How Saudi Arabia Is Building a 170 KM City in the Desert — The Line

A single building, 170 kilometres long, 500 metres tall, home to nine million people — with no roads, no cars and no emissions. That is The Line, the mirrored city Saudi Arabia announced as the centrepiece of NEOM, its five-hundred-billion-dollar bet on life after oil. Five years into construction, the story has changed. The 2030 target has reportedly been cut from 1.5 million residents to under 300,000. An internal audit reportedly put the true cost of finishing the city in the trillions. The chief executive is gone, a strategic review is under way — and yet the trench in the desert is real, the piles are going in, and the first module, Hidden Marina, is still rising. How is a linear city supposed to work? How is it actually being built? And what happens to the most ambitious construction project on Earth when the money, the physics and reality itself push back? We break it down — the vision, the engineering, the human cost, and the numbers. Chapters: 00:00 A City Drawn as a Single Line 01:04 Why Saudi Arabia Is Building It 02:35 The Plan: 170 KM of Mirrored City 04:25 The Site: Sea, Mountains, Desert 05:28 The Build: Trenches, Piles and 140,000 Workers 07:06 The Challenges: Heat, Water and Physics 08:18 The Human Cost 09:14 The Reality Check: Audits, Cuts and Reviews 10:48 What Comes Next ⚠️ ABOUT THE VISUALS: This is an educational documentary based entirely on publicly available information. The visuals are conceptual visualisations — AI-generated imagery and 3D reconstructions created for this channel to illustrate the announced designs and the reported construction process. They are not real footage of the site. Announced plans are described as plans; reported figures are attributed in the narration. Sources: NEOM official announcements (2017, 2021, 2022, 2024, 2025); Bloomberg (April 2024); Wall Street Journal (2025); Financial Times (2025); Reuters (November 2024); United Nations human rights experts' statements (2023); New Atlas and ME Construction News (Hidden Marina, February 2025). Satellite imagery: Copernicus Sentinel-2 / NASA Landsat (public data). The Future Frontier — megaprojects that reshape the world.