The Line, Saudi Arabia

The Line (stylised THE LINE; ذا لاين) is a linear smart city under construction in Saudi Arabia in Neom, Tabuk Province, which is designed to have no cars, streets or carbon emissions.

The city is one of the nine announced regions of Neom and is a part of Saudi Vision 2030 project, which Saudi Arabia claims will create around 460,000 jobs and add an estimated $48 billion to the country's GDP. The Line is planned to be the first development of a $500 billion project in Neom. As part of the construction process, thousands of people have been forcibly moved to make way for the project and villages have been razed.

The original plans were for the city to be 170 km long and accommodate a population of 9 million (25% of Saudi Arabia's 2022 population of 35.5 million) by 2030. According to a 2024 Bloomberg report, this was later scaled down to a population of 300,000, housed in 2.4 km by 2030. Saudi officials denied this claim and stated that the project was continuing as planned.

Proposal


The Line is eventually planned to be 170 km long. It could stretch from the Red Sea approximately to the city of Tabuk and could have nine million residents, resulting in an average population density of 260000 /km2. By comparison, Manila, the world's most densely populated city in 2020, had a density of 44000 /km2. The Line's plan consists of two mirrored buildings with an outdoor space in between, having a total width of 200 m and a height of 500 m. This would make it the 3rd tallest building in the country, after the Abraj Al-Bait Clock Tower and the proposed Jeddah Tower, and approximately the 12th tallest building in the world.

The plan is for the city to be powered entirely by renewable energy. It will consist of three layers, one on the surface for pedestrians, one underground for infrastructure, and another underground for transportation. Artificial intelligence will monitor the city and use predictive and data models to find ways to improve daily life for its citizens, with residents being paid for submitting data to The Line.

The estimated building cost is US$100–200 billion (– billion SAR), with some estimates as high as $1 trillion. It is claimed by the Saudi government that it will create 460,000 jobs, spur economic diversification, and contribute 180 billion SAR (US$ billion) to domestic GDP by 2030. According to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2022, the first phase project is expected to cost SAR 1.2 trillion (USD 320 billion), and the Saudi sovereign wealth fund Public Investment Fund (PIF) would provide half of the sum.

On 5 April 2024, Bloomberg News reported that the project has been scaled back due to restrictions over funding by the PIF. Bloomberg cited Saudi officials as expecting a 2030 completion of a 2.4 km section of the city which would host less than 300,000 residents, a reduction of more than 98%.

Planning
The Line emulates many aspects of architectural ideas from the industrial era: The first plan for The Line was announced on 10 January 2021 by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in a presentation that was broadcast on state television. Earthworks began in October 2021, and crews working on the project were projected to move in during 2024. , the first phase of the project was scheduled to be completed in 2030. Bin Salman, as chairman of the Neom board of directors, released a statement and promotional video on 25 July 2021 which led to more widespread media coverage of the project. This raised questions about the merits of the design and environmental issues, with critics concerned that the project would create a "dystopian" and "artificial" facility that had already displaced the Huwaitat indigenous tribe and would impact the migration of birds and wildlife.
 * In 1882, the Spanish urban planner Arturo Soria imagined a linear city, based on the innovative use of the tramway. He applied part of his idea to a neighborhood in Madrid but never went further due to lack of support.
 * In the 1950s, the French architect Yona Friedman proposed the concept of an integrated, modular and vertical "spatial city" to solve the problem of urban sprawl, but it remained a simple intellectual curiosity.
 * In the 1960s, the Italian avant-garde group Superstudio presented a radical artistic project: the continuous monument, "an architectural model for total urbanization," which was supposed to cover the entire Earth, but again without any feasibility or real utility. It was a criticism of Modernism, monumentality, design and capitalism.

Construction
The Line will consist of connected communities called modules. The total structure will consist of 135 modules, each 800 m in length and 500 m tall. In October 2022, drone footage released by Ot Sky confirmed that construction on The Line was underway, with excavation taking place along the entire length of the project.

Architects
The project management had all architects sign confidentiality agreements, which is why there are no references to The Line on any of their websites. German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung found out that two well known architects terminated their participation in the project because of human rights and ecological concerns – Norman Foster and Francine Houben from Mecanoo. The paper also reported that several high-ranking architects are still on board: David Adjaye, Ben van Berkel (UN Studios), Massimiliano Fuksas, the London office of the late Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, the Laboratory for Visionary Architecture (LAVA) as well as Delugan Meissl and Wolf D. Prix from Coop Himmelb(l)au. The Süddeutsche criticized the lack of sustainability and the prevailing double standards of the architects in moral issues.

