The Line - Sustainable Utopia or Greenwashing Prison?
The mega project The Line in Neom, Saudi Arabia, is taking the concept of a gated community to the next level. The 170km long lovechild of a skyscraper and a border wall is promising a futuristic life in an exclusive net-zero community. However a glance behind the facade of shiny renderings is raising questions about sustainability, inclusivity, and human rights violations.
No other architecture project this year has been marketed as heavily as The Line. The renderings of the mirror-covered city have been inescapable since July - from LinkedIn and Twitter to architecture magazines and blogs. In a world of rising sea levels and climate activist upheaval, it is surprising that reporting about the project seems to err on the positive or neutral side. These reports seem to lack the critical reflection one would expect on a project that defies the rules of sustainable architecture and common sense. Therefore let us take a deeper look into the promises of this mega development.
© The Line - Neom
What is the Line project and why is it being built?
The Line is a $500bn investment project of the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia designed by US-architecture firm Studio Morphosis. The 200m-wide and 500m-high urban development will cut through the deserted landscape in the northwest of the Saudi kingdom, stretching from the coast of the Red Sea 170km inland. The region was strategically chosen to develop a new economic hub positioning Saudi Arabia as an innovative host on the international stage.
© The Line - Neom
All living spaces are allocated along a straight line in the car-free smart city. The developers promise that all necessary facilities and amenities will be reachable within a 5 min walk and longer distances can be reached via an underground high speed rail system.
Life on the edge.. er, line
The main claim for reducing the footprint of a nine-million-inhabitant metropolis onto a single line is to reduce interference with nature. Usually projects with this kind of objective try to embrace their surroundings and respect natural habitats (wildlife bridges, for example). The Line however seems to find its form despite its surrounding landscape rather than because of it - cutting through migration paths of animals and hilly landscape. Needless to say the reflective mirror facade is a deadly hazard for birds.
With a total space consumption of 34 km² and nine million residents, The Line will be an extremely compact city. London, which has a similar population size, is 46 times larger. Once fully occupied, the density of 265,000 persons per km² will be unmatched by any existing city. It begs the question how liveable and feasible a city with eight times the density of Mumbai can possibly be. Especially in a region so devoid of the natural resources needed to sustain life, it seems like an impossible task to import and distribute water, food and energy. There is little information published about the resource management strategy for The Line other than buzzwords promising high-tech solutions and sustainability. A city of this size would need approximately 900 million liters of water just to nurture its residents (not yet accounting for the insane ski resort Trojena planned 50km inland). In the mega developments projects of the UAE like Dubai, sea water desalination plants installed in the Persian Gulf make up for the lack of groundwater. Besides their high energy demand, greenhouse gas emissions and discharge of chemical pollutants, they also have contributed significantly to the rise in salinity and temperature in the Gulf impacting the marine wildlife and ecosystem. Similar desalination efforts for The Line could have drastic effects on the beautiful but sensitive coral landscape of the Red Sea.
Rising temperature and salinity in the Persian gulf due to brine water release from desalination plants and climate change (Source: Will Le Quesne)
Skyscrapers in the desert - A shameless tale of sustainability
The claim of net-zero buildings in the hot and arid climate zones has already been made for high-rises in Dubai or Qatar. But it is as greenwash-y for Neom as it is for these other projects. Buildings with these extreme amounts of glazing require enormous quantities of cooling energy to retain a comfortable indoor climate under the desert sun and outdoor temperatures of approximately 38°C in August. The two mirrored building blocks heat up and cannot retain any cold air created by the shading in between them, which is an incredibly energy-inefficient concept. Let’s pretend all of the energy needed to operate The Line and transport its inhabitants to, from and within the city would be generated from renewable energy sources. Even then it is still an unsustainable project because of the sheer amount of resource consumption and embodied carbon footprint necessary to erect such a mega project.
““You cannot build a 500-metre-tall building out of low-carbon materials. This would require a phenomenal quantity of steel, glass and concrete.” ”
He has estimated that building The Line would produce upwards of 1.8 billion tonnes of embodied carbon dioxide, equivalent to more than four years of the UK's entire emissions. “My feeling is this vast embodied carbon will overwhelm any environmental benefits that a small footprint provides”
© The Line - Neom
The Line with its 500m x 200m cross-section is rather high and narrow for an urban living block. Walking between the two buildings is going to feel similar to being in downtown Manhattan, except with giant skyscrapers all the way without a gap for natural light as far as you can see (for comparison the Empire State Building is 382m high). With this image in mind, it becomes very clear how deceiving the rendings really are when they show a giant space in between the two blocks with lush green parks and giant trees. Our analysis shows that barely any sunlight is going to reach the inside of The Line. If your apartment is on the external facade, you are going to be in either bright sunlight or feel like you are on the dark side of the moon, depending on the time of day.
© TBG Consult
Polished renderings created by bloody hands
Despite the marketing material suggesting otherwise, the area was actually not uninhabited prior to the project start. The Al-Huwaitat tribe located in the area have reported harassment by Saudi security forces since April 2020. Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti was an active voice protesting planned forced displacement of his tribe from their historic homeland and was later killed by Saudi security forces. Since then there have been multiple arrests, evictions and three death sentences imposed on members of the tribe of 20,000 people. Together with a team of London lawyers they sent urgent communication to the UN in hopes of changing their fate. However this did not avert their eventual displacement from their indigineous lands without compensation.
If this is how the Crown Prince makes room for his vanity project, worries arise about how the society within Neom is going to be structured. Online commenters foresee service staff to be located in underground housing or slum settlements outside of the shiny gates of The Line. While it is speculative right now to assume how social inequality will manifest itself in Neom, it is definitely certain that its board of directors is lacking diversity.
Outlook
Like many of the giant projects in the Middle East, The Line will border on water. With rising sea levels, this does not appear to be a sound investment. With poverty and unemployment still an issue in Saudi Arabia, it would seem much more appropriate to develop and improve existing cities. In bigger cities like Jeddah, up to 30% of the population live in informal settlements with unreliable access to water and lack of sewage networks. Saudi Arabia is also one of the countries in danger of losing water resources and farmable land in the next decades due to climate change advancements. Therefore it seems unwise to further waste resources by building unnecessary fantasylands, rather than investing in quality of life improvements for the larger population and the resilience of their habitat.