Saudi Arabia’s The Line, a proposed 170-kilometer linear city carved across the Tabuk desert, has moved from concept to visible earthworks. But what’s now under construction, what remains conceptual, and how far the original brief has been pared back are questions worth answering before the next glossy rendering arrives.
When Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman unveiled The Line in 2021, it read like an architectural manifesto for a new era: a 170-kilometer, car-free, zero-emissions linear city inside NEOM made of two mirrored walls, rising 500 meters above the desert and wide enough to carry urban life on a horizontal ribbon. The claim was bold: the development would house up to 9 million people and, together with other NEOM components, form part of a trillion-dollar-plus reimagining of the Saudi kingdom’s economy. That vision is now being dramatically reworked: officials and media reports say the scheme has been scaled down in size and ambition, with major parts paused and timetables pushed out by decades.
It forces a reckoning about the limits of architectural futurism when set against geopolitics, energy cycles, environmental aspiration, and the realities of delivering infrastructure at a continental scale.
From Visionary Blueprint to Scaled Reality: The Line’s Numbers and Real-World Shift
At launch, the headline figures were a 170 km long linear city, 200 meters across, rising 500 meters high, home to 9 million people, and powered by 100% renewable energy, a new model of city claimed to preserve 95% of the surrounding land for nature. NEOM was part of a suite of giga-projects that, when combined, were variably reported at between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion in expected public and private spending.
Reports from November 2025 indicate that The Line, as originally designed, will only be built in a much smaller form, a few kilometers long, accommodating roughly 300,000 people, and that the 170 km aspiration may be a multi-decadal outcome (three to five decades, by some accounts). Senior executives tied the change to fiscal sensibility after years of high spending, changing oil price dynamics, and the need to prioritize investments that show short-term returns.
Those are not small edits. A move from 170 km to “a few kilometers” is a scale reduction of two orders of magnitude. The urban and infrastructural logics that work at the neighborhood scale, walkability, microclimates, and local energy loops are fundamentally different from the systems engineering needed to run a city stretched across 170 km. In other words, this is not merely shortening; it’s a redesign of the entire proposal.
Why the change makes sense
Several converging pressures explain the retreat:
- Oil price and fiscal reality. The kingdom’s finances remain sensitive to oil prices. When Vision 2030 was announced in 2016, oil was near triple-digit levels; it has since fluctuated, and the comfortable fiscal envelope assumed then has narrowed, prompting officials to “course correct.”
- Escalating costs and overruns. Multiple NEOM subprojects have experienced delays and cost inflation. Sindalah, Trojena, and Oxagon have all shown overruns or shifted timelines, prompting scrutiny about which projects deliver value versus prestige.
- Governance and leadership churn. Upper management changes, including the departure of long-time NEOM executives and public reporting of alleged waste, have fed an appetite for reassessment and reprioritization.
For national policymakers, redirecting funds to initiatives with clearer near-term returns (energy, AI, data centers) while keeping a much smaller version of The Line as a research-by-demonstration project is a defensible political choice. For designers and urbanists, it means the speculative, whole-system thinking behind The Line must be reframed as iterative prototyping.
Design Challenges, Construction Feasibility, and Technical Realities
A major tension in reporting over the last two years is the gap between the originally stated ambition and the pragmatic reality of financing and delivery. Multiple independent reports and sources inside and close to NEOM say that the scope and cost of The Line have been repeatedly reassessed.
Decisions by Saudi authorities have shifted focus toward components of NEOM that deliver near-term international profile (for example, sports and tourism venues) while pausing or reducing the size and speed of the full Line rollout. Reuters reporting and several industry briefings show a clear pivot toward phasing and prioritization as costs balloon and timelines slip.
Even when separated from its political and financial context, The Line poses significant engineering and urban-planning challenges that are instructive in their own right:
- Structure and façade physics: A continuous 500-meter-tall façade, even if only intermittent, creates enormous wind, thermal, and structural loads. Designing a long, thin built form to withstand desert sandstorms, thermal expansion along kilometers of mirrored cladding, and seismic or settlement effects is non-trivial and would drive specialized detailing and expansion joint design. (NEOM’s published cross-section highlights the slenderness that creates these constraints.)
- Utilities and linear logistics: Delivering water, power, waste, and transport along a 170-km corridor changes the assumptions of density that typical cities rely on. Linear high-speed transit is technically feasible, but the length and redundancy required for resilience mean costs escalate quickly.
- Phasing for population: NEOM’s promotional material suggested millions of residents in full maturity. Practical phasing usually means building districts, testing systems, and scaling from tens of thousands up. Moving from a demonstration sector to mass occupancy requires operational systems that are already unproven at this scale.
The technical demands also explain why authorities would re-sequence or shrink parts of the plan before attempting full-scale vertical construction.
The project is central to Saudi Vision 2030 and the Crown Prince’s economic diversification agenda, which gives it political weight and international visibility. But such visibility cuts both ways: the project has been subject to scrutiny over costs, governance, and the social impacts of land clearance and resettlement in the NEOM zone. Critics have questioned whether the project’s benefits, costs, and environmental impacts have been fully assessed, an issue of importance given the involvement of public funds and international partners.
NEOM’s The Line 2025: Current Construction Focus and Strategic Priorities
Industry and financial reporting over the past 12–24 months indicates NEOM leaders and Saudi decision-makers are prioritizing elements of the broader development that produce international events, economic anchors, and earlier revenue streams (staged tourism hubs, Oxagon’s industrial area, and sports facilities tied to global events), while putting a slower, phased approach around the Line itself.
That doesn’t mean The Line is cancelled; rather, the current phase looks like a pragmatic re-sequencing: complete critical infrastructure, demonstrate live districts, then expand on lessons learned and available funding.
The Line remains one of the most talked-about urban proposals worldwide because it reframes the question of what a city can be. The desert is already being prepared for a linear infrastructure corridor visible; measurable work is underway, but the original, uninterrupted 170-kilometer mirrored façade and the billion-person-scale rhetoric have been met with a dose of real-world constraint: cost escalation, technical complexity, and a political appetite to prioritize short-term, deliverable assets.
In that sense, the project’s present phase looks less like a single instant leap into an imagined future and more like a traditional megaproject being reworked into manageable phases.
Credit: © NEOM
