You may have seen this, well just about everywhere. It's
the architectural concept that broke the internet.
Saudi Arabia has just shocked the world.
At first I thought it was a metaverse project, but it’s a real project.
I’m gonna be reacting to The Line.
The Line is a 170-kilometre long, 500-metre high linear city that either represents
the cutting edge of architecture or a grim dystopian future depending on who you ask.
But what exactly is The Line, and what can it teach us about our cities today?
Back in 2021, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman first
announced plans for a new kind of sci-fi-like city called The Line.
It’s part of NEOM, the Kingdom’s new nation-building megadevelopment that
will stretch across 26,000 square kilometres of desert.
The Line has been pitched as a futuristic eco-city north of the Red Sea with no cars,
no streets and no carbon emissions.
The Saudi government says it will create housing for more than 9M people.
And leaked documents reportedly show proposals for everything from robot maids,
an artificial moon, flying cars and just about everything else from The Jetsons.
Think Dubai, but on steroids.
Well, I mean, it looks like something out
of science fiction is, obviously, but I believe that's the intention.
It is a huge an impressive PR and marketing endeavour before anything else.
the intention is not to be impressive. The intention is to be awesome in the
literal sense. Right. Hey, we are where innovation happens in the built world now.
The main question is not so much how or when,
but why and why do we need to build such a city? Why do we need to deploy those kind
of resources for that kind of project? And why does the city need to look like that?
The entire NEOM development is intended to become
so self-sufficient that it is being referred to as a "country within a
country" where residents will apparently be called "Neomians" rather than "Saudis".
It’s no secret Saudi Arabia has been attempting to rebrand itself on the world stage, looking to
the UAE as a template for a post-oil economy. And that includes pie-in-the-sky megaprojects.
It has been folded into what is known as Vision
2030, which is the Saudi Arabian Vision 2030 plan, which basically says that by
the end of this decade, Saudi Arabia will look dramatically different. It won't be a
kingdom reliant on oil anymore. And real estate is a big component of that plan.
It wasn’t until July of 2022 that we got our first glimpse at what a linear city could actually look
like, outside of science fiction movies, and it’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
The city would essentially be sandwiched between two enormous buildings that
rise 500-metres into the sky and then stretch 170-kilometres into the desert.
This would easily make them the largest buildings ever constructed.
The buildings would be mirrored, so as to impose
as minimally as possible on the surrounding environment.
The 200-metre wide gap in between the skyscrapers is where the city
would lie. Here will be a high-speed rail line connecting residents end to end in 20 minutes,
eliminating the need for cars or roads.
Homes, public parks, schools and offices will be layered on top of each other meaning
that every amenity will be accessible within a five minute walk, while parks
and nature will be accessible from anywhere in the city within just a two minute walk.
This takes the concept of the 15-minute city and explodes it.
According to NEOM, the entire city will be powered by renewable energy, while its minimal
physical footprint will ensure that 95% of the development’s land will be preserved as it is - a
far cry from the urban sprawl of modern cities that have now reached the size of small nations.
I see it more as a way to reshape the sprawl. Right. Rather than avoiding the sprawl at all.
Even if you look at the history of recent capitals built from scratch, the sprawl is
always there that actually starts and forms during construction when the city is not even built.
So if we look at Brasilia today,
there are approximately and I'm thinking Brasilia as an example because it has a
very finite and beautiful pilot plan. There are approximately 3 million people living there,
the majority of which in the sprawl that formed around the pilot plan.
But there is little actually known about the city itself,
outside of the trailer and glossy renderings.
We do know initial earthwork began in October 2021 and that the first residents are said to
start moving in by 2030. But aside from that, this project is mostly defined by its questions.
And there are a lot of questions.
Can you even build something like this?Can you have a city without cars? Without streets or
roads? What if everything you ever needed was within a 5 minute walk? Could we live
in a hyper planned city that didn’t disrupt nature? Is a giant mirror in the middle of an
Arabian desert a good idea? Would a high speed rail work for shorter distances like this? How
would the city evolve over time?
Some of it is so beyond our understanding at the moment,
because they are sort of raw engineering challenges that even
the world's foremost engineers haven't really figured out what to believe.
they need to figure out how to have a break in the building to account for the curvature of
the earth. These are not these are not problems that have been faced by any modern structures
ever. Right. These are and I think this is kind of the intention with Mohammed bin Salman is he
wanted to make something that was as while had had as much of a wow factor as the Pyramids of Giza.
While we may not see The Line exactly as it appears in renderings now. It
is possible we could see a scaled back version of it sometime in the future.
I don't see the line as presented ever realised. But I do think there is a
possibility where some of those ideas are tested in a mini version of it.
The whole concept kind of breaks do cwn. So in the end,
you're making, you know, you're making and maybe not a line, you're making a dot.
So, you know, if in the course of developing, Neom, because there is very real money being
thrown thrown at this project, if in the course of developing, Neom, we find new
innovations in structural engineering, we find new innovations in sustainability,
we find a way to apply technology to the built environment at scale in a way that
we hadn't before. That's fascinating, and that's great. That's great for the world.
Strangely enough there are many concepts on display here that aren’t entirely new.
For instance, a linear city has been dreamed up before, but not as a utopia, instead as a warning.
The Italian architecture collective “Superstudio” created the “Continuous Movement” in 1969,
a series of collages depicting vast blocks encircling the world,
cutting through cities, mountains, valleys - in much the same way the Line does.
These striking artworks were meant as a criticism against mass urbanisation,
against cold relentless architecture.
From an architectural perspective,
the line as a concept is not new. I think it has its roots, has very deep roots.
The main difference to me is how this city will
heavily rely on technologies that are not quite ready yet.
As for other areas of the city, some of it may not be as far-fetched as you think.
Cities are already making changes to take cars off the road and prioritise walkability.
There are digital twins of entire cities and programs that can regulate buildings remotely.
And NEOM isn’t the only vision of a so-called smart city.
Bjarke Ingels Group made headlines in 2020 when it
introduced the “The Woven City” that would be built near Japan’s Fujiyama.
It imagines a fully autonomous future with driverless vehicles and AI systems.
There’s also Egypt’s new smart city that’s being built near Cairo,
and Telosa, a utopian vision for a new American city.
None of these projects are perfect and they’ve all got their fair share of criticism,
but perhaps it is worth rethinking how our cities are structured.
Right now, our modern metropolises don’t work for everyone.
1 in every 52 people in London are homeless, while more than a million UK residents live
in “food deserts”, areas that have limited access to cheap fresh food.
A report from Groundwork UK found that there are severe inequalities in access
to parks and green spaces across the country – with 40% of people
from ethnic minority backgrounds living in the most green-space deprived areas.
Our cities need to function better. And having everything you need within a five
minute walk might actually help lessen some of these equalities – of course,
if everyone has access to it.
What I do like about a bold project such as the Line is the ability to stir up the
conversation and make us question and rethink how a city should look like.
The Line is a pretty bold idea. It’s supposed to be. But maybe we need bold
ideas if we’re going to fix the built environment?
Maybe not everything on the Saudi Kingdom’s wishlist will
come to fruition. Like an artificial moon and flying cars, for example.
But more efficiently run cities with access to nature and amenities might
not be too far from where we should be aiming.