NEOM’s Mirror Line: Saudi Arabia’s Smart City
There is a highly ambitious - and some might even say, revolutionary - project being undertaken in the Saudi Arabian desert. A new city is being built near the Red Sea to, as the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman describes, “tackle the challenges facing humanity in urban life today.”. NEOM - which receives its name from a combination of the Greek word for “new” (neo) and the Arabic word for “future” (mustaqbal) - has plans include having no cars, no greenhouse gas emissions, and accommodation for 9 million people. The project promises everything from job creation and ecological sustainability to better healthcare and higher disposable incomes due to its layout.
There’s just one catch: the city is planned to be 200 meters wide, and 170km long.
A projection of the Mirror Line City stretching into the Saudi desert. Credit: Architectural Digest
The project is, of course, exceptionally ambitious. Officials behind the project say that places visited on a regular basis (schools, homes, offices, etc.) will take a mere 5 minutes for commuters, and end-to-end journeys will take only 20 minutes. The city’s outer “wall” will be mirror-clad to reflect the desert’s heat, while the interior is lined with trees and other foliage. The project also boasts proximity to international trade routes (such as the Suez Canal, through which an estimated 10% of global trade flows), perennial sources of solar and wind power, and opportunities for testing new technologies in desert habitation.
NEOM Line City’s creation is part of Saudi Arabia’s wider Vision 2030 project, which seeks to diversify the national economy away from fossil fuel production and re-invest into healthcare, education, infrastructure, and more. Food and water security, as well as research and development capacity, are also at the forefront of the project.
An estimation of what the Mirror Line City’s interior may look like. Credit: Arab News
Nevertheless, critics have found a wide variety of shortcomings in NEOM’s Line City plans. In a financial sense, research shows that Saudi Arabia has struggled to attract adequate levels of foreign investment, and that such shortfalls will cause the project to be completed in 2050 - twenty years past its goal - and subsequently costing nearly USD $1 trillion. Further criticisms - such as those from Philip Oldfield, head of the Environmental School at the University of New South Wales in Sydney - warn that the carbon cost of constructing the city “will overwhelm any environmental benefits. You cannot build a 500-meter tall building out of low-carbon materials.”. Oldfield further estimated that fully producing NEOM’s Line City would produce nearly 2 billion tons of emitted carbon dioxide - roughly equivalent to more than four years’ worth of the UK’s entire emissions.
NEOM’s Line City - regardless of whether it will or even can work - is a significantly revolutionary idea. Its greatest success may be causing the rest of the world to re-examine our own cities to see what needs to be fixed, changed, or replaced, but this may ultimately be its greatest success - but perhaps its only one.
TAI Score: Degree 1. The construction of the Line City will not likely cause a negative impact on the international stage. While it is possible to provide a net benefit to the Saudi Arabian economy, it is more likely that the Line City’s greatest negative impact to be climate related - though this phenomenon is already a cause of concern due to a number of other sources.
