Recent history has several examples of smart city ideas that never left the drawing board and those that became engineering boondoggles – massively disruptive and expensive construction that by the time it is complete, faces a different market or demand than when it was conceived.

Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, comes to mind. Decades of financial hangups and construction delays led to a highly stunted, overly ambitious, not-so-carbon-neutral and futuristic city – in a place no one has asked for it. Sondgo, South Korea, seems destined for the same fate, albeit for different reasons. Google’s Sidewalk Labs and the city of Toronto reconsidered their partnership in light of the 2020 pandemic. Their original plans were for a waterside community serving as a testbed for autonomous vehicles, digital services, highly modular construction techniques, among others.

And yet none of those were as grandiose as Saudi Arabia’s The Line. As first proposed in 2022, it features two parallel skyscrapers, each 1,600 ft tall and 110 miles long, upon completion in 2045. The first 1.5 long section of The Line will be completed by 2030. There, 300,000 Saudi Arabians will live, work and play their entire lives in a campus that is extremely digital, automated, sustainable, efficient and interconnected. Eventually the population will exceed nine million.

The Line will be a key engineering experiment to understand what types of smart city technologies will prevail on this type of scale. Because lessons learned might be all there is to recover at the end of this project.Artistic interpretation of The Line, which features ample public space and flora. Source: Neom

Dreams of utopia

Neom stadium rendering. Source: Saudi Arabia Ministry of Sport

The Line’s engineers have attempted to resolve the most resource intensive and wasteful challenges of modern life within the buildings’ walls. There will be no cars and no carbon emissions. Although most amenities – like banking or medical offices – will be highly walkable for residents, transportation will be offered by high-speed underground rail, electric trams and eventually, urban air mobility.

In fact, the whole building will run on renewable energy. The Line will need a lot of power, as services, utilities, residents and even mundane facets of life are captured, stored and analyzed by AI to make civic changes and respond to weather events, citizen transportation patterns, security needs or a multitude of other challenges. AI will be used to help design The Line out of designs for prefabricated sections. That model can later serve as its digital twin.

In this case, generic and ugly urban sprawl has been resolved for something coined a “linear city,” where city residential, industrial, commercial and administrative zones are not just defined, but a feature of the infrastructure itself. It is a self-contained urban center, with schools, restaurants, shops, recreational areas and everything a populace needs. Parks, urban gardens and additional buildings will fill the space between the two skyscrapers, which will be connected by bridges and tunnels.

There is no end to the immensity or opulence. A section called “Hidden Marina” will offer integrated terminals for cruise ships. A sports stadium, 1,000 ft above the ground, will host the 2034 World Cup. A high-speed train will take riders from end-to-end, more than 100 miles, in 20 minutes. The entire façade will be mirrors. DJ Khaled will almost certainly be there.

And this is just part of Saudi Vision 2030, which is a government initiative to diversify the kingdom’s economy away from petroleum and toward tourism, construction, hospitality and services. The Line is only a part of Saudi Arabia’s construction of Neom, itself billed a futuristic city. And Neom is one of 16 megaprojects in the nation – each costing no less than $1.9 billion – that are further investments in the Saudi economy to diversify away from the shrinking importance of the oil industry.

A project grounded on Earth

Nothing clears bureaucratic red tape, local opposition and critical thinking like the third richest but most inhumane government on Earth. Suffice it to say that the scale of engineering behind The Line, and Saudi Vision 2030, would be extremely difficult in most other political environments. Many of these investments are part of a larger campaign to whitewash the country’s human rights record to drive foreign visitors and investment.

Solar and wind power can certainly go far in the desert, but those resources aren’t generating yet and a completely green energy facility might be decades away still. The Line is also going to need vast quantities of water for its residents, green spaces and canals, which must be desalinated from the ocean. A building in the desert, covered in glass will get hot – so crank up the HVAC. The Line will be extremely resource intensive.

By some measures, The Line is already a disaster. Construction is powered with fossil fuels and there are many high-carbon materials in the building construction. One estimate claims construction will generate as much carbon emissions as the entire U.K. does in four years. A giant building of mirrors is going to kill a lot of migratory birds. Indigenous peoples were displaced from the site of The Line. Some estimates state The Line has already killed tens of thousands of foreign construction workers, who face notoriously bad treatment in Saudi Arabia.

There are some very practical challenges as well. One of the primary benefits is the idea that this will ease most commuting. Everything is walkable and if it's not, there are high-speed linear trains. Researchers and mathematicians analyzed The Line and found that a line was one of the most inefficient building shapes. At any given moment, two random individuals in The Line are on average 35 miles apart. In Johannesburg, itself a sprawling megacity with a larger current population than The Line’s goal, two individuals are today only 21 miles apart. The average distance between two points has grown.

Consider that in The Line’s skyscrapers, there will also be a lot of vertical travel, not just horizontal. Linear transportation methods are extremely prone to cascading setbacks from a single delay. Due to the modularity of the predesigned sections, expansions, new construction or modification projects will be made more difficult. The study concluded that a circle would be the optimal city shape. It could achieve better walkability and digitalization at a lower building density; two random citizens would be an average of 1.8 miles apart.

The Line crosses too many lines

The Line is a gigantic engineering project that is going to have a questionable positive impact on the daily lives of a significant population of Saudis. It sure seems like the Saudi government has a new highly pervasive surveillance apparatus for its population. Appeal to many tourists could be diminished by its human rights record, transportation issues, privacy concerns, carbon intensity or any number of other factors.

The Line might be one of those projects that were better left on the drawing board. It’s likely to continue forward as project that is too big to fail, unless a significant change in Saudi Arabia’s government, wealth or priorities occurs.

For those reasons, the world will look on with intrigue, and hopefully healthy skepticism, about how The Line is built and used in the decade ahead. For sure, some lessons and innovations will come from it. And those can be applied to future, from-scratch smart cities – because we know that The Line is not going to be the last.