The Line: Saudi Arabia's 170km Linear City — Original Vision and 2026 Scope Cuts

The Line Saudi Arabia

The Line Saudi Arabia is the most architecturally radical and most heavily marketed component of NEOM, the $500-billion-plus giga-project anchoring Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 economic transformation. As originally unveiled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on 10 January 2021, The Line was to be a single linear city stretching 170 kilometres across the northwestern Tabuk desert from the Gulf of Aqaba inland — a continuous structure 500 metres tall, 200 metres wide, sheathed in mirrored glass, populated by nine million residents, free of cars, streets and carbon emissions, traversed end-to-end by a high-speed underground rail line in twenty minutes. It was, in MBS’s own framing, “a civilizational revolution that puts humans first.”

Five years on, that vision has been substantially abandoned. Bloomberg reported in April 2024 that the 2030 population target had fallen from 1.5 million to under 300,000 residents and that the buildable Phase 1 segment had been cut to roughly 2.4 kilometres — about 1.4 percent of the original length. A leaked internal audit obtained by the Wall Street Journal and reported in March 2025 projected an $8.8 trillion lifetime cost and a completion horizon of 2080. CEO Nadhmi Al-Nasr departed in November 2024 amid worker-fatality reporting and cost-control concerns. In September 2025, the Public Investment Fund suspended construction outright pending strategic review, and the PIF wrote down $8 billion across its giga-project portfolio.

The Line has not been formally cancelled. NEOM’s website, advertising and ministerial talking points still describe the original 170-kilometre concept. But the gap between the marketed project and the project actually being built has become the defining feature of the programme — and a useful lens for understanding how Vision 2030’s most ambitious commitments are being repriced under real-world constraints. This entry treats The Line as both: the architectural and political concept it was sold as in 2021, and the much smaller, slower, more contested construction project it has become by 2026.

Quick Facts

The Line was announced by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on 10 January 2021 in a state-television broadcast, after what officials described as three years of planning. NEOM Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Public Investment Fund, holds the development mandate. The site sits in Tabuk Province in northwest Saudi Arabia, beginning near the Gulf of Aqaba and extending inland.

• Announced: 10 January 2021 by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
• Original length: 170 km (~105 miles)
• Original height: 500 m (1,640 ft) — taller than the Empire State Building
• Original width: 200 m (660 ft) between the twin mirrored facades
• Original population: 9 million residents at full build-out
• Original footprint: ~34 km² (vertical city, no horizontal sprawl)
• Original transit: end-to-end in 20 minutes via high-speed underground rail
• Original sustainability claim: zero cars, zero streets, net-zero emissions, 100 percent renewable energy
• Revised 2030 target (Bloomberg, April 2024): ~2.4 km Phase 1, under 300,000 residents
• Original cost estimate (2021): $100-200 billion infrastructure
• Revised cost estimate (WSJ, March 2025): $8.8 trillion lifetime, completion 2080
• Spent through 2024: approximately $50 billion
• Construction status (May 2026): suspended September 2025, foundation piling on ~2.4 km of Phase 1 alignment, no above-ground city
• Architects (Phase 1, current): Delugan Meissl Associated Architects (DMAA), Gensler
• Architects (Phase 1, formerly): Morphosis (Thom Mayne) — departed
• Parent project: NEOM

The Original Vision

The linear-city concept The Line draws on is more than a century old. Spanish urbanist Arturo Soria y Mata published his Ciudad Lineal proposal for Madrid in 1882, advocating cities organised along a single transit spine rather than radiating outward from a centre. Soviet planners revived the idea in the late 1920s under the disurbanist movement; Le Corbusier sketched linear variants; and Russian urbanist Nikolai Milyutin’s 1930 Sotsgorod scheme proposed parallel functional bands along a transport corridor. None of these proposals built out at the scale their authors imagined. The Line was pitched as the first credible attempt at a billion-square-metre linear city.

Mohammed bin Salman’s January 2021 announcement framed the project in civilizational rather than urbanistic terms. The recorded address — broadcast on Saudi state television and reposted to the NEOM corporate site — opened with a critique of contemporary cities: pollution, congestion, sprawl, climate damage, the human cost of car dependency. The proposed alternative was a single continuous structure where, the Crown Prince said, “all daily essentials” would be reachable within a five-minute walk; high-speed transit would handle longer trips; and 95 percent of the surrounding desert would be preserved as untouched landscape because the city consumed almost no horizontal land.

