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Picture this.
You’re flying low over the Red Sea, along the west coast of Saudi Arabia. Amid the sand dunes, rust-red outcrops, and splashes of bright light in turquoise water, something shimmers in the distance: a silvery reflection of everything around you.
Moving closer, you realize it’s a vast, mirrored wall, half a kilometer high and so long that you can’t see its other end.
What you’re seeing is the planned 170-kilometer-long city called The Line – the crown jewel in the futuristic Saudi megaproject Neom, which also includes equally ambitious projects such as a the Arabian Gulf’s first outdoor ski resort and an octagonal floating industrial city.
Announcing the concept in July 2022, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman billed The Line as a “carbon-free linear city” with no roads or cars and powered by 100 percent renewable energy.
It would eventually house a population of 9 million in a single building – just 200 meters wide and topped with wind turbines – connected by an ultra-high-speed train and flying taxis, adorned with internal waterfalls and employing robot maids.
“The idea of layering city functions vertically while giving people the possibility of moving seamlessly in three dimensions (up, down or across) to access them is a concept referred to as Zero Gravity Urbanism,” reads the press release.
“Different from just tall buildings, this concept layers public parks and pedestrian areas, schools, homes and places for work, so that one can move effortlessly to reach all daily needs within five minutes.”
So, can this project truly up the game on sustainable urban living, and perhaps offset some of the country’s sizable carbon footprint – currently the world’s tenth highest per capita – or will its touted gains for people and nature remain a mirage?
Bin Salman has called the project “a civilizational revolution that puts humans first, providing an unprecedented urban living experience while preserving the surrounding nature.”
“The Line will tackle the challenges facing humanity in urban life today and will shine a light on alternative ways to live,” he added.
The Saudi government portrays the area where Neom is being constructed as pristine and uninhabited. That portrayal is unfortunately, and tragically, inaccurate.
The Indigenous Howeitat people have lived in the area for centuries, and a number of their communities have been evicted by Saudi authorities to make room for the city’s construction. Those who resist have faced serious punishment and even death.
Since the construction of Neom began, authorities have killed one activist, sentenced five Howeitat people to death and detained or arrested at least 42 more for refusing to give up their homes.
In May, the BBC reported that the Saudi government had permitted the use of lethal force to clear land for Neom’s construction.
These actions have drawn criticism from UN experts, who noted that “under international law, States that have not yet abolished the death penalty may only impose it for the ‘most serious crimes’, involving intentional killing. We do not believe the actions in question meet this threshold.”
The experts also questioned whether the Howeitat people had been consulted and given free, prior and informed consent prior to their eviction.
“On the contrary, these actions would certainly amount to forced evictions, which are prohibited under international law as a violation of the right to adequate housing,” they said.
Nor does the wellbeing of the migrant laborers building Neom seem to be a priority. Some workers told reporters they were regularly working 16-hour shifts for 14 days straight, while also enduring an unpaid three-hour bus commute to and from the site.
Serious human rights issues aside, will the plan deliver on its purported environmental benefits?
If The Line does succeed in being powered by 100 percent renewable energy, it would be a massive step for a country that currently generates less than 2 percent of its energy from renewable sources.
That said, it’s worth noting that entire countries with far lower GDPs than Saudi Arabia, such as Ethiopia, Nepal and Paraguay, are already fully powered by renewables at this point.
Yet The Line will leave a massive trail of carbon emissions before it’s even completed, thanks to the vast amounts of steel, concrete and water that will be required.
What’s more, it’s difficult to see how the mammoth cost of such a project – estimated at around USD 100–200 billion – could align with the country’s Vision 2030 goal of reducing its dependency on remaining oil reserves.
The efficacy of the design is also under question. “The long thin shape, hailed as “innovative”, would create problems of circulation and connection,” wrote The Observer’s Rowan Moore.
“It’s like reinventing the wheel in the shape of a stick.”
Ecologists are also calling the environmental credence of the project into question, with many calling its proposed construction a “death trap for birds.”
Glass and mirror-fronted buildings are a well-known threat to bird life: in the U.S., for instance, over 1 billion birds are killed in collisions with buildings every year.
The area that The Line would pass through is already considered a “bottleneck” for the approximately 2.1 million birds that migrate from Europe to Africa every autumn, which include the endangered Saker falcon (Falco cherrug) and Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus).
The project’s design raises another set of red flags for experts. “This is a building that is 500 meters high going across Saudi Arabia, with windmills on top,” Cambridge University zoologist William Sutherland pointed out in an interview with BirdGuides.
“It’s also kind of like a mirror, so you don’t really see it. There’s a serious risk that there could be lots of damage to migratory birds.”
Some of these concerns may ultimately prove irrelevant. Earlier this year, the press began circulating leaked information from the Saudi government that the project had been scaled back to just 2.4 kilometers and will house less than 300,000 people by 2030.
This partly goes down to the staggering logistics involved. Neom’s chief investment officer recently said that the project will require an unprecedented 20 percent of the world’s steel.
If true, Saudi Arabia will have to import most of this steel from overseas, as it isn’t a major steel producer itself.
That brings us to another probable factor behind these cutbacks, which is financing. While the government set the official cost of Neom at USD 500 billion, analysts say the likely true cost of completion would be over four times that much, at USD 2 trillion.
That’s an amount the country’s coffers are not coughing up, with a USD 21 billion dollar deficit forecast for this year alone.
Right now, delegates from across the globe are gathering in Riyadh, the kingdom’s capital, for this year’s UN desertification conference (UNCCD COP16).
Those coming from Europe may well have flown over The Line, where digger tracks in the desert are as yet the only markers of the project’s development.
At the conference so far, the Saudi government and its partners have launched a new global drought resilience partnership that aims to transform how countries around the world respond to drought.
Yet this evokes some cognitive dissonance after the country successfully omitted any mention of fossil fuels at COP29, and then derailed the UN plastic talks, in just the past few weeks.
Scientists have made it clear that we won’t solve the climate crisis and its impacts – including drought and desertification – without drastically reducing our fossil fuel use.
That, ultimately, is the line in the sand that people and the planet actually need – not an eco-utopia in the desert.
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