Saudi mega project NEOM and its controversial “The Line” smart city is now projected to be completed in 100 years, much longer than previously announced, comments from officials involved in the project suggest.
During a talk with Deputy NEOM CEO Rayan Fayez at the World Economic Forum in Davos on 22 January, Neom’s Chief Development Officer Denis Hickey gave a time frame of a century to build and populate the project.
“You’re gonna build a city that ultimately has to be master planned to hold 9 million people, [the] size of London, [the] size of New York City. That’s a big ask,” Hickey said, adding that “it’ll take 100 years or whatever to fill that. But we’ve got to plan now.”
Reports last year suggested that The Line had been scaled down, however, with Bloomberg reporting that the by 2030 only 2.4km of the intended 170km length would be constructed.
An intended population size of 1.5 million had also been reduced to 300,000. The reports prompted speculation of a general downgrading of the project, which was originally planned to be completed by 2045.
Hickey however reaffirmed the intended size of the project, saying “at its widest point, The Line is going to be over 100km long, 1.2km wide.”
He said that excavation had already started on The Line: “We’re due to start pouring the foundations of the first phase of The Line, and then we’ll start to become vertical later this year.”
The Line is just one of several projects that make up the NEOM giga-project, with Hickey also reporting progress at other sites.
This includes the industrial city Oxagon on the coast which now has a running port, and the tourist-centric Trojena and Magna resorts, both of which are now under construction.
The Line and NEOM are central parts of Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman’s ‘Vision 2030’, a series of social and economic projects that look to diversify the Saudi economy away from oil.
In line with Vision 2030, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) has diversified its holdings, investing in big tech, international sports, and Riyadh’s new metro, among other projects.
Karen Young, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told The New Arab that while the extended time frame of the project was more realistic, it “creates enormous room for inevitable fiscal and regulatory changes we would expect over the future generations of leadership and resource wealth in the country.”
“Extending the timeline creates some room for the government to consider immediate spending priorities over the more ambitious gigaprojects,” she said.
Even as Saudi Arabia attempts to diversify the country’s economy, its government budget is still vulnerable to oil price shocks, and the budget moved into periods of deficit numerous times in recent years.
“It does create some credibility questions for the timeline of other gigaprojects, but as NEOM as an entity communicates its plans in line with its higher authorities (especially the PIF), the more realistic all of the progress and returns will be.”
In addition to the economic scrutiny, reports have emerged about the the ruthlessness of the government’s pursuing of NEOM, with international media reporting the 2020 killing of a villager who protested the project after being displaced to make room for it
