On January 21, 2026, The Nation published a sharply critical report claiming that The Line—the backbone of Saudi Arabia’s celebrated urbanization fantasy, Neom—was “dead.” A few days later, the Financial Times published another report confirming a “radical redesign and downsizing” across Neom. In my view, the future of The Line was clear from the outset because of the unnecessary costs created by its linear form.

Cities naturally function as three-dimensional, redundant networks. Reduce a city to a two-dimensional corridor, and you then have to build excessive capacity, layered logistics, expensive redundancy, and continuous operating infrastructure to prevent that corridor from becoming congested. The alternative routes that a normal city gains almost for free from its street network must instead be replicated through second and third engineered systems.

The phasing required to bring such a project into operation also becomes increasingly expensive. To make the structure work like a city from the beginning, the main spine, stations, and service infrastructure need to be constructed before a resident population has even emerged. That increases the risk of sunk investments. In the end, instead of financing the creation of a city, the project becomes an exercise in financing the effort to make a one-dimensional structure operate like a multidimensional urban environment.

A city is not so much the work of one designer or a small group as a social structure formed through the accumulation of centuries. It is a complex social order shaped by rhythms of everyday life, institutions, economic networks, cultural habits, migration, and the geography of social classes. Social structures do not readily submit to designers’ fantasies or to the imposition of an arbitrary form. Treating the relationship between society, a city, and nature as a plan that can be completely controlled from above is bound to produce high costs and failure in the long run.

Creating a social structure or a city with a distinctive identity requires not merely inventing a unique geometry, but establishing institutions and everyday arrangements compatible with the historical logic of urban life: multiple centers, redundancy, incremental growth, and accountable governance. Design works when it supports these principles; when it attempts to replace them, it creates inflated costs and fragility.

The lake you thought you had drained rises again. The stream you confined overflows and floods the building you constructed above it. A once-in-a-century wave destroys the road built on reclaimed land along the coast. A city expanded without regard for a fault line risks becoming one more buried ancient city in the Aegean. In discussing this extreme Saudi project, we should also draw lessons for our own cities, projects, and systems of governance.