“The Line” is essentially an attempt to realize the “ribbon arcology” concept from Science Fiction in real life. Design and construction are underway, although ambitions are already being scaled back and aspirational timelines extended, as tends to happen with visionary projects. This Financial Times article takes a somewhat sneering negative tone, in my view. My thought is that a linear project gives you the ability to plan/design/construct in phases, scale up and down, and change timelines as economic conditions and technologies change during its construction. It has been referred to as “multi-generational”, so the fact it hasn’t been built in the first few years after it was conceived does not constitute failure, in my view. Still, I doubt it is particularly fun to work on a project like this, and I especially wouldn’t want to be a in a high-profile responsible position on the project.

Such was the gravity-defying spirit of Neom — the vast mega-project with The Line at its heart — that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman hoped would redefine life in the kingdom and beyond. The chandelier was just one part of The Line, a 500 metre-tall mirror-glass structure running 170km across the sand and designed to house 9mn people: a city built into a wall higher than the Empire State Building.

Of course, I am particularly interested in the transportation, water, energy, and food aspects. If you build something linear like this, how do you avoid problems with bottlenecks or breakdowns somewhere in the middle affecting the entire system?