The Line's Erasure: Clear Warning To Wannabe Utopias

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia does not have much in the way of homegrown digital or technological enterprises, so Riyadh is instead investing on the principle of if we build it, they will come. Simply put, Saudi Arabia is attempting to attract foreign entrepreneurs, manufacturers, logistics companies and tourists to ease its transition to a post-oil economy.

NEOM is the most ambitious of all of Bin Salman's plans to attract foreign investment. Indeed, the name NEOM is a portmanteau of the Greek 'neo' and the first letter of Mohammed Bin Salman's name .

The published plans and publicity for NEOM are a sight to behold.

NEOM will include everything in one massive development. It will have a free port and logistics hub, a seaside tourist town and even a mountain sports playground. NEOM's centerpiece attraction, however, unquestionably is The Line .

The Line was envisioned as a 170 km linear city clad in reflective material, that would cut into the deep desert from the Red Sea like one of the swords on the Saudi flag.

The evangelical advertisements for NEOM promised freedom and multiculturalism in one of the most authoritarian and monocultural nations on Earth, as well as total surveillance and advanced AI to underpin innovation for all its residents.

An early consultancy report was even more excessive than what the actual plans became , proposing to include an artificial moon and fleets of drones and visualilzing that 50 per cent of the“population” would be service robots.

The initial advisory board included the likes of British architect Norman Foster and the CEO of Google's Sidewalk Labs, Dan Doctoroff. Most of the more famous advisers seem quietly to have disappeared from the project in recent years.

Now, almost as soon as ground had been broken , it was announced that the centerpiece plan has been scrapped . The Line is no more and in its place are plans for a much smaller 2.4 km long city - a mere dash compared to The Line's original misguided ambitions .

Was The Line all just a public relations exercise designed to generate likes and speculative foreign investment capital? In public there may have been much wonderment. However, behind the scenes the entire Line project has been nothing more than a weird, unsustainable and hubristic fantasy.

NEOM is planned to be built in one of the most geopolitically significant - and at times turbulent - areas of the world, where Saudi Arabia borders Egypt, Israel and Jordan. Perhaps even more significantly, NEOM will be built in a region where summer daytime temperatures are already
heading above 50 C in our era of global heating . (That's 122 F.)

Who was going to want to live at the far end of a 170-kilometer long parallel terrace from which your only means of exit was an“intelligent” train system? And how was security going to be managed for a place that promised freedom and legal systems compatible with international human rights norms in one of the most authoritarian nations in the world, both internally and externally?

How would NEOM stop Saudi dissidents from escaping to or through it? Security and surveillance have never been part of the published plans, but industry publications have revealed that Bin Salman was envisioning an entirely private police force and a specialist drone surveillance control center for The Line .

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The kingdom had already scheduled the execution of three members of the Howeitat tribe who had objected to this non-consensual development on their traditional lands.

Harsh lessons

It is currently unclear whether other parts of the NEOM plan will be scaled back.

Work has already started on the Red Sea tourist resort town of Sindalah and it is unlikely Bin Salman will abandon the potentially lucrative Port of NEOM . Beyond that is anyone's guess.

Many plans for ideal cities have been impractical fantasies. But NEOM also typifies a massive and persistent failure of the imagination driven by a capitalism - blinded by fossil-fuel ideology and unable to come to terms with the necessity of confronting the climate crisis, the growing global inequality and the persistence of war and genocide.

It's about time for wealthy corporations and nation-states with the historic and contemporary responsibility for driving the climate crisis, like Saudi Arabia, to start taking this responsibility seriously. The world should be investing in making existing cities sustainable and just at a human scale - not pouring money into speculative, unsustainable and authoritarian urban mega-projects.

David Murakami Wood is a professor of critical surveillance and securities studies at L'Université d'Ottawa/University of Ottawa .

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .