For a building project marketed like a Hollywood blockbuster, the latest footage from the deserts of northwestern Saudi Arabia is a little underwhelming. A column of trucks is moving sand, a row of diggers poking at the barren landscape like toys arranged on a beach. The soundtrack, an epic swirl of fast-paced, rising strings, doesn’t really belong here.
Still, the video got its message across: it’s really happening. The widest aerial shots reveal an enormous groove in the sand, stretching to the horizon. We are seeing the birth of “The Line”, an insanely ambitious project for a city extending 170km through the desert, sandwiched in a narrow space between two immense walls. The new construction footage is an update on the viral CGI trailers that overwhelmed the internet last year, showing us glimpses of what life will be like inside this linear chasm of a city: a city where there will be no cars or roads, where every amenity is always a five-minute walk away, and where, according to one planning document, there could be robot maids.
This scheme sounds mad enough, but The Line is only the centrepiece of a much bigger development, called Neom (a blend of neo and mustaqbal, Arabic for “future”). Neom will be a semi-autonomous state, encompassing 26,000 square kilometres of desert with new resorts and tech industry centres.
There may be no philosopher kings, but there are sci-fi princes. The dreams of Mohammed bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia and chairman of the Neom board, make the techno-futurism of Silicon Valley look down to earth. Bin Salman is especially fond of the cyber-punk genre of science fiction, which involves gritty hi-tech dystopias. He has enlisted a number of prominent Hollywood visual specialists for the Neom project, including Olivier Pron of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy franchise. A team of consultants was asked to develop science-fiction aesthetics for a tourist resort, resulting in “37 options, arranged alphabetically from ‘Alien Invasion’ to ‘Utopia’”. One proposal for a luxury seaside destination, which featured a glowing beach of crushed marble, was deemed insufficiently imaginative.
Such spectacular indulgence must be causing envy among the high-flying architects and creative consultants not yet invited to join the project — if there are any left. But it also makes the moral dimension difficult to ignore: how should we judge those jumping on board bin Salman’s gravy train? Saudi Arabia — in case anyone has forgotten in the years since the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered at its consulate in Istanbul — is a brutal authoritarian state.
In recent weeks, this has prompted some soul-searching in the architecture community, with several stinging rebukes aimed at Neom. Writing in Dezeen, the urbanist Adam Greenfield asks firms such as Morphosis, the California-based architects designing The Line, to consider “whether the satisfaction of working on this project, and the compensation that attends the work, will ever compensate you for your participation in an ecological and moral atrocity”. Ouch. Greenfield’s intervention came a week after Rowan Moore asked in The Observer: “When will whatever gain that might arise from the creation of extraordinary buildings cease to outweigh the atrocities that go with them?”
You see, bin Salman’s blank slate in the desert was not actually blank (they never are); settlements belonging to the Huwaitat tribespeople have been ruthlessly flattened to make space for Neom. One man leading resistance to the clearances, Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti, was killed by security forces in 2020, and three others have been sentenced to execution. Critics also point to the absurd pretence that The Line is an eco-friendly project, given the industrial operations needed to build and maintain a city for nine million people in searing desert temperatures.
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SubscribeLook on the bright side: all the while these guys are indulging their fantasies in some remote desert region they’re not inflicting them on us.
The problem is all the birds that are going to die because of this monstrosity. It will block the migration of many species who will hit the wall. Also, you can’t not be worried about how the impressionable and insane people of the World Economic Forum are going to react to it. For all we know we might be pushed into this sci-fi abomination even in the West.
Don’t worry, the birds only die if they actually build the thing. Which they won’t – it is ludicrous.
Don’t worry, the birds only die if they actually build the thing. Which they won’t – it is ludicrous.
The problem is all the birds that are going to die because of this monstrosity. It will block the migration of many species who will hit the wall. Also, you can’t not be worried about how the impressionable and insane people of the World Economic Forum are going to react to it. For all we know we might be pushed into this sci-fi abomination even in the West.
Look on the bright side: all the while these guys are indulging their fantasies in some remote desert region they’re not inflicting them on us.
Whether it’s China or Saudi Arabia, for liberals, it seems money always trumps principles. Considering that Enlightenment liberalism’s only principle is “my rights only stop at your nose”, this isn’t really surprising.
Ethical principles require a metaphysical source (something outside of man). Liberal, secular, humanism can not maintain them on its own.
Whether it’s China or Saudi Arabia, for liberals, it seems money always trumps principles. Considering that Enlightenment liberalism’s only principle is “my rights only stop at your nose”, this isn’t really surprising.
Ethical principles require a metaphysical source (something outside of man). Liberal, secular, humanism can not maintain them on its own.
Makes Albert Speer look like a bumbling amateur.
Makes Albert Speer look like a bumbling amateur.