is to complete, by 2030, a 2.4-kilometre (1.5-mile) section of the city that would house fewer than 300,000 residents, a reduction of more than 98%.
A dream truly scaled back.
This is not the only source of controversy surrounding the project. The extreme secrecy that the project’s management has demanded of all the professionals involved is also a subject of debate. The German newspaper ‘Süddeutsche Zeitung’ reports that two architects, Norman Foster and Francine Houben of Mecanoo, ended their involvement in the project because of concerns about human rights and the environment.
The same newspaper reported that several top-level architects were still part of the board of professionals, such as David Adjaye, Ben van Berkel (UN Studio), Massimiliano Fuksas, the London studio of the late Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, the Laboratory for Visionary Architecture (LAVA), and Delugan Meissl and Wolf D. Prix of Coop Himmelb(l)au. In short, the who’s who of world architecture.
How will it end? Will the dream of a ‘mirrored architectural masterpiece rising 500 metres above sea level, but only 200 metres wide’ become a global model for a truly smart and fully sustainable city? We shall see.
