Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's dream of a new Saudi reality is just getting weirder. His controversial and grotesquely expensive £830 billion hypercity project, The Line, will likely never see the light of day as the technology needed to build the city doesn't actually exist yet.
Similar to the NEOM megacity project, The Line project has reportedly been halted due to a financial shortfall.
Reliable sources earlier revealed that the NEOM mega-project, founded by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), was halted due to the same reasons.
The sources also emphasized that MBS imposed a complete media blackout over news about the matter. He instead ordered to shed light on the Kingdom's foreign policy in relation to Iran.
The project will remain only in his mind, as the technology needed to build the city does not really exist and it seems like a fantasy video game.
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 video widely circulated on social media has linked The Line project to the Al-Barayeh smart city environmental project, designed by Kuwaiti engineer Faisal Al-Jehaim.
There was also a sense of déjà 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, 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 $500 billion Neom development plan, the plan was trumpeted as a “civilizational 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 urbanization of the planet.
MBS has long been criticised over his huge spending on unreal megacities, saying that architecture is often drawn to authoritarian regimes, as well, for no other reason than their ability to do things by decree, citing NEOM mega-project as an example.
It is worth mentioning that NEOM offered tax-free salaries of $700,000 to $900,000 for some senior expatriates, more than 20 times the income of the average Saudi, and a broad range of other perks.
NEOM has become something of a full-employment guarantee for international architects, futurists, and even Hollywood production designers, each taking a cut of Saudi Arabia’s petroleum riches in exchange for work that some strongly suspect will never be used and for designs that never see the light of day.
The unconventional megacity is part of MBS' ambitious NEOM development project, which released conceptual videos showing the city's high walls enclosing trees, gardens, and other plant life, nestling communities among work and recreational structures.
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’ urban dream may never be delivered.
Economists have questioned the heavy spending of MBS over the past years, saying that a fire-hose of investment may transform the kingdom’s economy—or deplete its coffers
This huge spending on unreal projects, while Saudi Arabia's unemployment and poverty rate continue to rise, sparks widespread controversy in the Kingdom.
