“There won’t be a single supermarket,” Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman told Bloomberg in 2017. “Zero. Nobody will go and buy things for their home. Everything will come to your house using technology.”
The then 32-year-old was laying out the most ambitious vision for a city in human history. His megaproject, Neom, would transform Saudi Arabia from an economy dependent on oil to a global hub of innovation and prosperity.
Just months earlier, he had become the Kingdom’s de facto ruler, promising to usher in an era of idealism and technological revolution. This was his most daring gamble yet.
As part of the Neom project, more than £363 billion would be pumped into the construction of a mountain ski resort, several coastal resorts and an industrial zone along the coast of the Red Sea.
But the jewel in Neom’s crown was The Line: a 170km megacity consisting of two gleaming 500-metre high skyscrapers cutting through the desert sky.
Less than a decade on from the announcement of Neom, the Saudi government appears to have admitted defeat. After a series of delays and ballooning costs, the Financial Times reported that the project would be scaled back.
Saudi officials now envisage Neom being something “far smaller” than the original design, but architects say the project was doomed from the start.
“It’s an excellent example of a type of architecture where you propose something provocative to get a reaction. It’s always been an advertising gimmick for Saudi Arabia,” says Professor James Campbell, an architect and architectural historian at the University of Cambridge.
The majority of the architectural community shares his view, he claims, with some frustrated that the plan was not dismissed much earlier. “It’s ignored all the [engineering] problems. It’s just a big shiny wall.”
The limitations, he says, are not structural. In theory, it would be physically possible to build The Line – but the city does not make sense from an urban planning or financial perspective.
“As a building it makes no sense, and as a city it makes no sense – the perfect shape for a city is a tight circle”, he says, adding that the project is “economically not feasible”.
Riyadh does not deny immense overspending. “We spent too much”, one Saudi official said at an investment forum last November. “We rushed at 100 miles an hour. We are now running deficits. We need to reprioritise.”
Prince Mohammed is reported to have come up with the idea for a linear city himself. The original design, put forward by Los Angeles architecture firm Morphosis, proposed a 2-kilometre wide strip running from the sea to the mountains, connected entirely by rail.
But the crown prince’s ambition only grew. “I told the team, ‘how about if we take that two kilo[metres] and we flip it to two towers? Is that going to work, or is it going to be massive?’” he said in a documentary on the Discovery Channel.
The new brief envisaged a 200-metre wide city, housing 9 million people and operating without roads, cars or emissions. Officials said it would run on 100 per cent renewable energy.
Morphosis, founded by star architect Thom Mayne, drafted the initial designs. Other major architecture and planning companies came onboard, including Adjaye Associates, Peter Cook and OMA.
Several firms, including Morphosis, have since left the Neom team as concerns grew around budget constraints and alleged human rights abuses on site.
The project is now being led by companies including Delugan Meissl Associate Architects, Gensler, and Mott MacDonald. It remains unclear what role they will play following the scaling back of Neom.
The Independent has reached out to most of the publicly-listed companies involved in the project, as well as Neom itself, but received no response.
Despite skepticism, Prince Mohammed was consistently dismissive of those who doubted the project, claiming it would add $100 billion to Saudi GDP by 2030.
But the crown prince was “overly ambitious right from the outset”, said Dr Neil Quilliam, associate fellow in the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House.
Officials in Riyadh got “caught up in the enthusiasm of the changes that were taking place” but would privately have felt doubt over whether it could be achieved, he told The Independent.
“At that particular time there was a buy-in to Saudi Arabia suddenly having this energy, this power and this will to do whatever it wanted, to really set a new agenda,” he said.
“It wanted to demonstrate there was a clear willingness and desire to demonstrate that the country was shifting and changing. In Neom, it was sort of laying that out.”
As a result, the significant down-scaling of the project will be met with a “sense of embarrassment”, Dr Quilliam said. Prince Mohammed has gone through a series of “painful learning processes” during his time in power and will emerge with a stronger sense of “realism”, he added.
Future projects on the scale of Neom, he said, will be much less likely going forward as a result. For now, there will be no gleaming towers in the desert.
