So what is The Line? What even is NEOM? Is that a typo? And no it’s nothing to do with the sound children make when they’re playing with race cars.
NEOM and The Line are both planned development projects by the Saudi Arabian government. I won’t go into details on the wider NEOM project, as that itself is an extremely ambitious project aimed at building a major city/state in the north west corner of Saudi Arabia with a small cost of $500 billion. These projects (both NEOM and The Line among others) are being spear head by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and he really is planning to put himself right at the heart of them, but more on that later.
Let’s start with what actually is it?
Put simply, The Line is a proposed city in Saudi Arabia. A city planned to start being built this year (2021) and cost somewhere between $100 and $200 billion. But it’s unlike any city ever planned before. It is a 100 mile strip of land, and that’s not 100 square miles. It is 100 miles of land in a straight line from the Red Sea in the east, to the mountains of Saudi Arabia in the north west. There will be 3 separate layers, the top layer is for pedestrians and communities, thenthere are 2 underground levels for transport, services and infrastructure.
Wait what?
Hopefully these pictures will help.
The Line will form the spine (fitting as it’s actually a straight line) of the broader NEOM project for the region.
So it’s a new city, arranged in a line. Why? Because, essentially, infrastructure is easier to build in straight lines. They’re planning that along The Line will be a series of connected communities joined by high speed transport infrastructure should you wish to travel between them.
Ok so let’s dive into it a bit more.
The Good
Let’s start with the good.
What The Line is proposing does sound good on paper:
Walkable communities? Tick
Nature and innovation at the heart? Tick
Everything you need no more than a short walk away? Tick
Prioritsed pedestrians, comfort and livability? Tick
100% powered by renewable energy? Tick
High speed, green transport? Tick
Conveniently located with with 40% of the globes population within a 4 hour flight? Tick
Who wouldn’t want to live here?
It’s no secret that the world is urbanising, with the ever quoted stat from the UN, that 68% of the worlds population expected to live in urban areas by 2050, not withstanding the uncertain long term impacts of COVID-19 and how this might change population projections (but that’s another article). Even so, what is certain is that cities are increasingly stressed, economically, environmentally and socially with increasing strains on finite resources.
The Line is being proposed as a solution to all the modern problems of cities.
The weird
Did I mention glow in the dark sand for the beaches, and what seems like a Jurassic Park inspired amusement park with robotic dinosaurs, robotic butlers and of course, flying drone taxis.
Anyway, moving on…
Nope they haven’t stopped there.
The Downright Ridiculous
They also want to change the very environment within which The Line inhabits with the introduction of cloud seeding machines to bring rain to the desert as well as the creation of an artificial moon to light up the sky at night.
Ok, while some of that may seem a bit far fetched, whether or not they achieve all of those plans in the end, it most certainly won’t all be the first stage of the city. The fact is this is a real city that is being built, with real money and real peoples lives are being affected.
But there’s another side to this city that needs to be spoken about.
The Ugly
Firstly, the City is planned to be so high tech, that it will track citizens every move in the name of safety and security. Through CCTV, drones and facial recognition the aim is that crimes never have to be reported because the city is so well tracked and automated that a computer can observe and make notifications of crimes occurring autonomously.
Is anyone else getting Disney Land/1984 vibes at the same time?
Oh and the legal system will be custom made, partly to allow for things banned in the rest of Saudi Arabia such as drinking alcohol, but more worryingly it will be entirely accountable to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman only.
Ok those are worrying, but I guess they could technically work out fine?
The Bad
Here’s where things do not work out as fine. Despite being a totally planned city from the ground up and while they have chosen a relatively unoccupied area, the area isn’t vacant entirely.
Part of the site is home to the Huwaitat tribe who have lived across the peninsula for centuries in harmony with nature well before even the founding of Saudi Arabia.
However, they are all either facing displacement, or being forced to retrain to learn “appropriate” skills to quote the Saudi government in order to be deemed worthy enough to live there.
If this isn’t unsettling enough, it gets worse with Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti who was an outspoken critic of the plan and voice of the tribe, being shot dead in his home. The Saudi authorities said he’d been killed in a shootout with police. Need I say more?
The Why You Should Care
At its best, The Line is an extremely ambitious, forward looking, hopeful development trying to bring together the best bits of modern cities and regions to produce a safe, clean, sustainable city for everyone to enjoy.
At its worst, it is a harebrained scheme that is focussing on delivering a city for the elite, without a care for those it displaces or for any who do not wish to live a specified lifestyle dictated by one ruler. Less of a shining light for the wondrous future cities that we might inhabit but an actual embodiment of Saudi human rights violations through the displacement of the Huwaitat tribe.
The reason you should care is that planned urban regions like this are new. Most of the great urban regions and mega cities of the world were organically made, slowly developing over time, starting as small cities capitalising on the benefits of agglomeration before expanding, evolving and becoming bigger regional hubs that act as magnets for people and business.
They generally had a political motivation, such as Brasilia (Brazil), Canberra (Australia) and Washington DC (USA) to appease competing regional favouritism. Then these smaller planned cities evolved over time and built up slowly to become thriving urban regions.
Building an entire metropolis straight away has never been done. However, it might be something that needs to be done more and more in the future as existing city-regions become stretched. This is why this example should be carefully watched, as it is essentially the first serious attempt in doing so. Other governments potentially considering similar initiatives in their own countries should sit up and take note, as it’s not off to a great start.
Furthermore, dare I say, with the recent touchdown on Mars, perhaps entirely planned city-regions from the ground up may be what we come to rely upon in the future to ensure our survival. Therefore, any that are being built now need to be carefully scrutinised to ensure we don’t start down a path that takes us somewhere that we don’t want to go.
At least on Mars we wouldn’t be displacing entire communities (or so we think….)
