The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia wants me to know that it is building a new city. Its adverts follow me around the internet. ‘Imagine a traditional city and consolidating its footprint, designing to protect and enhance nature.’ I’m imagining. Their city ‘will be home to nine million residents, and will be built with a footprint of just 34 square kilometres. And we are designing it to provide a healthier, more sustainable quality of life’. According to its website, this new town ‘is a civilisational resource that puts humans first’. Which all sounds vaguely nice, if also nicely vague (although as I happen to be a human myself, I do appreciate the gesture). That is, until you see what they actually mean by this. The Line is not so much a city as a single cuboid structure, covered in blank glass walls. If it’s built according to plan, it will be taller than the Empire State Building, about as wide as Euston station, and roughly as long, east to west, as Portugal. It’s called the Line.
In their promotional videos, the Saudis show an immense mirrored scar cutting 170 km across the desert. There will be high-speed trains that allow you to travel from one end of the Line to the other in 20 minutes, which means no need for roads or cars. In the middle of one of the world’s hottest deserts, it will use ventilation and passive cooling to maintain a year-round temperate climate. The city will get all its water from desalination, all its energy from renewable sources, and all its governance from a terrifying omniscient artificial intelligence. In the space between its two perfectly smooth outer faces, there will be a hollow crisscrossed by walkways and what look to be flying cars, along with trees bobbing about in levitating pots of earth.
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