The Line (and why it's bad)

Urban form without urban function

The Line is the mega-city of the future, or so Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman (aka MBS) would have us believe. Part of the Saudi government’s Vision 2030 initiative, the project originally claimed it could spin up a 9 million-person city in the middle of the desert. 

While cities are great, The Line is, conceptually speaking, asinine. What’s been proposed isn’t so much futuristic metropolis as absurd Potemkin village ineffectually aping the form of a city without understanding what gives rise to its function.

Now, folks have been ridiculing The Line for years (mostly from the perspective of criticizing Petro State Autocrats Doing Petro State Autocrat Things). Those criticisms are fair, but I want to provide an urbanist set of reasons to condemn The Line (and the pseudo-urbanist worldview it represents). 

So, dear readers, grab your coffee, get comfortable, and in the words of a completely different mega-project loving authoritarian, let the hate flow through you as we explore the nature — and failings — of The Line. 

A Line in the sand

Like it says on the tin, The Line was envisioned as a city in the shape of a 100-mile long line. The development was meant to start in the Red Sea and end at the (actually existing) city of Tabuk. The design for the structure itself resembles two skyscrapers laid side-by-side with an open air space between them forming a kind of angular “u” shape opening up to the sky. Fun features include a vague promise to deploy AI as “the Beating Heart of the City” and also an artificial moon (because why not).

If all this sounds like the dumbest kind of Mckinsey slide deck fever dream, you’re right.¹ To date, MBS has failed to convince foreign investors to commit significant levels of capital and, faced with footing the entire $1.5 trillion bill on its own, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund is pumping the brakes.  

Project Rendering of The Line, Source: UniladTech

At first blush, The Line might look like just another ill-conceived mega-project, but it’s actually much worse than all the publicly subsidized sports stadiums that never paid for themselves. The Line represents an authoritarian view of urban development that fails to understand what cities are or where they come from. To appreciate this deeper point about Why The Line Is Bad, we need to start with why the vision it represents is so wrong.

Where do cities come from?

For those who never got the talk from their parents, I’m here to help answer the question that everyone begins to ask at a certain age — “Where do cities come from?”

Spoiler: they aren’t delivered in swaddling by petro state autocrats. 

Cities form gradually over time for some economic reason. Throughout history, that reason has often been trade. More than a few modern cities were originally settled because of easy access to navigable waterways. This was the story for Guangzhou in China, London in the U.K., and basically every major city on the East Coast of the U.S. 

There are non-trade examples as well like Johannesburg (mining) and basically every capital city ever (public administration), but the pattern remains consistent — human settlements are created for economic reasons and grow into full-fledged cities over time. 

As cities grow economically, their economies also tend to diversify. A harbor supporting shipping eventually gives rise to cargo insurers, rope makers, carpenters, taverns, and a million other businesses built to serve the people working in a city’s initial anchor industry.

If the economy continues growing, those secondary industries inspire ancillary services of their own and so the process continues. Sometimes those original anchor industries wither and die, but they’re always present in the genesis of a city as the reason people begin living together in the first place. 

Not how it works

The built environment develops in a similarly piecemeal way. Wealthier, more productive places tend to see denser development over time. As a local economy grows, it becomes more valuable to be located where the action is. That value becomes reflected in land prices and as land prices get higher, it makes increasing sense to build more buildings instead of buying more land. 

If this is all a bit abstract, just think of New York versus almost anywhere else in the U.S. There’s a lot of economic opportunity in New York and this means there are a lot of people that would love to live and do business there. That demand is reflected in how much the dirt costs, and that cost has resulted in developers building taller buildings with smaller footprints. 

All that said, the larger point is that cities are fundamentally never-ending group projects, emerging out of the countless plans of innumerable individuals spread across time and space. That's not to say that policy makers don’t exercise an outsized role; it’s just that policy making is more like gardening than it is building with legos. Municipal government can influence (often to a great degree and to terrible effect), but it can never dictate in the way that someone with a more authoritarian bent might like to believe.

Carts leading horses

If it’s not clear at this point, the planners behind The Line aren’t laying the foundations for organic growth, they’re specifying a finished product. They imagine that a city is a tool for achieving an end, not the result of an entire population working together in pursuit of their own diverse and varied goals. 

MBS imagines the project as a development play, but The Line will no more spur economic growth in the Saudi desert than a scale replica of Manhattan would if we built one in the corn fields of Kansas. The physical development of a city is the result of economic growth — not the cause.

Bird’s eye view rendering of The Line

So why is this bad? People do dumb stuff all the time and we ought to encourage people to try new things and see what sticks, right? 

Generally, yes. But when a single person commands the resources of a nation-state, probably not.

The original proposal for The Line is bad not just because it’s a waste of resources, but because it’s a waste of resources at scale. Remember, the original price tag was over a trillion dollars. And scale isn’t just a problem with respect to material resources–there’s a human cost as well.

People already live in the path of The Line. Villages in the way of the project have been cleared to make room. Dissidents who protested the forced removal of their communities have been arrested and sentenced to death. And herein lies another problem with scale: for a project as big as The Line, there’s always someone in the way.

There's criticism of The Line itself and then there’s criticism of the thinking that motivates it. The former ought to be obvious at this point, but it’s worth getting a few more licks in on the latter.

We often imagine that we can design urban life to a far greater degree than we actually can. When we believe cities are machines to be engineered instead of gardens to be cultivated, it not only leads us to follies like The Line, it also blinds us to how our already existing cities actually work. 

To the extent that American urban renewal was trying to accomplish anything good, it failed because of exactly this epistemic conceit. When we misunderstand what a city is and how it works, we fail to understand how to address its challenges as well.

Having said all that, this isn’t a polemic against city government or planning per se. Cities need institutions for resolving collective action problems and planned developments like California Forever are generally unobjectionable. The Line, though, attempts to plan at a scale and specificity beyond our ability to engineer and in its grasp exceeding its reach is where we find the harm.

Postscript

Ultimately, The Line won’t be built as originally imagined. Without access to infinite capital and no real economic reason for existing, the project will likely continue being reduced in scope until it’s more molehill than mountain. So, we may get something more like a futuristic dead mall in the middle of the desert at some point.

But the thinking that went into the project won’t die with it. As urbanists, it’s this thinking that we ought to look out for and guard against. And not just because of the next ill-informed state-sponsored pipe dream, but also because of the ways in which it blinds us to how our already existing cities work and how we might navigate the challenges we face today. There are limits to what we can directly control and appreciating that fact would help lead us to policy that nurtures, supports, and facilitates instead of imagining we can configure, dictate, or command.

1. And not just because of the fever part; Mckinsey actually worked on the initial proposals.