Saudi Arabia's The Line: $50 Billion Spent, Only Two Kilometers Built

The Line: $50 Billion for a Hole in the Sand

Four years after Mohammed bin Salman unveiled the linear city intended to span 170 kilometers of desert, the site antiestéticatures barely a couple of kilometers of metal pillars and open trenches. Neom’s flagship project, the crown jewel of Vision 2030, has already burned through $50 billion, and work is suspended despite no official cancellation. The promised city—200 meters wide, 500 meters high, nine million inhabitants, a five-runway airport, and a floating stadium—has become a thought experiment that no one could build.

What Remains of The Line on the Sand

The current landscape is a row of metal supports driven into the ground and deep trenches cutting across the terrain. Nothing else. According to people familiar with the project, efforts now focus on completing some small buildings around the marina. The Neom international airport, with five runways and capacity for 100 million annual passengers, is indefinitely suspended. The marina dug into the desert and the 30-story spider lamp meant to crown it have collided with the laws of physics.

The magnitude of this whim not only exhausted funds prematurely. Materials needed to erect the first 20 modules would have required an annual cement supply exceeding France’s total production, according to a former employee who worked on the site. With costs skyrocketing, fewer foreign investors want to put money into a project advancing at a snail’s pace.

Forced Evictions at Gunpoint and 50-Year Sentences

The human toll of the project is harder to conceal. Carlos de las Heras, Amnesty International’s researcher for Europe and Central Asia, denounces forced evictions from ancestral villages located along the line’s route. “Some were evicted from their homes at gunpoint, and people have been sentenced to 50 years in prison for refusing to leave,” he states. Migrant workers’ conditions also undermine the narrative: shifts up to 16 hours long, sometimes without days off and with precarious housing.

Environmental activists also raised alarms about the original design. The 500-meter-high wall, taller than the Empire State Building, would reflect the desert landscape and, they warned, cause the death of millions of birds migrating annually between Europe and Asia. The car-free, clean-energy city had a fundamental flaw: no one calculated the ecological cost of erecting a vertical mirror in the middle of the desert.

The Linear Urbanism Wet Dream

The idea of an elongated city is not new. Arturo Soria designed his Madrid Ciudad Lineal in 1885: single-family homes with gardens, boulevards, and public transport connecting houses and industry. The difference is that Soria thought in useful kilometers, while MBS envisioned 170 kilometers of showcase. The Saudi experiment, however, resembles more a strip 200 meters wide and 170 long: 34 square kilometers of absolute monotony where, according to circulating calculations, any movement along the line would be a sentence.

Some argue the project was never a real urban plan but a tool for Mohammed bin Salman to marginalize the old Saudi guard and reinforce his control over the kingdom. From that perspective, construction failure is secondary: the goal was power, not the city. The question remains whether the Crown Prince needed to spend $50 billion on the set piece.

The Guggenheim Effect and Other Concrete Fantasies

The Saudi case recalls a list of pharaonic projects that aged poorly. In Spain, Bilbao’s Guggenheim effect encouraged other cities to seek their own signature building: Seville’s Metropol Parasol worked, but Galicia’s City of Culture, Valencia’s City of Light, or Barcelona’s Forum remain reminders that an icon alone does not fix a city. The difference is that there the money came from public coffers, and here from a sheikh in a hurry to make history.

The lingering question is not whether The Line failed, but how long it will take for the desert to swallow the pillars already driven in. Will anyone remember the Crown Prince when sand covers the foundations?