NEOM’s The Line: Between a Shrinking Vision and a Warming World

Near the Red Sea shoreline, where the desert breeze carries the tang of heated metal, an unbroken row of stakes fades into a dusty blur. Only a few years ago, this was meant to mark the frontier of tomorrow: the launch point for NEOM’s The Line, a 170-kilometre mirrored city running through the wilderness. Now, it resembles a building site suspended between grand ambition and uncertainty. Labourers in fluorescent vests move deliberately beneath a bleaching, cloudless sun. Cranes stand still. Pick-up trucks cross the sand as though their drivers are not quite certain of the next destination.

Saudi Arabia’s dream megacity is quietly being made smaller.

The project marketed as a climate-proof refuge for humanity has met the most enduring constraint of all: finance.

And one uncomfortable question is now on everyone’s mind.

From boundless desert vision to an uneasy reduction in scale

When Saudi Arabia revealed NEOM and its flagship project, The Line, it seemed closer to a science-fiction film preview than a conventional urban plan. There would be no cars or roads; the city would run on clean energy, use passive cooling and extend farther than the width of many small countries. The desert was to become a climate haven: a $500-billion monument to human endurance in an increasingly hot world.

For a time, it was possible to buy into the vision. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman spoke of floating industrial platforms, artificial moons and robotic maids. Investor presentations portrayed zero-carbon living as though it were merely awaiting a procurement contract. As the planet heated up, one country appeared willing to beta-test an entirely different model for daily life.

Today, that same scheme is being “phased”, delayed and reduced.

The fantasy encountered a spreadsheet.

Contractors in Tabuk now offer a very different account from the polished, Hollywood-style promotional films. One project manager says his team had prepared for a city accommodating 1.5 million people by 2030. The most recent indication he has received? Something nearer 200,000. Possibly. Provided the next round of funding falls into place.

Satellite images of construction suggest that active work covers only a small share of the promised 170 kilometres. Reports indicate that the initial phase could extend to just 2.4 kilometres by 2030, a far cry from the civilisation-spanning corridor once presented to the world. That is not a megacity; it is a compact urban district with exceptional branding.

Most of us know that feeling: a wild late-night idea colliding with the hard reality of the morning budget.

The distinction here is that the idea involved remaking humanity’s future along a desert strip visible from space.

The causes of the cutback are hardly mysterious. Oil income has fluctuated, global interest rates have risen, and overseas investors prefer certainty to glossy imagery. NEOM has delivered considerably more of the latter than the former. Riyadh must now balance fighter-jet agreements, spending on sport, social reforms and a vast economic shift away from crude oil.

The calculations therefore changed. Vision 2030 requires jobs immediately, not only holographic concept films about 2045. Analysts speak quietly of internal arguments: should billions go towards more practical tourism schemes and logistics ports, or continue flowing into a mirrored wall in the desert?

Viewed from outside, it resembles a subdued acknowledgement that gravity cannot be resisted indefinitely, even with sovereign wealth supporting the effort.

But more than a budget is at stake. The project exposes the strain between survival-scale imagination and the careful, limited measures usually labelled “realism”.

NEOM’s The Line: a delicate boundary between realism and surrender

What should happen when history’s biggest and most conspicuous climate-proof city begins to contract? A sensible response would be to welcome the change: scale back The Line, improve governance and channel money into less costly, proven climate measures. That could mean shading established cities, refurbishing buildings, improving bus networks and using genuine renewable energy for desalination rather than relying on hoped-for capacity.

Urban planners from Cairo to Copenhagen quietly approve when they hear that NEOM is being “reprioritised”. They recognise the approach: begin on a small scale, test ideas and replicate the successful ones. A 170-kilometre corridor is unnecessary for trials of 15-minute neighbourhoods or car-free districts. What is needed is planning policy, unglamorous committees and the ability to withstand complaints.

It is not glamorous.

But it is generally how cities are actually made.

There is also the lingering disappointment of failed mega-visions. Consider Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, once promoted as tomorrow’s carbon-neutral city. Fifteen years later, it is closer to a modest business district carrying the guilt of its earlier promise. China’s “eco-cities” have often become expensive ghost districts.

Those working in climate policy know this record intimately. Billion-dollar pledges packaged in luminous buzzwords make them recoil. Some regard Saudi Arabia’s retreat as a long-overdue return to sense: less discussion of robotic Jurassic parks, more attention to heat-resilient homes for real low-income households.

