Saudi Arabia has a bold vision for its newest city: a 106-mile-long (170 kilometers) “Line” without cars or long commutes. But urban design experts are skeptical, to say the least. 

“Awful. Nightmare,” said Emily Talen, an urban design researcher at The University of Chicago. 

Despite the flashy announcement of The Line, the technology for such a city doesn’t exist yet, and building massive new cities from scratch is fraught with challenges. 

“The history of so-called megaprojects is not pretty,” said Stephen Wheeler, a landscape architect and environmental design professor at the University of California, Davis. “Usually, they don’t quite turn out the way the original visionaries intend, they often fall prey to economic conditions or other people’s ideas of what should happen, or they wind up costing vastly more than expected.”

Design of the line

So far, The Line exists only as a website and a press announcement made by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Jan. 10. The proposal calls for the aforementioned 106-mile strip of development in Neom, a planned city in northwestern Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government touts the area as undeveloped, but it is in fact home to 20,000 members of the Huwaitat (also spelled Howeitat) tribe, who have protested being evicted for the planned megacity, according to The Guardian.

The Line would be built in three layers: a surface-level pedestrian layer full of parks and open spaces, a lower “service” layer and an even deeper transportation “spine” that would consist of “ultra-high-speed transit.” The proposal claims that all daily services would be walkable within 5 minutes of each node on the line and that commutes between nodes on the high-speed transit would take no more than 20 minutes.

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