NEOM: The City of the Future Stuck in the Middle East of the Present

There are projects that look like real estate, and there are projects that look like a state's declaration of power. NEOM, the Saudi mega-project being built in the northwest of the kingdom, near the Gulf of Eilat, clearly belongs to the latter type. This is not just another new neighborhood, but an attempt to build a showcase for a future where Saudi Arabia is no longer dependent only on oil, but on tourism, technology, industry, green energy, and international money. When announced in 2017, there was talk of investments of more than $500 billion from Saudi Arabia, the Public Investment Fund, and other investors.

The highlight of NEOM is The Line, one of the strangest and most intriguing plans ever presented in the field of urbanism: instead of a city that spreads in all directions, the Saudis presented the idea of a city built as a long strip. Very long: 170 km, only 200 meters wide, and about 500 meters high. Everything was supposed to fit between two giant mirror-coated walls, a structure that looks in simulations like a metal blade cutting through the desert. According to the original plan, the city is supposed to eventually house up to 9 million residents.

The idea behind The Line was not only to impress the world, but also to offer a model that is almost the opposite of every city we know. No cars, no roads, no endless travel from home to work. A city where basic services are close by, and internal transport is supposed to move people quickly from end to end in a straight line. It sounds like a solution to everything that annoys us in a modern city, only in a Saudi, expensive, flashy, and slightly megalomaniacal version.

And then came the World Cup. Saudi Arabia was chosen to host the 2034 World Cup, and NEOM is supposed to be part of this big show. According to the Saudi bid website, a stadium with more than 46,000 seats is planned there, with the pitch itself supposed to be more than 350 meters above the ground, integrated into The Line. That is, not just a futuristic city, but also a stadium that sounds as if someone asked an architect to design “something that no one will believe exists.”

Here the story begins to get complicated. For years, NEOM was sold as an almost unlimited vision. Saudi money, empty desert, technology, political power. What could go wrong? In practice, almost everything. Costs ballooned, goals seemed less and less realistic, investors did not line up as hoped, and the project began to undergo adjustments. Already in 2024, Reuters reported that some of the plans, including The Line, were scaled back due to soaring costs, and that Saudi Arabia is still highly dependent on oil revenues.

The question of whether the war between Israel and Iran “destroyed” NEOM is also a good question, but it has no simple answer. It probably didn't destroy it alone. NEOM was already complicated before that, but the war and the regional flare-up did make this dream much harder to market. When you try to convince the world to invest in the city of the future by the Red Sea, you don't want the headlines around it to talk about missiles, threatened shipping lanes, and regional danger.

This is exactly what happened: the war with Iran and the Houthis' threats to shipping in the Red Sea have raised the importance and vulnerability of the entire region. According to AP, Bab al-Mandab, the southern gate of the Red Sea, is a route through which about 12% of global trade usually passes, and the Houthis have already proven in the past that they are capable of disrupting maritime traffic there. During wartime, this entire region stops looking like an advertisement for the city of the future and starts looking like a security and economic risk.

At the same time, according to a report by Semafor from May 2026, Saudi Arabia postponed further work on The Line until after 2030, and shifted the emphasis to more practical parts of NEOM, such as a port, infrastructure, and data centers. According to the same report, demographic targets were also significantly cut, and instead of a vision of hundreds of thousands or millions of residents by the end of the decade, the updated target is up to 100,000 residents in NEOM by 2030.

This is actually the real story. NEOM is not necessarily disappearing, but it is moving from fantasy to a much colder version of an Excel sheet. Less “170 km long mirror city,” more “let's build a port, electricity, cooling, infrastructure, and data connections first.” Less of an architectural dream aimed at stunning the world, more of an infrastructure project trying to justify itself economically.

There is something almost symbolic in this: Saudi Arabia wanted to build the city that would prove it is no longer stuck in the old world of oil, wars, and desert. But the old world refused to align. Energy prices, regional security, shipping lanes, wars, hesitant investors, and construction costs, all these things do not disappear just because the simulation looks amazing, but they do take a step back.

And yet, it is impossible to dismiss NEOM entirely. Even a scaled-down version of it could become a significant center for industry, logistics, tourism, and technology. But The Line, as it was presented at the beginning, the giant city between two mirror walls, will probably no longer happen at the pace and size the Saudis imagined.

Did the war destroy the craziest project in the world? No. It only exposed the truth that was there from the beginning: even the most futuristic dream in the world still has to live in a real region, with real politics, real security, and real money. And in the Middle East, as we know too well, reality always arrives without asking for permission from the simulation.