Just after dawn, the desert around Tabuk looks almost tender. The light is soft, the air still cool, and for a brief hour you can almost forget that this is one of the harshest places on Earth. On the horizon, cranes stall like frozen insects, lined up along where a 170‑kilometre mirrored wall was supposed to rise and slice the sand in two. Workers sip sweet tea from plastic cups, waiting for instructions that keep changing with each new directive from Riyadh.
This is NEOM’s The Line in 2025: not dead, not alive, just… shrinking.
The dream of a 9‑million‑person desert megacity is being quietly folded down, scaled back to a first segment, a pilot, a “proof of concept”.
Call it realism. Or call it retreat.
From trillion-dollar fantasy to shorter, sharper reality
When Saudi Arabia first pitched The Line, it sounded less like urban planning and more like science fiction fan fiction. A city with no cars, no streets, powered by 100% clean energy, stretched in a razor‑straight line across 170 kilometres of desert. The renders looked like a Blade Runner set washed in desert gold.
Now, Saudi officials are talking about building just a fraction of that. A first phase. A shorter segment that might host a few hundred thousand people instead of millions.
The sand has not moved as fast as the PowerPoint slides promised.
On the ground, you can feel the gap between the hype and the heat. Bulldozers have chewed through cliffs to carve the early foundations, and a handful of support buildings and camps already sit in the dust. Yet many of the most viral visuals — flying taxis, suspended stadiums, artificial moons — exist only on screens.
The Line was supposed to welcome residents by 2030. Now, even the most optimistic insiders whisper that only a small stretch of the project will be ready by then. A pilot city instead of a planetary revolution.
Nobody likes to say “scaled back”. They use phrases like “phased development” and “strategic focus” instead.
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This shrinkage is not just about money, though the numbers are staggering. The original NEOM price tag nudged the 500‑billion‑dollar mark, in a world already struggling to fund basic climate adaptation for vulnerable countries. As construction costs spike and oil revenues wobble, Saudi planners are doing what any ambitious homeowner does when the quote comes back double. They’re keeping the kitchen and cutting the rooftop pool.
There’s also physics and biology. Building a glass‑walled, climate‑controlled corridor in a place where summer temperatures now hit 50°C is a brutal engineering challenge. Keeping millions alive and comfortable inside that corridor for decades, on renewable energy alone, is something else entirely.
The story of The Line is starting to look less like a moon landing and more like humanity learning, again, that the desert always gets a vote.
Climate moonshot or monument to denial?
One argument for The Line has always sounded seductive: dense, linear cities are more efficient, cleaner, less car‑obsessed. Pack people into a compact footprint, stack services vertically, run everything on renewables, and you slash emissions. On a whiteboard in an air‑conditioned meeting room, this logic sings.
In that sense, scaling back feels like a loss. The project was a bold, if outrageous, bet that nations could leapfrog past messy incremental reforms and invent a whole new model of living. A prototype for post‑oil urban life stamped into the sand with oil money.
There’s a strange poetry in that contradiction.
Yet talk to climate scientists and urban planners off the record, and the tone shifts. Many never believed the 9‑million‑resident promise was plausible, environmentally or socially. Building an entirely new megacity in the desert demands colossal emissions from steel, cement, desalination, aviation, and constant cooling. You burn a lot of carbon chasing a carbon‑neutral dream.
Think of Dubai’s Palm Islands, where moving sand to shape a symbol became an ecological wound in the Gulf. The Line risked turning that logic up to eleven: a vast, fragile monument built by workers enduring 45‑degree heat.
We’ve all been there, that moment when a daring idea you secretly loved just doesn’t survive contact with reality.
The deeper question is uncomfortable: was The Line a genuine climate gamble or a glossy distraction from the slower, duller grind of real change? It promised a frictionless future — no cars, no pollution, no sprawl — without forcing existing cities to confront their own chaos.
Scaling back might be a win for common sense. Fewer kilometres mean fewer emissions, fewer displacements of local tribes, fewer risks of a glittering ghost city. It could also be read as a quiet admission that mega‑projects are not a substitute for the boring work of insulating homes, electrifying buses, fixing water systems.
Let’s be honest: nobody really does this every single day — waking up thrilled to retrofit old buildings and reform zoning laws. But those unglamorous fixes are what turn climate promises into something breathable.
What shrinking The Line means for the rest of us
For people watching from outside Saudi Arabia, The Line’s retreat carries a practical lesson: stop betting your whole climate story on impossible visions. The tools we need already exist in more modest form. Dense, mixed‑use neighbourhoods. Trains that run on time. Shade trees and cool roofs instead of mirrored walls and drones.
