The Line in Saudi Arabia is an urbanist’s dream

IT IS PERHAPS the mother of all off-plan sales. The prospectus makes a seductive pitch to weary city-dwellers trapped in polluted concrete jungles. Why spend years of your life stuck in traffic or crammed into public transport? Urban planners would no doubt make different choices if they were free to start from scratch. That, at least, is the thinking behind The Line.The proposed city within Neom, a high-tech development planned for Saudi Arabia’s north-west coast, would carve a 170km-long (106-mile) ribbon across the desert (see map). There would be no fights over congestion charges or parking regulations because there would be no cars, nor even streets for cars to drive on.