Saudi Arabia’s The Line Megadevelopment Gets A Lot Shorter

Saudi Arabia’s The Line—a horizontal megadevelopment that was planned to house more than 9 million people in a 105-mile-long strip across the desert—may be reduced to a dash. Last month, The Guardian and Bloomberg CityLab reported a massive scaling back of the development’s footprint: By 2030, a completed segment of The Line is now predicted to house just 300,000 people and be less than 1.5 miles long.

The Line is just one component of Crown Prince Mohammed’s grand vision for Neom, a multi-region development that will also include a yachting village, ski resort (that is planned to host the 2029 Olympic Winter Games), and various luxury tourist destinations. While much of The Line specifically has been questioned for its feasibility, the scale-back remains surprising as it has been touted eagerly by the royal family.

However, this likely is a budgetary issue. The Line was projected to cost $1.5 trillion. According to The New Arab, scaling back the project came at a time when the 2024 Neom budget had not yet been approved by the Public Investment Fund (the country’s sovereign investment fund), and Saudi Aramco, the oil company that The New Arab calls "the financial juggernaut behind Riyadh's spending spree," has reported a nearly 25 percent drop in its 2023 profits. Still, Saudi finance minister Mohammed Al Jadaan said in December that extending the project timeline, "will serve the economy," as new factories must be built and "sufficient human resources" found, reads Bloomberg.

The Line, however long it will be at the 2030 goalpost, is currently under construction. In February, Neom released a video showing aerial footage of the site that feels eerily similar to Michael Heizer’s City, a desert land art project. Fittingly, the Neom video called its construction project "the world's biggest earthworks operation," where equipment is shown dredging and moving sand into curious patterns. Dezeen notes that, per the video, The Line’s construction is divided into 140 "modules"—each designed by a different architecture firm—yet it is unknown which module is currently in progress.

Perhaps the video was an attempt at a dose of optimism to drum up greater investment prior to reporting on The Line’s shrunken footprint, but the project remains under scrutiny. The BBC reported earlier this month that authorities were permitted to use "lethal force" to evict villagers residing in the area—an extension of the project’s blood-soaked reputation stemming from planned executions of Indigenous protestors in 2023 and the removal of more than 6,000 individuals from their homes.

Top Image: Satellite view of construction progress at the Western portion of The Line, Gallo Images/Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2023

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