Leaders of The Line share vision of a brave new world

November 15, 2024, 1:33 PM

In the absence of any concrete structures as yet, Neom exhibitors provided virtual reality sets to give throngs of curious visitors a sense of what The Line will look like — Neom used virtual reality to give curious visitors a sense of what The Line will look like

New collaborators announced
Virtual reality demonstrations
Based on walkability

Its managers and designers say it is the human society of the future, but others might see in it a dystopian vision of life shielded in a glass box from an uninhabitable world.

Leading figures behind the Neom city The Line – the boldest of Saudi Arabia’s $1.25 trillion giga-projects – made a coordinated pitch at Cityscape Global, a major real estate exhibition in Riyadh this week.

That followed months of speculation about the project’s progress after Neom – a territory carved out of northwest Saudi Arabia – said it would open in 2030 at less than 5km long, while the full 170km will be strung out to 2045.

This strategy solved the problem of financing as the government struggles with lower than expected oil prices and foreign investment, but also gives Neom time to test the waters with the first phase of one of the world’s most complex construction projects.

People, Person, Urban Leading figures behind Neom's linear city, The Line, made a coordinated pitch at Cityscape Global in Riyadh this week — Leading figures behind Neom’s linear city, The Line, made a coordinated pitch at Cityscape Global in Riyadh this week

“It’s the scale of the collaboration – the world’s best engineers, designers, landscapers, all coming together like a Nasa project to try to achieve almost the unachievable,” said Ian Mulcahey, principal strategy director for urban design at US architects Gensler.

Neom said this week it had appointed Gensler, engineering consultants Mott MacDonald and Austria’s Delugan Meissl Associated Architects (DMAA) to help with the first phase of the giant mirrored building, which will be 500 metres high and 200 metres wide.

Modelled on Manhattan, as one of the earliest linear cities, the basic idea was to take the communities along each side of a Central Park-like area and stack them up as two elongated walls encasing an open public space running the length of the construction.

In the absence of any concrete structures as yet, Neom exhibitors provided virtual reality sets to give throngs of curious visitors a sense of what it would look like from the inside.

“In some ways it’s a well-trodden path. If you look at the Burj Khalifa [in Dubai] or all the tall buildings, every construction has solved all these problems before. There’s nothing new we’re facing fresh out of the box,” said James Middling, global sector leader in built environments at Mott MacDonald.

Others experts waxed lyrical about the novelties of life in what resembles a giant shopping mall.

“We’ve all been experiencing traffic, pollution and isolation in the cities of today, and they’re only getting larger, whereas cities were meant to bring people together,” said Tarek Qaddumi, executive director for The Line design.

“All we’ve done now is just sprawl. So you put away the old model and go back to first principles,” he said.

Described as 'multilayered', The Line will feature 'floating villages on top of retail boulevards' — Described as ‘multilayered’, The Line will feature ‘floating villages on top of retail boulevards’

Multilayered public space

Martin Josst, a partner at DMAA, discussed human behavioural models that would be applied inside the utopian world of The Line.

“We did this very detailed microclimate study. We now have millions of data points – the temperature, humidity, daylight,” he said.

“The 3D dimensionality of the city is quite amazing. You have this multilayered public [space]. It’s thrilling that you have floating villages on top of retail boulevards, you have cultural assets that are under the sports areas,” Josst said.

“You can experience this in a two, three, four, five-minute walk, the city is really based on this human walkability, no cars.”

As the leaders of The Line spoke, Neom dropped a statement announcing the removal of CEO Nadhmi Al-Nasr in an apparent effort to move beyond months of negative headlines over Neom salaries, worker conditions – and construction delays on The Line.

“A lot of people look at The Line as something that’s just crazy, something way too ambitious,” Qaddumi said. “But in fact The Line could not be more logical.”