This is the Line.
A fantastical $200bn megaproject that is supposed
to rise from the Saudi desert.
Its backers say it represents the future of modern living.
The sceptics see an overly ambitious vanity project
inspired by a brash young autocrat that
risks becoming the oil-rich Gulf's next white elephant.
Championed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Salman, the Kingdom's de facto leader,
the plan is at the heart of his Neom project.
The goal is to build a futuristic car-free,
carbon-free city of one million people
beginning at the Red Sea coast following a narrow 170
kilometre line up through rugged mountains.
Nothing so audacious has ever made it
beyond an architect's draft.
The infrastructure alone is expected
to cost $100 to $200bn, with designs
from underground, hydrogen-fueled automated
transport system.
It has raised eyebrows, caused us
to sort of giggle a little bit thinking, you know,
is this actually going to happen?
Unfortunately, you know we've got the Dubai bug, really,
and we have this problem of highlighting futuristic video
clips with hyperbolic language that
sometimes get misunderstood.
Can you tell us about the Neom project?
Neom is a sustainable city, and that will change
the future of Saudi Arabia.
Look, I think you have to go beyond the glitz
and the futuristic videos and the hyperbolic language that
comes from western consultants.
And I think what Neom has failed to explain properly
is that there is substance below this.
We've tried to examine what exactly
is the substance beyond the PR hype about invisible technology
generating carefree and open urban space.
The problem is, there's very little public information
about the project beyond the glitzy YouTube video which
has popped up on TVs around the world
as part of a global advertising campaign.
A few things you should know about Saudi Arabia.
First, it has no running rivers, but vast oil reserves
that have enabled it to become the world's top crude exporter.
Now, Prince Mohammed, known as MBS,
is determined to use the nation's petrodollar wealth
to back his grandiose plans to modernise the conservative
Kingdom and end its addiction to oil.
Back in June 2017, King Salman shook up Saudi
Arabia's succession order by naming Prince Mohammed,
his favourite son, heir apparent to the throne.
Four months later, MBS unveiled Neom,
which is being overseen by the Public Investment Fund,
or the PIF, the sovereign wealth fund the crown prince chairs.
This is a $500bn megaproject supposed
to cover 26,000 square kilometres
from the western coast and stretching up
to the borders of Egypt and Jordan.
Unlike the densely populated districts of Jeddah, Riyadh,
and Dammam, the Neom region contains
no major urban centres.
And more than three years after Neom's launch,
the 170-kilometre line project was announced
as its first major development.
This month, the bulldozers moved in
to begin laying the groundwork for the first phase
of the futuristic city.
Neom declined to be interviewed or provide a map of where
exactly the Line will be.
Using the latest satellite imagery,
you can see how vast and empty the site currently is.
It's not clear whether these settlements are part
of building work on the Line.
So how far has the project progressed?
It's virgin territory.
It's a beautiful coast.
There are some government buildings that have been built.
There's a camp that's been built for the Neom
management and team.
Bechtel has mobilised now to start,
and you will start to see a dome being built there
for the desalination plant.
There's been a lot of touristic activity down there already.
So not much, but actually not nothing either has been built.
I mean, it is a busy place.
But it will take a number of years for this
to show up on the ground in anything really substantive.
But this isn't the first time that Saudi Arabia
has tried to build new cities in the desert.
In the mid-2000s, the authorities launched plans
for six new economic cities with the same lofty aspirations
as Neom - to diversify the economy,
attract foreign investment, and create jobs for young Saudis.
That project was less ambitious, the estimated price
tag $120bn for the six was far more modest in comparison.
But only one made it off the drawing board, the King
Abdullah Economic City, and cynics will tell you
that only succeeded because it carried the then monarch's
name.
The track record of new cities, not only in the Gulf,
but around the world is fairly discouraging.
I think what's going to be a bit different in Neom
is the level of political commitment,
and the need to make it a success in some way
because it's so high profile.
What that means in practise is not necessarily that billions
or tens of billions of foreign investments are going to come
streaming in, but that the government and the PIF
in particular are going to invest quite heavily into it.
And there will be, to be fair, some parts
of the project there are more feasible than others.
So there are some fairly conventional dimensions
of sectoral diversification.
Some of the tourism could probably work,
because it's a beautiful natural environment, at least
for domestic tourism.
Some of the renewables investment
could work, some of the manufacturing stuff, some
of the agro industry could work, if only
for sort of food security reasons
there's a good case to be made for domestic agricultural
investment.
I mean, flying cars, and glowing sands,
and artificial moons are on a different level.
Political commitment can have all sorts
of connotations in the MBS era.
The millennial prince has shaken up
the Kingdom in an unprecedented fashion in the few years
since his rapid rise to power.
He has upended decades of more consensual rule
within the al Saud monarchy, riding
roughshod over royal rivals and crushing
all forms of critical debate.
The CIA has reportedly concluded that as the Kingdom's
day-to-day leader, he must have authorised
the operation in which Saudi agents murdered Jamal Khashoggi
and dismembered his body.
Female activists who campaigned for women
to be allowed to drive were jailed,
including Loujain al-Hathloul, whose family
allege she was tortured.
In Neom, security forces shot dead Abdul Raheem al-Huwaiti
after he refused to be evicted from his property
to make way for the project.
