Plans for Neom’s The Line, a zero carbon city in Saudi Arabia with “vertically layered” buildings, have been scaled back.
The Line, which was originally meant to stretch 105 miles (170km), is now expected to reach just a mile and a half (2.4km) by 2030, as reported by Bloomberg.
According to the publication, officials expect The Line to house fewer than 300,000 people by 2030. Initially, the development was to be home to 1.5 million residents.
The Line reduced from 170km to 2.4km
The ambitious project has attracted criticism since it was unveiled in 2021. Last year, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman and several architects involved in The Line said it was “very doable” and “possible”.
Prince Mohammed said in a Discovery Channel documentary titled The Line: Saudi Arabia’s City of the Future in Neom: “They say a lot of projects in Saudi Arabia can’t be done – they’re too ambitious. They can keep saying that and we can keep proving them wrong.”
“It’s massive. It’s huge. It’s a project making money, it’s a project absorbing demand that we assumed in Saudi Arabia, and it’s something that creates the new way of building cities and a new way of living.”
The scaling down of The Line is because Saudi’s sovereign wealth fund is yet to approve the Neom 2024 budget, Bloomberg reports. Additionally, at least one of The Line’s contractors has started dismissing some of its workers on the site.
Giles Pendleton, The Line’s chief operating officer, recently shared a selection of new images on LinkedIn to showcase the latest updates at the giga-project.
Alongside the images, he wrote: “How to answer the naysayers about the incredible work being done in Neom? Show a cross section of the world’s largest building site from the mountains to the sea.”
Images courtesy of Neom