The architectural language was striking and intentionally unfamiliar. Two parallel structures rising 500 metres — taller than any building in North America — clad in mirrored glass on their outer faces. Between them, a 200-metre-wide canyon of layered urban environments: parks, plazas, schools, retail, residences, offices, hospitals, places of worship, all stacked vertically rather than spread laterally. NEOM’s marketing called this “Zero Gravity Urbanism” — a term coined for the project that does not appear in any prior planning literature. Renderings showed cliff-like mirrored walls reflecting desert and sky, an interior climate moderated to subtropical comfort, residents moving up and down through the structure as easily as across.

The Line was also pitched as an answer to climate questions. Zero cars meant no tailpipe emissions and no parking. The compact footprint meant minimal habitat fragmentation. The renewable-powered grid meant no operational carbon. The vertical density meant no suburban sprawl. NEOM marketing claimed The Line would prove the world’s cities could be remade — that this was not a Saudi project but a global prototype.

The first project budget cited publicly was $100-200 billion for infrastructure. The full population target of 9 million was scheduled for buildout by 2045, with an interim 1 million residents by 2030. Architectural commissions went to a roster of internationally famous practices: Morphosis, Adjaye Associates, Coop Himmelb(l)au, UNStudio, Mecanoo, OMA, Studio Fuksas. Norman Foster’s office was attached at various points before exiting. The Line was, in 2021 and 2022, the most prestigious architectural commission anywhere on earth.

The Engineering Critique

Pre-construction critique was unusually sharp for a project still on paper. Architects, transit planners, climate scientists and urbanists — including some attached to the project — raised structural concerns within months of the announcement.

The first was geometric. A linear city is, by definition, the worst possible shape for minimising distance between residents. A 2023 study by Rafael Prieto-Curiel at the Vienna Complexity Science Hub, published in the journal npj Urban Sustainability, calculated that the average distance between two inhabitants of a 170-kilometre linear city of 9 million people would be 57 kilometres — versus 2.9 kilometres for a circular city of equivalent population. Only 1.2 percent of the population would be within walking distance of any given resident, against 24 percent in a circular form. The five-minute-walk claim was true within a single vertical module but false at the city scale: most of The Line’s residents would live tens of kilometres from each other. The claim that high-speed transit solved this only worked if the rail system never failed and never stopped at intermediate stations.

The second concern was thermal. A 500-metre, 170-kilometre wall of mirrored glass in the Tabuk desert — where summer surface temperatures routinely exceed 50°C — would generate enormous thermal loads on the cladding and concentrate reflected radiation onto adjacent ground and air. Specifying a glass system that survives daily thermal expansion, sandstorm abrasion and decades of UV exposure across that surface area is at the edge of what is engineerable; doing it economically is harder still. Maintenance — cleaning the exterior glass alone — has no precedent at this scale.

The third was ecological. The 170-kilometre profile would form a continuous physical barrier across what is one of the major migratory bird flyways between Africa and Eurasia. The mirrored exterior — visually invisible to many bird species — would constitute one of the largest avian collision hazards ever built. Philip Oldfield, head of architecture at the University of New South Wales, estimated the project’s embodied carbon at roughly 1.8 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent across glass, steel and concrete — equivalent to roughly four years of total UK emissions — making the net-zero claim mathematically dependent on operating-phase savings recouping construction-phase emissions over implausibly long timeframes.

The fourth was vertical-transportation engineering. Moving 9 million residents up and down 500 metres of building daily, plus along a 170-kilometre horizontal axis, requires elevator and rail capacity well beyond anything ever assembled in a single project. The 510 km/h underground “Spine” train concept assumes vacuum-tube hyperloop technology that has not been deployed at commercial scale anywhere on earth. Conventional high-speed rail tops out around 350 km/h and requires gentler curves than a 200-metre-wide corridor allows.

The fifth concern, which surfaced loudest after construction began, was simply density. Nine million residents in 34 square kilometres of vertical floorspace produces a density of roughly 260,000 per square kilometre — about ten times Manhattan’s residential density and six times the densest city in the world (Manila in 2020). No one has ever built a residential environment at that density and shown it works.

Several architects originally attached to the project quietly exited. Norman Foster and Mecanoo’s Francine Houben were reported to have withdrawn citing human-rights and ecological concerns. Morphosis founder Thom Mayne — who designed the Phase 1 Hidden Marina segment — left the project altogether by mid-2024.

