Quick Facts: Project: NEOM THE LINE. Location: Tabuk Province, Saudi Arabia. Announced: 2021. Developer: NEOM (Saudi Arabia’s futuristic city project). Proposed form: A linear city 170 kilometers long, 200 meters wide, and 500 meters tall. Proposed population: 9 million. Funding: Saudi sovereign wealth fund (Public Investment Fund). Current status (as of 2025): Construction underway, significantly scaled back from original vision — initial phase expected to house far fewer residents than planned.
THE LINE is either the most audacious urban development in history or its most extravagant folly. Probably both. A linear city 170 kilometers long, 200 meters wide, and 500 meters tall, running through the desert of northwest Saudi Arabia, housing nine million people with no cars, no roads, and a theoretically five-minute commute from any point to any other. When Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced it in 2021, the world didn’t know whether to be amazed or skeptical. Both, it turned out, were correct.
What THE LINE Is Supposed to Be
The design imagines three vertical layers: a surface level for pedestrians and green space, a service layer beneath for infrastructure, and a high-speed rail system running the full 170-kilometer length. The facades on both sides — two parallel mirrored walls visible from space — reflect the desert landscape, theoretically reducing visual impact while serving as a boundary. Everything inside is climate-controlled. No commute ever exceeds five minutes. In theory.
The Reality in 2025
Construction began, but the project has been substantially scaled back. Reports emerging in 2024 suggested the initial phase would house approximately 300,000 people rather than the nine million promised, with completion of even that scaled version pushed well into the 2030s. The workforce on the project has faced significant scrutiny over labor conditions. The question of whether a climate-controlled 170-kilometer mirror wall in a desert is environmentally responsible remains genuinely open.
Why It Still Matters
THE LINE forces a rethinking of what cities can be. Even if the final result is a fraction of the vision, the questions it raises about linear urbanism, car-free design, vertical density, and the relationship between architecture and climate are worth asking. The most interesting urban experiments rarely succeed on their own terms. They succeed by shifting the conversation about what’s possible.
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4 Comments
I would love to live there now while it’s being built as an engineer I would give free construction advice as well as donating a few million dollars to the project.
Great questions, I think some of your questions would make the planners and engineers sweat 😅!
We still think of this as large-scale vaporware until we actually see it built and functioning.
Interesting idea. 9 million people in 34 sq kilometers…. That equates to about 13 sq miles.
The 5 boroughs of New York City consists of 8.8 million people in the space of 302 sq miles!
Seems a bit overcrowded to me….
I’d like to know what the size of housing looks like in this Utopia… 10′ x 10′ cubes perhaps?
Sounds to me almost like a prison cell in this Brave New World Order….
I’m guessing the elite will have much larger accommodations – carbon-free, of course.
How exactly are they going to provide “carbon-free” power to an entire city, including high speed rail?
What about the water needs of 9 million people and all that greenery and trees pictured in the brochure – in a literal desert?
Will there be any meat to eat in The Line, or just vegetables? I didn’t see any pastures for livestock in those fancy pictures…
Wouldn’t it be more efficient use of space to built a city in a square or toroid shape instead of a 100 mile long straight line?
So many unanswered questions…
Other than doing it for the sake of doing it I don’t think there’s any benefit to this. It has to be be very intrusive to the environment.