Cities from Seoul to Paris are quietly doing what NEOM tried to gamify: shortening commutes, banning cars from key districts, adding bike lanes, redesigning streets for people instead of engines. None of these projects go viral like a 500‑metre‑tall desert wall. They do, though, change daily life in ways that stick.
Scaling dreams to human size does not mean shrinking ambition. It means moving it closer to where people actually live.
The biggest trap for policymakers right now is binary thinking. Either we bet on audacious mega‑projects that “change everything”, or we surrender to doom. The Line fed that logic: if a futuristic desert city can’t save us, then what can?
The truth is muddier. A world of slightly better housing, much better transit, and cleaner power grids will feel imperfect and compromised. It will also be far safer than a world that waits for a miracle megacity while the seas rise.
That’s where the emotional sting lies for many who fell for NEOM’s glossy videos. It wasn’t just about Saudi Arabia. It was about wanting to believe there was one big swing left that could fix it all at once.
Saudi architect and researcher Sara Nasser told me, “The Line was sold as a revolution, but real climate courage is investing in regular, unsexy cities where people already struggle with heat, rent, and pollution. You don’t need a mirror wall to do that — you need political stamina.”
- Watch the ratio
If a government spends more time on renderings and slogans than on bus routes, insulation and grid upgrades, that’s a warning sign. - Follow the money
Ask where the climate budget goes: to symbolic projects or to cutting everyday emissions in housing, transport, and energy. - Listen to who moves
When a project displaces existing communities or workers without giving them power in the design, it’s more branding than solution. - Respect the limits
Deserts, coasts, forests all have ecological boundaries. Any plan that pretends those don’t exist is built on wishful thinking. - Protect the boring wins
A new bus lane is less glamorous than a flying taxi, yet it can save more emissions, more time, more lives.
Retreat, betrayal, or a rare adult moment?
Saudi Arabia’s decision to quietly shorten its desert dream forces an awkward reflection on what we really want from climate action. Do we crave hope at any cost, even if it comes as shiny delusion? Or are we finally ready to accept that the last great gamble is not one mega‑city in the sand, but millions of smaller choices spread across ordinary streets?
*Maybe the brave move isn’t doubling down on fantasy, but admitting that the planet doesn’t care about our renderings.*
If the age of megaprojects is giving way to an age of repair, that shift will feel less like heroism and more like responsibility. Less viral, more vital. At the same time, there is real grief in letting go of a vision that, for all its flaws, dared to say: our cities could be completely different.
Whether you see The Line’s retreat as sanity or surrender probably says less about Saudi Arabia, and more about what you still secretly hope the future might look like.
| Key point | Detail | Value for the reader |
|---|---|---|
| Desert mega-dreams have hard limits | The Line’s 170 km vision is being cut back to a smaller, phased segment | Helps you spot when climate promises collide with physics, money, and time |
| Symbolic projects can mask real needs | High-tech renderings overshadow upgrades to ordinary transport, housing, and grids | Encourages you to question where leaders invest and what actually changes your life |
| Scaled-down ambition isn’t always defeat | Reducing scope can lower emissions, risk, and human cost while keeping useful ideas | Invites a more nuanced view of “failure” in climate politics and urban design |
FAQ:
- Question 1Is The Line project cancelled or just reduced in size?
It’s not officially cancelled. Current reporting and leaks suggest it’s being cut back to a shorter initial stretch, with long-term expansion left vague and dependent on funding, politics, and real-world performance.- Question 2Why was The Line scaled back if it was supposed to be climate-friendly?
Because building a brand-new mega‑city in the desert uses huge amounts of steel, concrete, energy and water. The more analysts crunched the numbers, the clearer it became that the environmental, financial, and social costs were far higher than the marketing implied.- Question 3Could a smaller version of The Line still teach us something useful?
Yes. A limited, functioning section could become a lab for dense design, walkable infrastructure, and renewable-powered services. The key is whether lessons are shared and adapted to existing cities instead of guarded as a luxury experiment.- Question 4Does scaling back mean countries should stop dreaming big on climate?
Not necessarily. It means big dreams need clear limits, community input, and a serious look at life-cycle emissions. Grand visions that ignore basic urban realities risk slowing down the quieter transformations that matter most.- Question 5What can ordinary readers take from this story for their own lives?
Use it as a filter: be skeptical of glossy “future city” promises, and pay closer attention to improvements in your own area — transit, housing, energy bills. Those are where the real climate gamble is being placed every single day.
