Saudi Arabia Wants to Build This Bizarre City Dubbed ‘The Line’

Why would they use a dark and spooky version of the song—something you’d be more likely to hear in the trailer for a 2010s movie about a serial killer? Your guess is as good as ours. But it’s certainly a choice.

As we mentioned earlier, this is far from the first time that an incredibly expansive planned community has taken shape on the drawing board. Even Amazon founder Jeff Bezos showed off something similar in 2019, albeit his plan is for a space colony.

Whether it was George Pullman’s hyper-capitalist town in Chicagoland, the drug-free cult of Synanon in California, or Upton Sinclair’s socialist cooperative in New Jersey, history has shown intentional communities are often ruined by the egos of the people building them. And there’s arguably no bigger ego on the planet than the developer of this city, Mr. Bone-saw himself, Mohammed bin Salman.

“We cannot ignore the livability and environmental crises facing our world’s cities, and NEOM is at the forefront of delivering new and imaginative solutions to address these issues,” MBS said in a press release about the project.

“NEOM is leading a team of the brightest minds in architecture, engineering and construction to make the idea of building upwards a reality,” the Saudi royal continued.

The question is whether MBS will be able to pull this one off. The country likely has enough money to make it happen, but as we’ve learned from countless utopian communities of the 19th and 20th centuries, you always need more than just money to make a utopian experiment work.