"The Line" in the Sand - A New Type of City

Examining a novel type of sustainable urban oasis born in Saudi Arabia

Jun 25, 2024

Welcome to The LineUp! Our weekly newsletter seeks to add value by engaging, connecting, and inspiring real estate operators and real estate entrepreneurs. If you enjoy what you read, please like, share, and subscribe. Thank you for your support in growing this community!

There is a project in the Saudi Arabian desert you may not have heard of where its proponents are imagining and building a new kind of city. The project is NEOM and a major component of the NEOM project is named The Line.

The Line is a 170 km linear city built on principles of sustainability, both environmental and economic. It is located in a remote area of Northwest Saudi Arabia.

An all-star team of designers have dreamed up on The Line. Its first phase is a vertical city (100+ stories tall) that is 1.5 miles long with no cars, and zero-emissions.

The all-star design team includes:

Peter Cook of Cook Haffner
Thom Mayne and Eui-Sung Yi of Morphosis
Roger Soto of HOK
Renier de Graaf of OMA

This is an urban experiment funded by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom has the money and ambition to transform itself from an economy built on oil wealth to a leader in technology and eco-friendly power sources. His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed Bin Salman is the main proponent and has provided the vision for the project and played a role in shaping the design.

This is a radical project that is untethered from the constraints of the historic city. The road network and the power sources that form the basis of the historic city is reconsidered and the way in which people interact is reimagined.

The city will consist of modules 200 m (656 ft) wide, 800 m (2,624 ft) long, and 500 m (1,640 ft) high. This scale is extremely bold and hard to imagine how it will feel to be inside until you see the renderings. It seems to be part Blade Runner, part Garden of Eden.

A Focus on Sustainability

The Line is the space that it leaves behind…Tarek Qaddafi Urban Design Executive Director of NEOM

Through the creation of a linear yet vertical city, you can condense the city itself and preserve nature. So instead of a sprawling city ruining the natural beauty of nature, its impact are limited by its much smaller footprint.

The project focuses on sustainability as not just a practical matter of providing energy, but also as a basis for the entire “ecosystem” of the city itself. From sources of energy like wind, solar, and geothermal, to new transportation networks the development integrates sustainable strategies at every turn. The projects integration of nature into the interior footprint as shown in the rendering above is impressive. There is also creation of the exterior of the building as a mirror to reflect the surrounding natural landscape to preserve views and to minimize impacts.

From sustainability we move on to the formal design concepts for the “building” itself, which have precedents in urbanism and architectural design. These we explore next.

Megaform: The Next Logical Step

The Line is considered a Megaform Building conceptually in the field of architectural and urban design.

A Megaform Building is defined as:

A LARGE FORM EXTENDING HORIZONTALLY RATHER THAN VERTICALLY.
A COMPLEX FORM, WHICH UNLIKE THE MEGASTRUCTURE, IS NOT NECESSARILY ARTICULATED INTO A SERIES OF STRUCTURAL AND MECHANICAL SUBSETS.
A FORM CAPABLE OF INFLECTING THE EXISTING URBAN LANDSCAPE AS FOUND BECAUSE OF ITS STRONG TOPOGRAPHICAL CHARACTER.
A FORM THAT IS NOT FREESTANDING BUT RATHER INSINUATES ITSELF AS A CONTINUATION OF THE SURROUNDING TOPOGRAPHY.
A FORM THAT IS ORIENTED TOWARDS DENSIFICATION OF THE URBAN FABRIC.
A FORM THAT CONTAINS MORE THAN ONE TYPE OF PROGRAM.
A SIZE GREATER THAN ONE MANHATTAN BLOCK OR 900 FEET LONG AND 250 FEET WIDE.

Kenneth Frampton - Original (1999) & John T Pugh - Additional Rules #6 & #7 (2009)

The earliest Modern historical precedent for The Line appears in the early 20th Century with designs by Le Corbusier. He imagined the future of the city and how a linear set of towers could open the ground plane for nature, air, and light. A subsequent derivative of this Radiant City concept is the Plan Obus for Algiers where a sinuous, linear building integrates into the landscape and both connects people to and separates them from nature.

Then in 1969 came Superstudio with their Megaform version of a new utopia/dystopia. In their concept design goes away and buildings are just a vast infrastructure set in nature. Very much representative of the time with the hippie revolution, etc.

Then came Rem Koolhaas, today considered the world’s greatest architect, and his thesis design, Exodus. In it he imagines how after a nuclear war destroys society we would rebuild using massive monumental buildings.

And finally in 2009 my design thesis. The thesis concept, “Megaform: A Frame of Opposition” is a continuous line building that once inserted into the endless sprawl of the American city to serve as a high density node for sophisticated, urbanity through a mix of civic, artistic, educational, commercial, and residential uses.

These concepts, maybe not mine :), influenced the design of the NEOM project. They serve as a foundation for the idea of a linear monumental city that is at once connected to and apart from nature.

From the urban design concept the all-star design team has further developed the concept with a focus on infrastructure.

Infrastructure First Approach to Future Proof New Cities

The urban design starts with infrastructure first as a framework upon which program (hospitality, multifamily, office, etc) is hung. This design approach creates a modular infrastructural system consisting of people movement, natural HVAC, and formal systems that can be expanded and amended infinitely. This infrastructure first design is similar to a modular computer code system where you can build upon it with endless possibilities.

As the city expands and eventually reaches its full 170 km length, the “modules” can be updated and the city can even be extended further into the desert. The Line is planned to extend over multiple various types of terrain from deserts, to mountains, with a large marina serving as the beginning area connecting to the Red Sea.

All of these infrastructural concepts are integrated into the design at the city scale. The scale of the human and the neighborhood is what we explore next.

The 5-Minute Neighborhood

A primary concept of The Line is to create a city where people will not need to go more than 5 minutes away from their home or 400 meters. So if you want to go to the park, grocery store, office, they are all a short walk away. Then if you want to travel further, you get on an extensive mass transit system.

The plan for the movement of people is that it will take place through horizontal and vertical subways. These will allow people to move at high speeds over long distances from one place to another when they are not walking.

The entire structure will be powered by a variety of sustainable power sources. From wind, to solar, and other alternative energy sources, the intent is for this tower of glass, metal, and concrete to be 100% emissions free. Of course our limited ability to construct tall buildings without concrete or steel will for the time being not limit the embodied energy. This is something for the design team to work on going forward.

By the way, the project is now under construction. See the pic below as they are working on the foundations.

The Line under construction in Northwest Saudi Arabia on the Red Sea.

Whether you believe this utopian project will be successful or not, I cannot help but respect the ambition of the project. It is vast in scope and scale. Might this be the beginning of a dystopian nightmare? Or, as we are in an emerging and dynamic geopolitical situation as a global society today, maybe these types of projects could lead us to a better future. I’m excited to follow along and find out.

Cheers, John