SAUDI Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) has said that the country’s flagship project Neom will compete with US coastal city Miami in terms of entertainment, culture, sports and retail.

Appearing in a documentary shown by Discovery Channel on Monday, Crown Prince unveiled the salient features of The LINE project within Neom, the first smart city of its kind in the world with no roads, cars or emissions.

Speaking about Neom, Crown Prince said, it is to create the new civilisation of tomorrow and encourage other nations to keep doing similar things for the benefit of the planet.

“Saudi Arabia is creating a new way of building cities and a new way of living. The people of Saudi Arabia are very much hopeful of this project as it would meet their growing demand in future,” he said.

Kingdom making it to create ‘civilisation of tomorrow’

THE LINE is considered as the biggest infrastructure project in history, promising a revolution in urban living. Speaking about country’s growing population he said that it will double from 33 million to about 50-55 million by 2030.

“By that time, the population will reach a level of consuming full capacity of the existing infrastructure of the Kingdom. This raises an important question that we need to create a new city,” he said.

Regarding conceptualisation of THE LINE, he said that they exchanged ideas, worked with many teams, and launched a competition for the best designers of the world.

“All of them provided us with city models that are in line with the available models, but with better solutions, except for one designer who adopted the idea and said to turn the circle into a straight line”, MBS said.

He said that the city is already under way with the first phase’s completion is planned to align with the Vision 2030.

“The models are completed and now they are working to implement them”, he said while speaking about the progress of the project.

Since the project was announced in 2017, the $500bn prospective megacity, organisers claim it will be 33 times the size of New York City.

“The idea was amazing and it is huge and massive that I can’t explain it in a smaller way,” he said while emphasising that the project will make money as it will draw big demand.

While pointing out that country’s northwest area has not yet been explored, adding that and its mixed-up topography, mountains, valleys, oases, dunes, beaches, islands, and corals.

Referring the city’s artistic feature, Crown Prince said, “Engineers and designers are not enough without art and Kingdom does not want to create a city without having the whole city as a piece of art.”

In response to criticism about completion of the country’s flagship, the MBS said, “let them speak, and we will continue to prove them wrong.”

Published in Dawn, June 28th, 2023