Modules 40–50
By March 2023, more than 4,500 piles had been driven in module 43, reaching a peak of 60 piles per day. Piling work then shifted towards modules 45, 46 and 47 which are located at the marina. Excavation of about 1 e6m3 of earth is taking place each week at the marina.

The Hidden Marina
The design includes a marina twice the size of existing marinas, on the northern side of the buildings, away from the sea. The plan calls for a tunnel and canal to be made through The Line, large enough for large cruise ships to pass through. Construction started in April 2022, aiming to open to visitors and residents by 2030. As of February 2024 over 90 million cubic metres of material has been moved.

The Spine
Early plans proposed an underground railway with 317 mph trains that could travel from one end of The Line to the other in 20 minutes. As of 2023 short tunnels have been dug for the start of the railway, and a train is in a prototype stage of development.

2024 scaling back
In April 2024 it was reported that the project had been "scaled back" after foreign direct investment investors had not "bought into the crown prince's vision", according to Torbjorn Soltvedt, principal analyst at risk consultancy Maplecroft. Fluctuating global oil prices had contributed to the decision.

The Line is now expected to be reduced to a short section at the western end 2.4 km long, a 98.6% reduction from the original design, with a population of 300,000 rather than the intended 1.5 million.

The Saudi minister of economy and planning rejected the claims of scaling back. He said in an interview during World Economic Forum special meeting in Riyadh that "For NEOM, the projects, the intended scale is continuing as planned. There is no change in scale".

Urban planning concerns
In an interview with Dezeen, associate professor Marshall Brown at Princeton University said he believed that in such large-scale urban planning, it would be difficult to achieve the slick, futuristic aesthetic seen in the concept art because of the large number of factors involved; for example, one of the images depicts a picnic on a 200 m ledge, which would probably be dangerous in real life. Hélène Chartier of C40 Cities compared The Line to other unrealised linear city projects, such as the 1882 design by Soria and a 1965 proposal for a linear settlement in New Jersey. Dutch architect Winy Maas said that while he would love to live in such an environment, its profile as seen in the concept art was monotonous, and he believed it would facilitate unfavorable wind flow through the interior.

Philip Oldfield of the University of New South Wales said that the quality of life would probably come down to whether the city was well-managed, rather than to its visual flair. Oldfield said the project would have a carbon footprint of about 1.8 Gt of equivalent in the glass, steel, and concrete, because "you cannot build a 500 m building out of low-carbon materials". He said the 170 km profile would create a large-scale barrier to adjacent ecosystems and migratory species similar to that created by highways, and the mirrored exterior facade would be dangerous for birds.

Researchers from the Vienna Complexity Science Hub suggested that a circular city of a 3.3 km radius would have much shorter commuting times than a linear city. The average distance between 2 inhabitants of a linear city is 57 km as opposed to 2.9 km for a circular city. In a linear city each inhabitant has only 1.2% of the population in walking distance as "people are as far away from others as possible", as opposed to 24% in a circular city. In a linear city walking and cycling will not be popular and the travel time in the fast train will be disproportionately long, while a compact circular city allows active mobility and fast trains are not needed. The required density in a circular city would be much lower, which would allow building it with existing technology and reduce the environmental footprint of buildings. A railway line disruption would immobilize a linear city, but have less impact on a circular city.

Concerns about policy and human rights
Digital rights researchers such as Vincent Mosco suggested that the city's data collection scheme could make it a "surveillance city", because of arrangements that would distort consent to sharing data, and because Saudi Arabia's poor human rights record might imply potential misuse of data. Neom CEO Joseph Bradley said that the Neom coordinators were resolving privacy issues and that Saudi Arabia had a personal data protection law.

Aside from the merits of the projected city, there was also scrutiny of the actions of the Saudi government in pursuing the project. In October 2022, Shadli, Ibrahim, and Ataullah al-Huwaiti, of the Howeitat tribe, were sentenced to death when they refused to vacate their village as part of the NEOM megaproject. Shadli al-Huwaiti was the brother of Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti, who was shot dead by security forces in April 2020 in his home in Al-Khariba, in the part of Tabuk province earmarked for NEOM, after he posted videos on social media opposing the displacement of local residents to make way for the project. In response to reports of human rights violations, one company, Solar Winds, pulled out of the project in 2022.

Feasibility
According to the architect and urban planner Etienne Bou-Abdo, "the 3D images presented are not classical 3D architecture images", and the designers of the project "have rather called upon video game designers". Bou-Abdo stated that the plan includes "a lot of technology that we don't have today". Many of the project's key announcements, particularly in the areas of energy and transportation, are based on technologies that do not exist even in prototype form.