Construction Status and Reality 2024-2026

The honest construction record is short. NEOM began site clearance and earthworks in October 2021. By October 2022, satellite imagery showed excavation along most of the planned alignment. Foundation piling began in 2023. By late 2024, NEOM Construction Week imagery showed several kilometres of concrete piling and partial structural cores along the Phase 1 (Hidden Marina) segment in the southwestern section of the corridor.

Above ground, almost nothing exists. There is no completed building, no occupied floor, no operating transit. The mirrored-facade system has not been installed at scale anywhere on the project. Photographs from 2024-2025 show what looks like a large, conventional foundation-stage construction site stretched along a desert corridor — closer in appearance to a port or motorway project than a city.

The first major public scaledown came on 5 April 2024, when Bloomberg reported that internal Saudi government documents had cut the 2030 residents target from 1.5 million to under 300,000 and the 2030 buildable length from a previously communicated 5 kilometres to about 2.4 kilometres. Saudi government officials publicly disputed the framing while making no operational changes inconsistent with it. New Civil Engineer picked up the same numbers a few days later under the headline “Plans for Saudi Arabia’s linear city cut from 170km to 2.4km.” Saudi Minister of Economy Faisal Alibrahim told reporters at the World Economic Forum in Riyadh that “for NEOM, the projects, the intended scale is continuing as planned. There is no change in scale.” The market read his denial as confirmation.

In November 2024, NEOM announced that long-time CEO Nadhmi Al-Nasr — who had run the project since 2018 — was being replaced as CEO by Aiman Al-Mudaifer, head of PIF’s local real estate division. Reporting from Reuters, AGBI and New Civil Engineer connected the change to the cost overruns, the scaledown reporting, and a series of damaging stories about worker fatalities and management conduct. The same month, NEOM officially reassigned the lead design role on Phase 1 from Morphosis to DMAA and Gensler.

The most damaging single story landed in March 2025, when the Wall Street Journal reported on a leaked NEOM internal audit. The audit projected $8.8 trillion to complete the full original Line vision and a completion date of 2080 — moving the project from “ambitious” to “arithmetically impossible under any realistic budget.” The audit also documented what its authors called “deliberate manipulation” of cost projections by NEOM management to support continued capital allocation, with consultancy McKinsey & Co. named as having helped construct the optimistic underlying assumptions. NEOM disputed the WSJ characterisation while not contesting the underlying numbers.

In August 2025, the PIF’s annual report disclosed an $8 billion write-down across its giga-project portfolio, with NEOM the largest single contributor. On 16 September 2025, PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan formally suspended Line construction pending strategic review, and over a thousand NEOM staff were relocated from the Tabuk site to Riyadh. As of May 2026, construction has not resumed. Independent reporting from House of Saud, The Middle East Insider and Newsweek in early 2026 describes a project in indefinite pause rather than active build.

The labour story is its own scandal. NEOM contractors have employed an estimated 100,000-plus migrant workers, predominantly from Bangladesh, Nepal, India, Pakistan and the Philippines. A December 2024 Human Rights Watch report — “Die First, And I’ll Pay You Later” — documented systematic wage theft, exorbitant recruitment fees, restrictions on job transfers, inadequate heat protections and uninvestigated worker deaths. ITV reported workers describing 16-hour days, three-hour commutes and routinely denied leave. An October 2024 documentary attached to a number of the giga-projects collectively claimed roughly 21,000 worker deaths across Saudi Vision 2030 sites since 2017, though the figure is disputed and Saudi authorities have rejected it. Either way, the sworn record of named deaths and serious injuries on Line construction is large enough to constitute a freestanding ESG problem for any institutional investor still evaluating exposure.

Role in Saudi Vision 2030

The Line occupies an unusual position in Vision 2030. It is the single most internationally recognised element of the entire programme — by some margin the most-searched, most-rendered, most-news-covered Saudi project of the decade. Its marketing function inside Vision 2030 has been disproportionate to its operational status. Almost no foreign visitor to Saudi Arabia has been to The Line; almost every foreign observer of Saudi Arabia has an opinion about it.

That branding role explains why the project has been protected even as its operational case has weakened. The Line is the visual centrepiece of Saudi positioning at Davos, COP, Expo, the World Economic Forum, the Future Investment Initiative, and dozens of bilateral diplomatic events. Renderings of the mirrored corridor are shorthand for “Saudi Arabia is changing” in a way that nothing in oil, banking or defence procurement can match. The political cost of formally cancelling it would be substantial — both domestically, where MBS personally announced and remains identified with the project, and internationally, where it has been used to recruit foreign investment, foreign architects and foreign tourists into Vision 2030 more broadly.

