Saudi Arabia’s wildly ambitious plan to build 500m tall, mirrored, 170km long parallel skyscrapers, forming a 1.5M population desert city has been curtailed to 2.4km long.

The news was broken by the financial news publication Bloomberg, which said that Saudi Arabia’s government had “scaled back its medium-term ambitions” for Neom, of which The Line is the most significant sub-project.

The Saudi government had hoped to have 1.5M residents living in The Line by 2030, but this has been scaled back to fewer than 300,000, according to the report. It is unclear how it intends to house a higher concentration of people considering the proposed length (and therefore area) has been massively slashed.

  • The Octonaut
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    8 months ago

    You’ve missed the point that the government had relatively recently introduced a ‘temporary’ Universal Service Charge during the recession and had not (and have not to this day) removed it. I was in favour of metering water but the argument wasn’t as simplistic as you’re making it.

    Ireland being a low density country with an inundation of fresh water rain and springs is certainly worth mentioning when comparing with Saudi Arabia though…