Yet an overlooked danger sits within that relieved exhale. If every unsuccessful mega-project is treated as evidence that “bold doesn’t work”, the result is a return to the half-measures allowing the climate crisis to work ever further into everyday life.

The divide between realism and defeat is narrower than the marketing makes it appear.

The straightforward reality is that mega-projects are assessed unfairly at both ends of the spectrum. At launch, they are hailed as silver bullets; when they falter, they are dismissed as fantasies. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.

NEOM has always contained contradictions. It is presented as a sustainable megacity while being financed by profits from burning oil. It promises a “post-car” oasis in a country still shaped by motorways. It offers climate refuge in a place where summer temperatures will increasingly approach lethal levels.

Even so, the project’s retreat signals more than Saudi Arabia reaching financial limits. It also delivers a quiet message globally: if a petrostate with a vast, centralised budget cannot fully support its radical urban experiment in survival, who can?

That question should disturb more than the dreamers in Riyadh; it should trouble city councils everywhere that are still resurfacing the same old roads.

What NEOM’s setback reveals about our shared future

This moment can be understood as a toolkit rather than simply as a failure. Remove the public relations, and NEOM becomes an exaggerated version of choices confronting every nation. How compact should cities become? How much should be invested to prepare for 50°C summers that no longer feel theoretical? Who will be allowed into the future’s “safe” areas, and who will remain in ageing grids, enduring the heat?

Saudi Arabia attempted to answer every one of those questions in a single theatrical act. Surprisingly, its fractured parts remain useful. They demonstrate that climate-adaptation showmanship alone cannot feed people or steady an economy. They also reveal the risk of attaching survival strategies to one charismatic leader and one dazzling project.

The more understated approach is unexciting but resilient: numerous small investments, repeatable trials and genuine accountability when initiatives fail.

That approach does not produce dramatic headlines. It is, however, usually what succeeds over decades.

When NEOM is scaled back, there is a tempting but mistaken conclusion: that “realism” must always mean reducing our idea of what can be achieved. Stop thinking big, embrace gradual change and avoid alarming the bond markets. On paper, it seems prudent.

But look at what is already happening. Heatwaves are changing school timetables. Insurers are quietly withdrawing from areas exposed to floods and wildfires. People are migrating not only for employment, but for breathable air and temperatures in which they can survive. In that context, unqualified incrementalism starts to resemble denial wearing the clothes of pragmatism.

The problem is not that somebody had the nerve to envision a climate-adapted megacity. The problem is that so few governments are prepared to picture anything more than minor adjustments to what already exists.

To be frank, hardly anyone does this every day: sits down and asks, “If we were designing our city from scratch for 2050, what would we build?” Perhaps that is exactly the question NEOM, for all its excess, forced into public discussion.

Saudi architect and urbanist Marwa Al‑Sabban put it bluntly in a recent panel: “We needed NEOM to push the window open. We don’t need to copy its wall of mirrors. We need to copy its nerve.”

• What can be salvaged from the dream?
  Some elements of the proposal still work in other places: solar-powered cooling districts, AI-managed transport, strict walkability requirements and building regulations designed for lethal heat rather than merely moderate discomfort.

• What should be left in the desert?
  Concepts that mistook spectacle for survival: flying taxis as everyday transport, luxury pods described as “inclusive housing”, and greenwashed promotion that never confronted the realities of migrant labour and water scarcity.

• What should we steal immediately?
  The licence to discuss, plainly and boldly, the extent to which cities must change, while basing budgets on figures that can withstand more than one oil cycle or election.

Between a shrinking Line and a heating world

Saudi Arabia’s desert megacity was never solely about Saudi Arabia. It held up a mirror to a civilisation attempting to improvise an escape from a crisis it spent a century creating. For several years, that mirror showed an alluring picture: technology as rescuer, money as magic and climate as a design problem rather than a moral one.

The image is now more severe. We see a kingdom undertaking its own cost-benefit assessment of the future and cutting its boldest wager down to what its balance sheet can support. We see the rest of the world observing, partly relieved and partly disappointed, then returning to smaller battles over cycle lanes and bus services.

Perhaps the central issue is not whether NEOM’s reduction is a victory for realism or a betrayal of ambition. Perhaps it is whether we can hold two ideas together: that fantasy at Saudi Arabian scale was unsustainable, and that today’s collective caution is nowhere near sufficient.

The Line may become a short, gleaming remnant of the promise made. The planet it was intended to save will not be so simple to scale down.