In 2021, The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia revealed plans for a 100-mile linear city made up of small, ‘modular’ communities in which residents can walk to all the necessary public amenities within five minutes.
Dubbed ‘The Line’, the city will have no cars or streets, with residences built around local amenities within easy walking distance.
The city will be powered entirely by renewable energy, and situated inside Neom, a region that Saudi Arabia plans to invest $500bn in, to make it smart, sustainable, fully automated and carbon-free.
Transport across the city will take place underground. Below The Line, two tiers of subterranean transportation networks will be built: a subway level for passenger travel, and another high speed network for autonomous freight transport.
The Line is only one part of Neom’s adventurous plans for smarter working, living and tourism, driven by more sustainable planning and materials and enabled by AI infrastructure. They hope to attract residential and tourist audiences and propel KSA as the leader in smart cities and a luxury tourist destination. More importantly, they hope the tourist income and property investments will help the Kingdom transition, as demand for oil inevitably declines and electric and hydrogen grows.
Other key projects planned within Neom include: Sindalah (a luxurious island destination for yachting, diving and tourism) , Trojena (a mountainous, cooler region for work & play), Oxagon (an advanced and clean industrial ecosystem) and Leyja (a luxury eco-tourism location of stunning boutique hotels and wellness centres built around the mountains).
It remains to be seen whether these ambitious plans will be fully realised, although construction of the Line started in 2023.
The plans present a striking portrait of how the cities of the future could look like and function when built around artificial intelligence and automation, instead of road transport.
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