The Line
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
How this atlas is made · What “last verified” means · What “source-checked” means
Pitched as a 170km linear city for 1.5 million residents, The Line was scaled back in 2024 to a 2.4km first phase for under 300,000 people by 2030 (Bloomberg). Saudi Arabia's PIF suspended construction in 2025 pending review, and by 2026 work was reported halted until after 2030 — a dramatic reversal for its flagship megaproject.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is press reporting; no primary evaluation was located. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →🎓 Lesson
Announcing a hyper-ambitious mega-form before engineering and financing are proven invites a painful public correction: within three years The Line went from a 170km blueprint to a suspended 2.4km stub. (The often-cited ~$50bn is NEOM-wide spending — airport, port, roads, hydrogen — not The Line alone.)
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “The Line” — NEOM, Saudi Arabia. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/neom-the-line/ (last verified 2026-07-16). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.