The economic-substance case is harder. Vision 2030’s stated diversification goals — raising non-oil GDP, growing private-sector employment, expanding tourism, increasing FDI — are mostly being delivered, where they are being delivered, by other parts of the programme: the Aramco IPO, the Public Investment Fund domestic-investment build-out, regulatory reform, sectoral programmes in entertainment, sports and tourism. The Line absorbs capital but produces almost no GDP, no tax base and no measurable diversification benefit until residents and businesses are operating inside it. The project is in the strange position of being central to Vision 2030’s brand and peripheral to its measurable economics.

The internal Saudi reasoning, according to reporting and analyst conversations, has settled around two propositions. First, the Phase 1 segment — Hidden Marina, with its 200,000-300,000 residents and tourism-anchored programme — could plausibly be delivered by the early 2030s and would, on its own, be a major piece of architecture and a meaningful tourism asset. Second, the full 170-kilometre vision is best treated as a long-term aspiration. NEOM communications since late 2024 have softened on timeline language while preserving the original specifications as the eventual target. This is a quiet retreat dressed as a recommitment.

Financial and Capex Reality

The cost trajectory is the clearest evidence that the original Line is not the project being built.

The funding model originally assumed three legs: PIF capital allocation, sovereign-debt issuance, and large foreign direct investment. The first has held — PIF has continued to fund operations — but at lower levels than originally projected and now with formal write-downs. The second has expanded; Saudi sovereign debt issuance has grown materially since 2023, partly to plug the FDI gap. The third never arrived: foreign capital did not commit to The Line at the levels NEOM had modelled, despite extensive marketing through 2022-2024. Multiple PIF officials and foreign bankers, quoted anonymously in Bloomberg, FT and Semafor coverage, have described the FDI shortfall as the single decisive factor in the 2024 scaledown.

The internal-audit numbers reported by the Wall Street Journal — $8.8 trillion lifetime, 2080 completion — have to be read carefully. They represent the cost of building the full original 170-kilometre vision. They do not represent a current funded budget, and NEOM and Saudi authorities have not adopted them as their plan of record. Their significance is that they set out, on paper and in management’s own files, the scale of the gap between the announced project and any defensible funding trajectory.

For oil-revenue context: at roughly $70-75 per barrel through most of 2024-2025 — well below the $90-plus level that Saudi Arabia’s federal budget needs for fiscal balance — and with Aramco having reduced dividends by approximately $40 billion for 2025, the PIF’s spare capital for absorbing cost overruns at NEOM has tightened materially. Vision 2030 broadly is being repriced to the new oil reality, and The Line is the most exposed component of that repricing.

Risks and Controversies

The Line carries an unusually concentrated risk profile across human-rights, governance and ESG dimensions. Each item here is a real-world reputational and political constraint on the project, not a hypothetical.

Howeitat tribal displacement. The Line is being built across the historical homeland of the Howeitat (also spelled Huwaitat), a tribe with deep ties to the Tabuk region. Saudi authorities began forced evictions from villages including al-Khuraybah from 2020 onward to clear the corridor. On 13 April 2020, tribal activist Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti was killed by Saudi security forces in his home, hours after posting videos online refusing to vacate his property and predicting authorities would plant weapons to incriminate him. At least 47 Howeitat tribe members have been arrested or detained on charges related to resisting eviction.

Death sentences upheld April 2024. In October 2022, three Howeitat men — Shadli Ahmad al-Huwaiti (Abdul Rahim’s brother), Ibrahim Salih al-Huwaiti, and Ataullah Moussa al-Huwaiti — were sentenced to death by Saudi Arabia’s Specialised Criminal Court on terrorism-related charges that human-rights organisations including ALQST, MENA Rights Group and the European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights describe as retaliatory for opposition to NEOM displacement. The sentences were upheld on appeal in early 2023 and remained outstanding through 2024-2025. Two further tribesmen, Abdullah and Abdulilah al-Huwaiti, received 50-year prison sentences in August 2022. UN special rapporteurs have publicly raised concerns about the cases.

Worker fatalities. As above, the December 2024 Human Rights Watch report and multiple investigations by ITV, the Wall Street Journal and Dezeen have documented systemic labour abuses on NEOM construction. Specific cases include 25-year-old Pakistani civil engineer Abdul Wali Skandar Khan, killed when a guardrail collapsed on a NEOM site on 28 December 2023. Worker deaths on the project are routinely uninvestigated and often not formally attributed to construction activity.