The authorities said al-Huwaiti was armed and shot first
and insisted those being relocated
are fully compensated, but activists saw it
as another sinister act associated with MBS's reign.
There was an iron fist against not like one tribe or another,
but actually against everybody, including royals, and princes,
businessmen and businesswomen, liberals, feminist,
intellectuals, economists, even poets.
And I have seen and documented firsthand
a lot of people who were arrested
just because they tweeted.
And I know people who were arrested
because they tweeted about people
who were arrested over a tweet.
So there was even a series of arrests
just because one tweet, one word, or one comment,
one post on social media.
Saudi Arabia has never been democratic,
but there was some kind of what Jamal Khashoggi used
to call the checks and balances within the royal system, where
there were multiple branches within the royal family that
counter balance each other, making the Saudi government
less unstable, let's call it.
But with the crown prince and this centralised kind of power,
he has now every power on his hand.
He can do everything unchecked.
He's uncontrollable.
The crackdowns have taken place as the crown prince's
of supporters have trumpeted economic and social reforms
that he has spearheaded.
In recent years, the feared religious police
have been largely muzzled, and the decades-old ban
on women driving has been lifted.
Cinemas have opened and courts have issued landmark rulings
asserting women's rights to live independently and travel
without the approval of their male guardians.
Despite Khashoggi's brutal murder and other abuses,
a host of global music stars including Mariah Carey, Enrique
Iglesias, and Sean Paul have flocked to the Kingdom
to perform at massive state-sponsored music
festivals.
When Saddam Hussein was confronted about his behaviour
on an issue, he said he will change and he introduced
reforms.
When Bashar al-Assad took power a few years later,
he said he will change the system of Syria,
and he introduced reforms.
And let's remember, Mohamed Ghadafi, just right
before the revolution, he said he will be the reformer,
and he introduced reforms.
And multiple dictatorships around the world
have used that line of reforms, but no reform
will ever take place if the population is excluded.
But MBS's changes have been embraced
by many among the Kingdom's youthful population,
and the crown prince's loyalists insist that his iron fist
approach was needed to bring radical change to such
a conservative nation.
Change is bloody.
It's difficult. Now you can pick particular cases
in the past few years in Saudi Arabia.
Obviously, the Khashoggi case was a tragedy.
You know, the arrest of the woman also is unfortunate,
but so you can look at the micro and feel very uncomfortable.
But when you look at the macro, in context
of historical development, you could not
have opened the political space.
There are a lot of structural problems
that you needed really a big dose of testosterone
to address, and a baseball bat.
And he has done that.
Now as he made his mistakes?
Of course he's made his mistakes, he's human.
He's not a prophet, and you can't choreograph this
perfectly.
And I'm sure if he could play back
the tape there are a lot of things
that he would have done differently.
It is the Line, perhaps more than any other project,
that represents MBS's vision of the future, crafted
with the aid of an army of highly
paid western consultants.
Neom in a way is the closest to an attempt
to build a new Saudi Arabia.
To start with no constraints, to get rid
of all of the old administration, of all
the bureaucracy, and paperwork, and operate independently
of the established business and merchant
class, of which there's quite a bit of distrust
in the ruling circle, currently.
But is this really what Saudi Arabia needs?
I mean, there's a very lively also very private debate
about that in Saudi Arabia.
And some Saudis apparently have called
the tripled VAT that was introduced in summer 2020
as a Neom tax.
Soon if that circulates widely, that's not very good PR.
But any whispered criticism won't stop MBS forging ahead.
Just as Napoleon III instructed Baron Haussman
to demolish mediaeval parts of Paris in the 1800s
and build the wide avenues and parks the French capital is
famed for, the Line is very much the crown prince's pet project.
Even with Haussman in Paris, it was actually Napoleon III.
It was his vision and Haussman was the sort of implementer
of this kind of vision.
So with the Line project, it's probably
coming from Prince Salman thinking actually,
this is what I want to develop and create, and then
bring kind of architects, developers planners on board
to sort of fulfil my vision.
I think the role of the architect of the planner
can be to have these sort of quite bold, radical visions,
these big ideas of how cities could change,
how people can live differently.
But a lot of them are these kind of propositions,
and influence the way things are planned on the ground.
But this sort of grand sort of top-down vision
and implementing that can be quite contentious,
can be quite difficult.
And this idea that you're building on nothing
is never quite true.
So this idea that you're building
on kind of virgin land, as it's been described,
you could question actually, firstly, there's
a very complicated context of mountains of what
is the actual ground look like?
But also, there are people living there.
There are different communities living there.
Would you like to live in the Line?
I don't think I would.
Why not?
For me, the kind of, I mean, the focus on lifestyle I
find really, really one-dimensional.
I found it not really sort of, for me,
what makes cities exciting is living
with lots of different people from different socioeconomic
backgrounds, from different cultures,
and learning from one another.
Do you envision yourself living in the Line?
Would you like to live there?
I'm too old to live in the Line.
I think the Line is, you and I are
a bit beyond our sell by date, as far as that's concerned.
I think the Line is going to attract
Saudis in their 20s and 30s.
Would you ever move there?
No, I would never.
I would rather prefer the people who are already
living there to be building real projects from their own ideas
where they are included, where their ideas are part
of the project, where their cities and traditions are
respected.
I'd rather do that.