A car-free, carbon-free city the size of Belgium, built in a straight line through a remote part of Saudi Arabia is MBS’s grand plan. Will it succeed? The FT’s Andrew England explores the crown prince’s pet project.
This is the line a fantastical 200 billion dollar mega project that is supposed to rise from the saudi desert its backers say it represents the future of modern living but skeptics see an overly ambitious vanity project inspired by a brash young autocrat that risks becoming the oil-rich gulf’s next white elephant championed by crown prince mohammed bin salman
The kingdom’s de facto leader the plan is at the heart of his neon project the goal is to build a futuristic car-free carbon-free city of 1 million people beginning at the red sea coast following a narrow 170 kilometer line up through rugged mountains nothing so audacious has ever made it beyond an architect’s draft the infrastructure alone is expected to cost
100 to 200 billion dollars with designs for an underground hydrogen-fueled automated transport system it has raised eyebrows you know caused us to sort of giggle a little bit thinking you know is this actually going to happen unfortunately you know we got the dubai bug really and we have this problem of highlighting futuristic video clips with hyperbolic
Language that sometimes get misunderstood can you tell us about the neon project real as a sustainable city and that will shape the future of saudi arabia look i think you have to go beyond the glitz and the futuristic videos and the hyperbolic language that comes from western consultants and i think what nyom has failed to explain properly is that there
Is substance below this we’ve tried to examine what exactly is the substance beyond the pr hype about invisible technology generating carefree and open urban space the problem is there is very little public information about the project beyond a glitzy youtube video which has popped up on tvs around the world as part of a global advertising campaign a few
Things you should know about saudi arabia first it has no running rivers but vast oil reserves that have enabled it to become the world’s top crude exporter now prince mohammed known as mbs is determined to use the nation’s petrodollar wealth to back his grandiose plans to modernize the conservative kingdom and end its addiction to oil back in june 2017 king
Salman shook up saudi arabia’s succession order by naming prince muhammad his favorite son air apparent to the throne four months later mbs unveiled nyong which is being overseen by the public investment fund or the pif the sovereign wealth fund the crown prince chairs this is a 500 billion dollar mega project supposed to cover 26 000 square kilometers from
The western coast and stretching up to the borders of egypt and jordan unlike the densely populated districts of jeddah riyadh and damam the neon region contains no major urban centers and more than three years after neon’s launch the 170 kilometer line project was announced as its first major development this month the bulldozers moved in to begin laying
In the groundwork for the first phase of the futuristic city neon declined to be interviewed or provide a map of where exactly the line will be using the latest satellite imagery you can see how vast and empty the site currently is it’s not clear whether these settlements are part of building work on the line so how far has the project progressed it’s virgin
Territory it’s a beautiful coast there are some government buildings that have been built there’s a camp that’s been built for for the neon management and team bechtel has mobilized now to start uh you will start to see a dome being built there uh for the desalination plant there’s been a lot of touristic activity done there already so not much but actually
Not nothing either has been built i mean it is a busy place but it will take a number of years for this to show up on the ground in anything really substantive but this isn’t the first time that saudi arabia has tried to build new cities in the desert in the mid 2000s the authorities launched plans for six new economic cities with the same lofty aspirations
As neon to diversify the economy attract foreign investment and create jobs for young saudis that project was less ambitious the estimated price tag at 120 billion dollars for the six was far more modest in comparison but only one made it off the drawing board the king abdullah economic city and cynics will tell you that only succeeded because it carried the
Then monarch’s name the track record of new cities not only in the gulf but around the world is fairly discouraging i think what’s going to be a bit different in neon is the level of political commitment and the need to make it a success in some way because it’s so high profile what that means in practice not necessarily that billions or tens of billions of
Foreign investments are going to come streaming in but that the government and the pif in particular are going to invest quite heavily into it and there will be to be fair some parts of the project that are more feasible than others so there’s some fairly conventional dimensions of sectoral diversification some of the tourism could probably work because it’s
A beautiful natural environment at least for domestic tourism some of the renewables investment could work some of the manufacturing stuff some of the agro industry could work you know if only for sort of food security reasons as a good case to be made for domestic agricultural investment i mean flying cars and glowing sands and artificial moons are sovereign
On a different level political commitment can have all sorts of connotations in the mbs era the millennial prince has shaken up the kingdom in an unprecedented fashion in the few years since his rapid rise to power he has upended decays of more consensual rule within the outside monarchy riding roughshod over royal rivals and crushing all forms of critical
Debate the cia has reportedly concluded that as the kingdom’s day-to-day leader he must have authorized the operation in which saudi agents murdered jamal khashoggi and dismembered his body female activists who campaigned for women to be allowed to drive were jailed including lujan al-khaflul his family alleged she was tortured in neon security forces shot dead
