NEOM’s 100-Mile Megacity: A Desert Dream Under Pressure

The desert highway stays arrow-straight-until it abruptly does not. Eventually, tarmac becomes gravel, gravel turns into red-tinged sand, and all that remains is wind, cranes and a procession of steel frames fading into the heat haze. A Tabuk driver blasts his horn as a convoy of white SUVs forces its way past, flinging dust over billboards still advertising flying taxis and mirrored towers cutting across the skyline.

At close range, the vision resembles less a science-fiction tomorrow than an unfinished film set abandoned before filming ended. Workers shelter beside shipping containers, looking at their phones. A sign saying “WELCOME TO THE LINE” in English and Arabic directs visitors towards a restricted area, watched over by men in immaculate uniforms.

The funding is unquestionably real. So are the doubts surrounding it.

Billions in the sand and a line that will not materialise

The proposition was irresistibly straightforward: a 160-kilometre (100-mile) linear city in the Saudi desert, without cars or roads, run on clean energy and housing nine million people between two enormous mirrored walls. It promised an entirely new civilisation arranged in a single straight line-the sort of daring concept that makes investors pay attention and keeps designers sketching through the night.

But a drive across the dusty plateau close to the Red Sea reveals not a city, but a wound in the landscape: dug-out trenches, foundations ending without warning, and clusters of camps where migrant workers sleep in prefabricated blocks. Severe floodlights cast a chilly industrial light across the desert after dark. The future appears to have stopped halfway through a sentence.

In polished presentations shown at Davos and technology events from Miami to Singapore, NEOM’s proposed megacity was to cut across 170 kilometres of vacant land like a silver blade. Within it would be vertical farms, robotic maids and flawless 20-minute journeys. Beyond it would sit unspoilt nature beneath star-filled skies.

Yet contractors on site quietly discuss reduced phases and late payments. A drone pilot who once filmed promotional material now largely works for Riyadh property developers. He says overseas film crews often ask, partly in jest, “So, is The Line… real?” After travelling for three hours and stepping into the windblown sand, they silently grasp just how far the fantasy has raced ahead of the concrete and steel.

Beneath the spectacle lies an ancient calculation: using oil wealth to purchase time. Saudi Arabia’s rulers understand that oil wells will not flow indefinitely, and that a young population cannot be kept content with promises alone. NEOM, particularly The Line, was intended as a fast route to the future: one vast development that could pull the kingdom into the post-oil age while impressing a doubtful world.

However, mega-projects create a gravitational pull of their own. Once the cameras have left, the remains can be ballooning costs, cleared villages and incomplete roads leading nowhere. The question local people raise, usually privately, is not whether the dream was ambitious enough. It is who will speak when that dream is discreetly reduced. Who will account for the funds, the land and the people caught in its path?

NEOM: between progress and playground, how the vision changes on the ground

From the outset, NEOM was sold as a wager on progress. The crown prince spoke about “a new Silicon Valley”, presenting it as an experimental ground for AI, green hydrogen and biotechnology. Western consultants arrived, stayed in luxury coastal compounds and produced lengthy reports filled with terms such as “disruption”, “ecosystem” and “regeneration”. In slide decks, it all seemed almost orderly.

Life in the desert is far from orderly. Fishermen in small settlements near the Gulf of Aqaba recount being instructed to leave, with compensation that seemed rushed and unclear. Huwaitat tribal families, whose roots in this unforgiving terrain stretch back generations, suddenly found themselves labelled “obstacles” to a futuristic utopia presented to international media as empty, unused land. For them, progress came as somebody knocking at the door.

One account repeatedly emerges in conversations with people familiar with the region. In 2020, Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti, a prominent activist from the Huwaitat tribe, posted online videos declining to abandon his ancestral home for NEOM’s construction. Within days, he was killed in a shoot-out which authorities described as an exchange of fire during an attempt to arrest him. Many local people saw it not as a routine law-and-order episode, but as a warning.

The figures offer a starker account. Tens of billions of dollars have already gone into NEOM and related developments, including Trojena, the mountain resort, and the Red Sea luxury islands. Global construction companies receive the contracts. Some early employees describe extravagant expenditure on promotion, VIP gatherings and consultants flown business class from London for one-hour meetings. Even by Gulf standards, the rate of spending is remarkable, while the line on the desert surface scarcely reaches the horizon.