Foreign-architect dependency. The architectural and engineering core of The Line is overwhelmingly produced by non-Saudi practices and non-Saudi engineering firms. Critics including Architectural Record, ArchDaily and the Architectural Review have argued this produces a project with no organic relationship to Saudi urbanism, Saudi vernacular, Saudi climate-adaptation traditions or local building economies — an imported civilizational symbol rather than an evolved local one.

Governance opacity. NEOM Company is wholly owned by the PIF and operates with limited public disclosure. Financial statements, contracting decisions, environmental impact assessments and labour data are not published at the level expected of a project at this scale. The 2024-2025 cost-overrun and audit-manipulation reporting all rests on leaked documents rather than official disclosure.

MBS political-priority dependency. The Line is identified personally with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to a degree that few infrastructure projects anywhere are tied to a single political leader. That linkage protected the project through the 2022-2023 cost-overrun period — no Saudi official wanted to be the one to recommend cancellation — but it also means The Line’s future is tied to MBS’s political position, which is itself tied to Vision 2030’s overall delivery and to the kingdom’s external relationships.

Future Outlook to 2030

A realistic forecast for The Line by 2030 looks roughly like this. Phase 1 — Hidden Marina, the 2.4-kilometre segment in the southwestern part of the corridor — is the only portion with any plausible 2030 completion path. Construction would have to resume soon after the strategic review concludes, run continuously for the rest of the decade, and avoid the labour, supply-chain and financing disruptions that have shaped the past two years. Even on that path, “completion” would mean a built segment with an initial cohort of residents — possibly in the low tens of thousands rather than the headline 300,000 figure — partial transit, operational utilities and a tourism-anchored programme of hospitality, retail and entertainment.

The mirrored facade at the original 500-metre height across the full Phase 1 segment is unlikely to be built at full scale by 2030. More plausible is a lower, simpler envelope on Phase 1, with the full mirrored exterior preserved as a marketing target for later phases. The 510 km/h underground transit is essentially impossible to deliver by 2030 given that the technology has not been demonstrated commercially anywhere in the world; conventional or upper-end conventional rail is the realistic Phase 1 transit reality.

Beyond Phase 1, the 167.6 kilometres of unscheduled Line is the open question. Three scenarios exist. First, slow extension: Phase 1 succeeds, generates revenue and political momentum, and Phases 2-N are added in five-to-fifteen-kilometre tranches over the 2030s and 2040s, never reaching the original 170 kilometres but producing a meaningful linear urban corridor over decades. Second, indefinite pause: Phase 1 functions as a standalone tourism and residential anchor, the rest of the corridor remains permanently unfunded, and The Line ends up as a 2.4-kilometre architectural curiosity rather than a city. Third, formal scope reset: Saudi authorities at some point publicly retire the 170-kilometre figure and rebrand the project around what Phase 1 actually delivers. The third is politically the most difficult; the second is operationally the most likely.

The deeper question, which Vision 2030 will have to answer at some point, is whether The Line is best understood as a city under construction or as a piece of infrastructure-scale architectural art. The honest answer for this decade is the latter — and the honest 2050 question is whether a country with Saudi Arabia’s demographic, climate and capital constraints would, looking back, have allocated the same trillions to the same shape.

Sources

• NEOM official: HRH Crown Prince announces THE LINE
• Bloomberg: Saudis Scale Back Ambition for $1.5 Trillion Desert Project Neom (April 2024)
• Wall Street Journal coverage of NEOM internal audit (March 2025)
• New Civil Engineer: Plans for Saudi Arabia’s linear city cut from 170km to 2.4km
• New Civil Engineer: Anticipated cost of NEOM gigaproject explodes from $500bn to $8.8 trillion
• Reuters/The National: Saudi Arabia replaces NEOM CEO Al-Nasr
• Human Rights Watch: “Die First, And I’ll Pay You Later” (December 2024)
• ALQST: Death sentences for men who refused to make way for NEOM
• OHCHR: UN experts alarmed by imminent executions linked to NEOM
• Architectural Record: Line of Discontent — Saudi Arabia’s Linear Folly
• The Conversation: What is The Line, the 170km-long mirrored metropolis?
• Prieto-Curiel et al., npj Urban Sustainability — linear vs. circular city analysis (2023)
• Wikipedia: The Line, Saudi Arabia
• Wikipedia: Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti
• Dezeen: NEOM CEO departs amid reports of worker fatalities

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