The Potential Air Castle in Saudi Arabia: Possibly the Costliest Aerial Fortress Globally?
The Line, Saudi Arabia's ambitious city project, remains active and progressing, despite facing significant construction challenges, feasibility reviews, and financial scrutiny. As of mid-2025, the initial 2.4 km section of the planned 170 km linear city is under construction, with massive foundation work ongoing amid harsh desert conditions.
However, the Public Investment Fund (PIF) has commissioned strategic reviews by consulting firms to assess the project's feasibility and cost-effectiveness due to mounting concerns about spiraling expenses and technical difficulties. The Line, part of the $500 billion NEOM giga-project, aims to transform Saudi Arabia's economy from oil-based to tourism and tech-focused.
The Line takes principles of compact structures, short distances, and emission-free transport to extreme lengths. It symbolizes change in the Middle East and could strengthen Saudi Arabia's influence on international construction and technology markets. The city is intended to cause no emissions, with solar and wind energy planned to supply the city, and the export of green hydrogen planned.
However, experts doubt the actual climate balance of The Line due to the CO2 emissions from construction and the potential burden of a 350-meter-high stadium. The stadium's mirrored ceiling in the interior could blind players, the location hinders escape routes and safety measures, and the power supply is to be fully covered by renewable energies.
The Line is intended to be many things at once: the city of the future, a technical showcase, a symbol of sustainability, an expression of political power. However, urban planners advocate for hybrid approaches, such as dense construction, multifunctional quarters, and modular infrastructure.
The construction of The Line itself is a CO2 monster due to tons of concrete and glass, energy-intensive supply chains, and a massive need for cooling. The Ellinikon Athens project is Europe's largest construction project.
Neom, a development project in Saudi Arabia, enforces a code of conduct based on national law and International Labour Organization norms through regular controls, but independent inspections are currently lacking. Approximately 20,000 members of the Huwaitat tribe were reportedly forced to leave their homes, contradicting the official line that the land is uninhabited.
Exchanges between neighborhoods, communities, and social groups are hindered when life spans 170 kilometers. Central to this is the question of participation - without input and democratic control, such large projects can quickly lose balance.
The Line remains intriguing for engineers, architects, or urban developers as a real-life laboratory for new building forms, a test field for smart city concepts, and a monument to what happens when political visions grow beyond practical boundaries. Whether the stadium will actually be built for the 2034 FIFA World Cup remains unclear.
- Despite the concerns regarding spiraling expenses and technical difficulties, the Line, an integral part of the $500 billion NEOM giga-project, aims to blend science, technology, and environmental-science to transform Saudi Arabia's economy.
- As the Line city project progresses, experts question its climate balance due to CO2 emissions from construction, raising concerns about the potential environmental impact even as it aspires to be emission-free through solar and wind energy.