Abdul rahim al-kuwaiti after he refused to be evicted from his property to make way for the project the authority said kuwaiti was armed and shot first and insisted those being relocated are fully compensated but activists saw it as another sinister act associated with mbs’s reign there was an iron fist against not like one tribe or another but actually against
Everybody including royals princess businessmen and business women liberals feminists intellectuals economists even poets and i have seen and documented firsthand a lot of people who were arrested just because they tweeted and i know people who were arrested because they tweeted about people who were arrested over a tweet so there was even a series of arrests
Just because uh one tweet one word or one comment one post on social media saudi arabia has never been democratic but there was some kind of what jamal khashoggi used to call the checks and balances within the royal system where there were multiple branches within the royal family that counter-balance each other making the saudi government less unstable let’s
Call it but with the conference and this centralized kind of power he has now every power in his hand he can do everything and check it he’s uncontrollable the crackdowns have taken place as the crown prince’s supporters have trumpeted economic and social reforms that he has spearheaded in recent years the feared religious police have been largely muzzled and
The decades-old ban on women driving has been lifted cinemas have opened and courts have issued landmark rulings a certain women’s rights to live independently and travel without the approval of their male guardians despite khashoggi’s brutal murder and other abuses a host of global music stars including mariah carey enrique iglesias and sean paul have flocked
To the kingdom to perform at massive state-sponsored music festivals when saddam hussein was confronted about his behavior and issue he said he will change and he introduced reforms when bashar al-assad took power a few years later he said he will change the system of syria and he introduced reforms and let’s remember gaddafi just right before the revolution
He said he will be the reformer and he introduced reforms and multiple dictatorships around the world have used that line of reforms but no reform will ever take place if the population is excluded but mbs’s changes have been embraced by many among the kingdom’s youthful population and the crown prince’s loyalists insist that his iron fist approach was needed
To bring radical change to such a conservative nation change is bloody it’s difficult now you can you can pick particular cases in the past few years in saudi arabia obviously the khashoggi case was a tragedy uh you know the arrest of the woman also is is is is uh is unfortunate but so you can look at the micro and and feel very uncomfortable but when you
Look at the macro in context of historical development you could not have opened the political space there were a lot of structural problems that you needed really a big dose of testosterone to to address and a baseball bat and uh and he has done that now has he made his mistakes of course he’s made his mistakes he’s human you know he’s not a prophet um and and
You can’t choreograph this perfectly and i’m sure if he could play back the tape there are a lot of things that he would have done differently it is the line perhaps more than any other project that represents mbs’s vision of the future crafted with the aid of an army of highly paid western consultants neom in a way is the closest to an attempt to build a new
Saudi arabia to start with no constraints to get rid of all of the old administration of all bureaucracy and paperwork and operate also independently of the established business and merchant class of which there’s quite a bit of distrust in the ruling circle currently but is this really what saudi arabia needs i mean there’s a very lively if also very private
Debate about that in saudi arabia and some saudis apparently have called the tripled vat that was introduced in summer 2020 the neom tax so if that circulates widely that’s not very good pr but any whispered criticism won’t stop mbs forging ahead just as napoleon iii instructed baron houseman to demolish medieval parts of paris in the 1800s and build the wide
Avenues and parks the french capital is famed for the line is very much the crown prince’s pet project even with houseman in paris it was actually napoleon iii it was his vision and houseman was the sort of implementer of this kind of vision so with the line project it’s probably coming from prince salman thinking actually this is what i want to develop and
Create and then bring kind of architects developers planners on board to to sort of fulfill my vision i think the role of the architect or the planner can be to have these sort of quite bold radical visions these big ideas of how cities could change how people can live differently but a lot of them are these kind of propositions rather and and influence the way
Things are planned on the grounds but this sort of brand sort of top-down vision and implementing that can be quite contentious can be quite difficult and this idea that you’re building on nothing is never quite true so this idea that you’re building on kind of virgin land as it’s been described you could question actually firstly there’s a very complicated
Context of mountains of you know what does the actual ground look like but also there are people living there the different communities living there would you like to live in the line i don’t think i would why not for me the the kind of um for me the focus on lifestyle i find really really one-dimensional i found it not really sort of for me what makes cities
Exciting is living with lots of different people from different socio-economic backgrounds from different cultures and learning from one another do you envision yourself living in the line would you like to live there i’m too old on the line i think the line is i’m you know you and i are are a bit beyond ourselves by date as far as that’s concerned i think the
Line is going to attract uh saudis in their 20s and 30s would you ever move then no it never i would actually rather prefer the people who are already living there to be building a real project from their own ideas where they are included where their ideas are part of the project where the cities and traditions are respected i’d rather do that
Transcribed from video
Why Saudi Arabia is building a 170km line city through the desert | FT By Financial Times
