Saudi Arabia’s controversial and grotesquely expensive £830billion hyper city project The Line will likely never see the light of day as the technology needed to build the city doesn’t actually exist yet, The Daily Star revealed.
Idea Theft
The project, dubbed The Mirror Line, wouldn’t look out of place in the ill-fated video game Cyberpunk 2077, with giant mirror-covered glass structures and impossible-looking geometry.
A footage widely circulated on social media has linked The Line project to Al-Barayeh smart city environmental project, designed by Kuwaiti engineer Faisal Al-Jehaim.
There was also a sense of deja vu when Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, unveiled his plans for the futuristic 100-mile-long linear city, momentously titled The Line.
It will be free from cars, the Forbes declared, powered by renewable energy and run by artificial intelligence, slicing straight through the Arabian desert in one continuous strip. As part of the country’s $500bn Neom development, the plan was trumpeted as a “civilisational revolution that puts humans first”; but it had inescapable echoes of another project with a very different purpose.
Three thousand miles away, in a gallery in Brussels, hangs a 1960s photomontage of an eerily similar vision, part of a new exhibition about the radical Italian architecture collective Superstudio. A great white oblong is depicted cutting through a desert, slicing through sand dunes and marching past palm trees in an unbroken urban block, its surface inscribed with an endless square grid.
This is the Continuous Monument, a project dreamed up by Superstudio in 1969 – not as a proposal for a smart city, but as a critical warning against the relentless urbanisation of the planet.
The Line will never come true
A British study has also revealed that The Line project, which came as part of MBS’ Vision 2030, will remain only in his mind in light of the growing economic challenges.
For its part, The Inspector also revealed other difficulties to the Saudi mega project, such as the water supply.
The Line runs across an almost untouched northwest corner of Saudi Arabia, and so access to water, crucial for making concrete, is limited, the paper reads.
“Individual tankers are currently being driven hundreds of miles from major ports like Jeddah. This is not a long-term solution. A British company, SolarWater, is building massive purifying domes that will take in seawater, heat it up into condensation, and pump out the clean H2O, but work on the first trial dome has only just started and it isn’t expected to be ready until the end of the year. ‘Nothing can happen without the water,’ a figure working on the project explains.”
Uncontrolled spending
In a recent report, Bloomberg Businessweek said that the futuristic megaproject looks like it took page right out of a movie.
Titled ‘MBS’s $500 Billion Desert Dream Just Keeps Getting Weirder,’ the report shed light on the expensive cost of the megacity project.
The Neom “style catalog” includes elevators that somehow fly through the sky, an urban spaceport, and buildings shaped like a double helix, a falcon’s outstretched wings, and a flower in bloom. There will be swim lanes for commuters and “smart” everything.
The project has tapped futurists, international architects, and even Hollywood production designers.
Neom appears to be one of the crown prince’s highest priorities, and the Saudi state is devoting immense resources to making it a reality.
Could it work?
Turning Neom into a reality is proving a “formidable challenge”, even for an absolute ruler with a $620bn sovereign-wealth fund, said Money Week. It’s true that some cities in the Gulf region – Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha – have sprung from the desert to become major commercial hubs in a remarkably short time.
But Saudi Arabia’s record to date is less impressive. In 2005, plans for six new cities were announced, but only one made it off the drawing board: King Abdullah Economic City, a $30bn project 90 miles from Jeddah on the Red Sea coast. High hopes for the city have failed to come to fruition: it has a population of around 7,000 people, against the original target of two million by 2035.
As for Neom, many millions have so far been spent on architects, futurists and even Hollywood set designers. But so far only a handful of buildings have been built. The chaotic trajectory so far suggests that MbS’s urban dream may never be delivered.
Social media outrage
A state of anger swept social media platforms as prominent international media reports revealed MBS’ project failure and high costs.
Martin Anderson said on Twitter: A few people enriching themselves at the expense of the local tribespeople. A nonsensical fantasy project by a murderous crown prince that will never happen.
https://twitter.com/mtsandersen/status/1564298502452043777
Jonathan Andrés also commented on the megacity project, saying: “This whole idea is a monument not to a man vision but to his estupidiity. This “project” is not futuristic, is impractical in any possible way. The whole thing is just moronic.”
