Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s ambitious plans for The Line, a one-of-a-kind linear city in the Saudi Arabian desert, look quite different moving forward.
The Line, the centerpiece of the crown prince’s $500 billion Neom megaproject, is colliding with the laws of physics and finance, as the project has been sharply scaled back after years of overreach and mounting skepticism both inside and outside the kingdom, the Financial Times reported.
Once envisioned as an approximately 106-mile wall of glass running through the desert, The Line was envisioned as a car-free, climate-controlled city stacked vertically from coast to mountains at a height taller than the Empire State Building. But as time has gone on and construction has advanced at a snail’s pace, costs have increased, timelines have reportedly been pushed and the foreign investment that the Gulf state bet on has failed to materialize.
At least $50 billion has been spent so far, according to the report, and the desert is dotted with half-finished pieces of construction. Neom, chaired by the crown prince, insists that The Line is still “a strategic priority” that will ultimately “provide a new blueprint for humanity by changing the way people live,” but acknowledged that it would be a “multi-generational development of unprecedented scale and complexity.”
In other words, the plans have been scaled back and The Line’s eventual completion remains up in the air as a result of geographic and financial hurdles.
Neom employees believe that much of The Line might technically still be buildable, but they’re allegedly not convinced anyone is ready to cough up the cash to fund it. Construction work across the planned megadevelopment has slowed, though the desert ski resort Trojena, the intended venue for the 2029 Asian Winter Games, is moving ahead on schedule.
Construction has not stalled entirely. As part of the creation of an inland marina requiring canals from the sea, crews have already cleared the way. The village of Qayal, which was located near the planned marina, has been flattened, with 15 members of the Huwaitat tribe who protested against their eviction being sent to prison, some for up to 50 years; three others were sentenced to death, per human rights observers cited by FT. A documentary on the project released last year alleged that upwards of 21,000 workers on the project from South Asia have died, per The B1M.
The budget for The Line started at $1.6 trillion in 2021, but an updated internal estimate the following year placed the total cost at around $4.5 trillion; estimated costs have grown to $8.8 trillion and counting. Neom is owned by Saudi Arabia’s nearly $1 trillion Public Investment Fund. The fund saw an $8 billion write-down over the summer as costs for the Neom project have ballooned.
The first phase of The Line was planned to be completed by 2030 with 20 so-called “modules” of housing across 16 kilometers of futuristic linear city, and residents were planned to start moving in as early as this year. But as time went on, the plans were dropped to just three modules, rendering some previously-built foundations useless.
Needless to say, reality has hit The Line’s developers like one of the high-speed rail trains planned for the mega-development. The crown prince, however, remains determined to see the project through to completion. “They say in a lot of projects that happen in Saudi Arabia, it can’t be done, this is very ambitious,” bin Salman said of the effort in 2023. “They can keep saying that. And we can keep proving them wrong.”
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