Saudi authorities maintain that the city is moving forward, albeit in stages that are more “realistic” than the initial concept images. People with inside knowledge discuss an opening section of The Line accommodating only a fraction of the originally planned nine million residents, with the remainder deferred by decades. Investors interpret such signals in their own language: risk, reassessment and damage limitation.

This is the plain truth: mega‑projects rarely die with a bang; they quietly shrink until no one dares mention the original promise out loud. In such cases, a story is often never fully heard-one involving displaced residents, public funds, doubts silenced within ministries and private jokes at consulting firms that gladly collected their fees. The desert remembers for a long time, even when official accounts have moved on.

Reading the warning signs: what this saga truly shows

Nobody needs to be a policy specialist to draw lessons from this 160-kilometre (100-mile) mirage. When a government or billionaire unveils a “city of the future” featuring flying cars and perfect weather, the first task is almost tediously simple: ask who will live there, who must leave and who is allowed to refuse. Look beyond the visualisations at relocation schemes, employment contracts and land ownership documents.

The next step is to track the timetable. When deadlines repeatedly move while pledges become still more extravagant, that divide reveals more than any press statement. Progress that is genuinely shared usually develops somewhat more slowly and with far less noise than glossy presentations suggest. The louder the vision, the more closely its small print deserves scrutiny.

Most of us know the feeling: a huge commitment-a job, a start-up or a public scheme-begins to seem slightly implausible, yet everyone nearby continues agreeing because too much is at stake. With NEOM, whole careers, reputations and diplomatic relationships depend on the image of an unstoppable future city, making any retreat awkward, to say the least.

For citizens and outsiders alike, the most frequent error is mistaking scale for seriousness. A scheme consuming billions and recruiting international stars can seem “too big to fail”, encouraging people to leave their misgivings at the entrance. History, however, shows that some of the most lavish failures were once the town’s most sought-after invitations. Raising basic human questions-who gains, who pays and who vanishes-is not cynicism. It is self-protection.

When we strip away the marketing, we’re left with a stark question that hangs over the Saudi desert like heat shimmer: if this dream falters, who stands up and accepts responsibility, and who quietly gets driven back to the airport in a tinted SUV?

• Follow the money
  Examine which budgets support the project, which overseas partners participate and what they receive besides PR.
• Listen to the margins
  Take note of local communities, sidelined employees and smaller contractors; their accounts often expose the concealed costs.
• Watch for silent retreats
  If official goals are suddenly diluted or disappear from speeches, it is not a typo. It is a deliberate withdrawal.
• Separate vision from vanity
  Some ambitious proposals are sincere investments in a common future; others resemble exceptionally costly mood boards for those in power.
• Ask the accountability question
  Should everything go wrong, does a clear legal, political or even moral process exist for demanding answers?

A desert mirror we would rather avoid

Saudi Arabia’s 160-kilometre (100-mile) megacity saga is not solely a Gulf narrative. It reflects how the world responds to grand visions when powerful people own them. Consultants sign non-disclosure agreements and take the assignment. Technology chief executives pose for photographs while discussing “transformative partnerships”. Governments remain courteously enthusiastic while contracts remain available.

Then the difficult stage arrives: funding tightens, schedules slip, communities object and workers speak about their conditions. Euphoria then gives way to calculated silence. The people who marketed the idea as a historic turning point begin using indistinct phrases such as “phased implementation” and “dynamic recalibration”. Somewhere inside those expressions, a person’s home has been demolished.

There is a more personal dimension too. Many of us are drawn to sweeping designs that claim to erase inconvenient reality: the faultless start-up, the perfect social network or an eco-paradise city in the desert. It is reassuring to think that enough money and brilliance can allow a complete fresh start, avoiding the slow and frustrating task of repairing what is already there.

NEOM’s story pushes towards a less comfortable question: what if progress has less to do with constructing spectacular new playgrounds for the powerful and more to do with extending old, unglamorous things-accountability, legal rights and shared ownership-to people seldom invited to a launch event? The line through the sand may never reach 100 miles, but the issues it has raised extend far beyond it: into how we allow power to dream on our behalf, and beneath whose feet such dreams are built.

FAQ:

• Question 1 What precisely is The Line, and how does it relate to NEOM?
• Question 2 Is Saudi Arabia’s desert megacity project genuinely being scaled back?
• Question 3 Who has been affected on the ground by the construction proposals?
• Question 4 Why do international companies and celebrities continue to partner with NEOM?
• Question 5 What does this project show about how major visions are marketed-and who is answerable when they stall?