The Line, part of the NEOM project, appears to be the most daring "Future Now" experiment in global urbanism, not only because of its unprecedented scale, but because it represents a conscious break with the traditional urban model. It is a linear, ultra-dense city that promises a life without cars, daily services within a five-minute walk, and high-speed transportation that reduces long distances to minutes.In the official narrative, The Line is presented not as tall buildings or a massive real estate development project, but as a complete redefinition of the meaning of the city itself: compressed daily functions, less sprawling infrastructure, and limited land footprint compared to horizontal cities. However, the analytical value of The Line today lies not only in its striking images of the future, but also in the fact that it mirrors the political, economic, and technological realities that produce our "near future" in practice, not just in theory.
With this in mind, The Line asks questions beyond engineering: Who has the right to plan cities from scratch? How is the "future" financed in a world suffering from an economic slowdown and investment competition? When does an ambitious vision turn into revision and redesign under pressure of cost and time? Since the project's engineering specifications were announced, the big numbers have remained part of the public discourse: 170 kilometers long, 200 meters wide, 500 meters high, with a final capacity of 9 million people, within a footprint of 34 square kilometers.These numbers are not a neutral engineering detail, but a political and economic message about the ability to produce a new urban model at unprecedented density. At the same time, they are a crucial test point: can "Future Now" be transformed into an achievable interim reality, or will it be redefined as an eclectic future with smaller sizes and more pragmatic goals?
The Line presents itself as a project that attacks the issues of the modern city from its roots, not its margins. Congestion, horizontal sprawl, high energy consumption, and inflated commuting time are all considered in official discourse to be direct consequences of the traditional city form. According to the stated specifications, the design is centered around the "five-minute" idea: daily needs within a five-minute walk, a high-speed railway connecting the edges of the city in 20 minutes, and a relatively small urban footprint relative to the target population.In terms of planning, these promises cannot be seen as mere luxury items, but rather a conscious attempt to create a new "time economy" within the city, where distance is transformed from a suffocating daily burden to an almost invisible element, and infrastructure is transformed from a vast, horizontally stretched network to a highly efficient, compact system.
The most controversial and intriguing part of this urban model is that it treats the city not as streets, facades and traffic hubs, but as "layers" and functional units within a continuous urban mass. The project presented the city as 170 kilometers of "reflective facades" within a strip 200 meters wide and 500 meters above sea level, with a goal of accommodating 9 million people within 34 square kilometers.In this context, the idea of "Future Now" emerges in its most literal sense: the city is not a gradual development as historically experienced, but a product that is designed all at once according to a comprehensive techno-managerial concept, so that environmental standards, mobility, services, and even the "ideal weather" within the living space become part of a pre-planned promise rather than a spontaneously created social climate.
The Line also presents itself as a direct response to a global phase in which policies to reduce emissions and reorganize megacities are on the rise, which explains its association with the discourse of a "city without cars and without streets." The project's analytical value is not limited to urban form alone.
However, what makes the experiment clearly classified as "Future Now" is that this environmental promise assumes highly reliable management and operational technology: ultra-efficient public transportation, 24/7 operating systems, and building standards capable of containing high population densities within a narrow mass. Here a critical point emerges: any flaw in this operational system could turn a theoretical advantage into a practical vulnerability, revealing that the future of a city is not only made by design, but also by risk governance, financing capacity, and operational continuity.
Beginning in 2024, the "Future Now" rhetoric around The Line began to take on a more realistic tone as credible international sources began to speak increasingly about cost pressures and priorities within mega-projects, including NEOM and The Line. Informed sources were quoted as saying that costs had "ballooned" and that The Line alone was expected to cost "more than a trillion dollars." The significance of this figure is not just that it is "more than a trillion dollars.The significance of this figure lies not only in its absolute size, but in its political and economic significance: when a single city reaches the $1 trillion mark, it begins to compete with entire investment portfolios and long-term budgets, making associated decisions subject to the logic of short-term return and trade-offs between projects.
In 2025 and 2026, this debate took on a more pronounced dimension. No longer just speculation or rumors of downsizing, it entered the "review and redesign" phase. The project is reportedly being scaled back and redesigned due to delays, cost overruns and financial constraints, with a clear shift towards a more modest and sustainable model and a focus on becoming a data and AI hub.A year-long review led by a new CEO is expected to conclude in early 2026. This shift in narrative is significant: "Future Now" does not mean sticking to the most ambitious form at all costs, but sometimes means redefining the future itself in line with financial realities and the balance of national priorities.
A more specific angle is added when it is mentioned that work is focused on a 2.4-kilometer "section" to accommodate World Cup-related components, suggesting that the implementation strategy may be moving towards symbolic phases that can be displayed and operated, rather than a full-length continuous structure. In the same context, the size of the Public Investment Fund is indicated at USD 925 billion, a figure that clearly illustrates why trade-offs between projects become a managerial necessity even in the shadow of a huge sovereign wealth fund.
The analytical conclusion here is that The Line is gradually shifting from being a "170-kilometer-long city" implemented as a single package, to a "series of phases" redefined according to the logic of financeability and marketability. This shift does not necessarily mean the collapse of the idea, but rather reflects its transition from the level of absolute vision to the level of operational pragmatism. The future, when it enters the implementation phase, becomes a permanent dialogue between ambition, budget and time.
In this context, The Line should also be read as an investment in image and narrative as much as in concrete. The project is part of Saudi Vision 2030, which aims to diversify the economy and build new sectors. A project of this magnitude gives the country a global platform to reposition itself as a force capable of producing a new urban model and attracting capital and talent. However, the battle for the future here is not just a battle of design, but of trust: investors want achievable stages, the tech sector wants stable infrastructure, and the global public is watching the commitment between promise and execution.
From a governance standpoint, The Line represents a new style of urban governance that relies on a high degree of centralization and smart management. The higher the degree of reliance on algorithms and data, the more questions of privacy and operational governance arise. This is the "Future Now" paradox: technology promises to solve city issues, but at the same time creates a new highly centralized control structure.
Economically, talk of The Line's cost ballooning to over a trillion dollars puts the project in the category of giant assets that need constant redesign to achieve measurable returns. The shift towards data and AI seems a viable path to turning "the future" into an investment asset faster than building a fully populated city.
In short, if The Line is the title of a paper labeled "Future Now," it is a test of planning's ability to reinvent the city, a test of finance's ability to carry an ambition beyond traditional metrics, and a test of governance's ability to operate a super-dense city without becoming an image project. The announced numbers still paint an ambitious ceiling, but the road to that ceiling goes through a gradual redefinition of the future itself. In this sense, The Line becomes not only the city of the future but a living laboratory of how to create the future under the pressure of reality.
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