In the vast desert sands of Saudi Arabia, an audacious experiment captured the imagination of urbanists, technologists, and futurists worldwide. NEOM’s “The Line” — a proposed 170-kilometer-long linear city — promised to revolutionize how humans live, work, and move. Its pitch sounds seductive: zero cars, zero streets, zero carbon emissions. Just two mirrored walls slicing through the desert, enclosing a hyper-dense vertical metropolis. But in 2025, the once-hyped vision has lost its glitz. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
A High-Stakes Urban Laboratory
NEOM, as a whole, represents one of the most experimental development efforts in the world. With a budget exceeding $500 billion and backing from Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the megaproject was envisioned as a showcase for rethinking civilization with The Line as its centrepiece: a radical departure from concentric or sprawl-based cities, challenging centuries of urban form. Yet, as in any laboratory, not every hypothesis holds up under pressure. Recent reports reveal that only 2.4 kilometres of The Line’s intended 170 km may be completed by 2030. Internal documents and satellite imagery point to major construction delays and there is growing scepticism among global observers.
More tellingly, thousands of planned residential units have reportedly been shelved, and major global investors are treading cautiously. Even within NEOM’s ecosystem, other projects — such as the floating Oxagon port and the mountain resort Trojena — seem to be progressing with greater coherence and less public scrutiny.
Why It Didn’t Work — And Why That’s Okay
The Line, for all its visionary appeal, faced structural challenges from the start. First, the idea of hyper-density in a desert climate raises severe questions about livability. Compressing nine million residents into a confined corridor just 200 meters wide meant facing not only engineering difficulties but also sociological ones: how would communities thrive in such a constrained vertical stack?
Second, the city’s utopian transport model — based on ultra-high-speed transit and drone logistics — remains largely untested at scale. Without real-world precedents, NEOM essentially tried to leapfrog decades of urban evolution, compressing it into a single, high-risk bet.
But experiments are meant to fail. Laboratories are where ideas are pushed to their limits. In that light, The Line’s struggles are not indictments — they are data and lessons learned. And if NEOM does this, the investment may yet yield dividends.
The Spine of a New Kind of Linear City
Even if The Line’s original vision proves untenable, its physical and digital infrastructure could prove very useful. The linear form still holds potential, especially as a backbone for a more distributed city — one that doesn’t force all functions into a narrow hyper-dense band, but instead embraces a necklace of specialized nodes and satellites along the spine. Rather than one continuous wall, imagine a series of linked but differentiated hubs: research districts, renewable energy farms, agrivoltaic belts, residential zones, resorts and cultural centres. Each node could be optimized for its use, with ample desert space between them — akin to beads on a string rather than sardines in a can.
The core transit spine — already partially under construction — would remain critical, enabling high-speed, carbon-free travel between nodes. Instead of replacing existing urban paradigms, it could augment them, distributing growth sustainably and more contextually across a larger territory.
This model resonates with the linear settlements seen in historic canal towns, railway corridors, and even highway-linked satellite cities — but updated for the 21st century’s climate and technological constraints. It combines NEOM’s ambition with a more grounded sense of urban pragmatism.
Learning Forward
The Line may never reach its original scale, and its mirrored walls may one day reflect more desert than density. But NEOM should be applauded for daring to ask fundamental questions about how we live. Not all of its answers will endure — and they shouldn’t have to. The future of cities lies not in perfection, but in adaptation. If The Line becomes a test bed whose failures are studied, repurposed, and improved upon, then its legacy may prove more valuable than if it had been built exactly as planned.
After all, the most resilient cities are the ones that know how to pivot and to adapt. No city has entirely been built as planned but has been adapted to respond to constant changes. Why would The Line be different?
Cover Image:
Proposal of Soviet Avantgarde Architect Ivan Leonidov for Magnitogorsk as a Linear City
socks-studio.com under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license
