When I first heard about Saudi Arabia’s “The Line”, I thought I must be misunderstanding it. A massive new city in the Saudi Arabian desert might make some sense, but why on Earth would it be built as a single 106-mile long building, standing over 1600 feet tall and 650 feet wide? That sounds both dystopian in the extreme and incredibly inefficient.

Quoting from the How Stuff Works linked above:

In a press release for a paper published in npj Urban Sustainability, mathematician Rafael Prieto-Curiel said a straight-line city is the “least efficient possible shape.”

Here’s how that inefficiency plays out in daily life: “If we randomly pick two people in The Line, they are, on average 57 kilometers apart. In Johannesburg, which is 50 times larger in area, two random people are only 33 kilometers apart.”

Eventually, I decided to just set the whole thing aside. It was too difficult to comprehend as anything but the fever dream of an imperial ruler. Now, the Financial Times has an incredibly damning report on the whole thing.¹

The centrepiece of The Line, a vast, glass-clad linear city in Saudi Arabia, was to be the “hidden marina”. The world’s largest cruise ships would glide through a gate as tall as London’s Shard over a deepwater harbour carved from the desert. Suspended above it, like a chandelier, a 30-storey glass-and-steel building would hang from the arch, a sci-fi vision dreamed up by a Hollywood art director. Even its designers warned that physics might not cooperate.

…

One recalled warning Tarek Qaddumi, The Line’s executive director, of the difficulty of suspending a 30-storey building upside down from a bridge hundreds of metres in the air. “You do realise the earth is spinning? And that tall towers sway?” he said. The chandelier, the architect explained, could “start to move like a pendulum”, then “pick up speed”, and eventually “break off”, crashing into the marina below.

Qaddumi listened — and the work continued. Yet with an upside-down building, even simple things became complex. “When you flush the toilet, the stuff goes downhill, right?” the architect asked. “We’ve worked that out,” Qaddumi replied, according to the architect. “We’re going to have hundreds of shuttle cars running back and forth, picking up the sewage on retractable bridges.”

A good amount of work has already been done, but it may all be a waste, or nearly so. The Line could well end up as little more than an outrageously expensive and wasteful mirage.

Footnotes:

1. You’ll need a free Financial Times account to read the full story. I very much believe it’s worth your time to make one. ↩︎