A Tale of Two Megalopolises

Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, has staked its bets on a much less conventional city. It’s unclear whether the futuristic megastructure in the desert, called The Line, will ever be built, but it has already gained a firm place in the global imagination: For some, it’s a truly grand ambition to remake a nation; for others, it’s a megalomanic effort seeking to distract from the reality of a brutal autocracy.

The two cities reveal very different strategies of how autocracies attempt to shore up legitimacy in the 21st century. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, an old-style despot-cum-technocrat, promises modernization, the same way many bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes did in the 20th century. By contrast, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman not only promotes a kind of sci-fi fantasy but cleverly appeals to cosmopolitan, even countercultural, sensibilities as he seeks to rebrand his regime at home and abroad.

The new city, built 30 miles east of Cairo, is hardly aesthetically distinctive. It is spread out in the desert, with skyscrapers, malls, and enormous so-called compounds—effectively, gated communities—all separated by large spaces. (Despite the lack of greenery and difficulties with water access, many of these communities have names such as “Palm Hills” and “Botanica.”) The city also contains a central business district built by Chinese engineers. If anything, Egypt has made some timid efforts to emulate Dubai by constructing what on paper are superlatives, including the world’s tallest flagpole, which may or may not attract foreigners.

Sisi’s approach is textbook technocracy, implemented by a military bent on grabbing ever larger shares of the economy. The military’s budget is shrouded in secrecy; its enterprises, from cement to foodstuffs, according to outside observers, remain unaudited and untaxed. Recruits can provide cheap labor, and the presence of army officers in so many different areas of economic life means the state can detect discontent early. This entire model, which has been described as a military with a state attached to it, would have been recognizable to observers in the second half of the 20th century.

Workers share a meal as they rest underneath a billboard advertising a construction development in Egypt’s new administrative capital on March 7, 2021. Ahmed Hasan/AFP via Getty Images

Yet while bureaucratic authoritarianism is not dead, it is hardly a major trend. The world is moving away from openly repressive regimes, such as Sisi’s, that are unashamed of notoriety for human rights violations—what social scientists Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman call “fear dictatorships.” In their place, we are seeing more “spin dictatorships,” or autocracies that skillfully manipulate public opinion at home and abroad to appear open and modern. To be sure, they keep repression in reserve: As Russian President Vladimir Putin has demonstrated, an autocrat who wants to be recognized as a democratic leader by the West can drop all pretense and decide to shut down any remaining oppositional media and lock up critics. Still, Guriev and Treisman have shown empirically that today’s authoritarians overall use less violence; it’s been a shift from terror to public relations.

Mohammed bin Salman, The Line’s prime promoter, seems to know that he desperately needs better PR. Internationally, his name remains associated with that of Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist and dissident who was killed and dismembered in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018. To change Saudi Arabia’s image, Mohammed bin Salman has gone beyond conventional promises of top-down modernization. His economic reform plan, “Vision 2030,” comprises projects from luxury tourism to investments in green energy and sports. These changes require getting Saudis to acquire new skills—which is one reason the regime is importing Western labor to build up a film industry, for instance—and bringing more young men into the workforce. The point is not just nation-branding but also nation-building, with megaprojects supposed to inspire local pride.

An image shows the location of The Line project during an expo in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Nov. 15, 2022.Eliot Blondet/abacapress.com via Reuters

The most astonishing of these projects is The Line, a linear city that’s expected to be 106 miles long, with parallel skyscrapers 1,640 feet high and 656 feet across. It is part of a $500 billion plan to develop “Neom,” a new region in the country’s northwest. Unlike conventional, sprawling cities, The Line is being promoted as environmentally friendly: Its long corridor, with mirrors facing the desert, will supposedly have minimal impact on the surrounding environment; there will be no cars—and in fact, no carbon emissions at all—but instead an underground high-speed train running beneath the entire city.

According to a Saudi exhibition in Venice’s Abbazia di San Gregorio in 2023, The Line will offer a “ubiquitous public realm,” presumably as part of what Mohammed bin Salman touts as “enhanced human livability.” The high-tech show, titled “Zero Gravity Urbanism,” featured famous architects’ proposals for the megastructure, from David Adjaye to Coop Himmelb(l)au, the Austrian firm that designed the European Central Bank in Frankfurt.

The idea of a linear city is not new. The Spanish highway engineer Arturo Soria y Mata pioneered the concept in the 1880s when he envisioned a city, built along a tramway, that would shorten commuting times and maximize health and well-being. Early in the 20th century, the visionary U.S. city planner Edgar Chambless followed with a linear design to span the entire United States; linear city proposals were also prominent in the Soviet Union; and, as late as the mid-1960s, leading U.S. architects Peter Eisenman and Michael Graves drew up a linear city that would connect Boston and Washington.

None of these projects really came to fruition. To be sure, the promises were appealing: efficient transportation and the possibility of easily extending a city without it expanding in unplanned ways. But precisely to prevent sprawl, linear cities have been premised on exceptional levels of control: The people who want to live in them are supposed to get in line and stay in line.

The Line does not just promise the realization, at last, of a linear city. It also picks up ideas developed by the experimental architectural groups Archigram and Superstudio in the 1960s. Both were known for their avant-garde designs, such as the former’s “Walking City,” a structure on giant metal legs that could move freely around the Earth, and the latter’s “Continuous Monument,” a linear structure in the desert and other landscapes that eerily prefigures The Line.

Yet Archigram and Superstudio did not draw blueprints to be picked up by investors or autocrats interested in what the urban theorist Mike Davis once called, apropos Dubai, “imagineered urbanism.” Rather, their intentions were decidedly subversive. The collectives were critical of consumer capitalism; “Continuous Monument,” for instance, questioned a total urbanization of the globe bound to destroy nature. “If design is merely an inducement to consume, then we must reject design; if architecture is merely the codifying of the bourgeois models of ownership and society, then we must reject architecture,” Adolfo Natalini, Superstudio’s co-founder, said in 1971. Superstudio positioned itself as anti-design and anti-architecture in the name of anti-consumerism and anti-capitalism.

Even so, there are surprising continuities between the countercultural movements of the 1960s and The Line. One of the architects involved in Neom is Peter Cook, a British founder of Archigram. Lavishly produced coffee table books on The Line available at the Venice exhibition claimed that the city’s inspiration was none other than punk: Through aggressive anti-establishment sounds and gestures, punk signified the maximum disruption of music; The Line’s creators, by getting rid of something as fundamental as the street, think they are maximally disrupting the traditional understanding of the city. The books indicated that residents of The Line would mostly be creative types from abroad. The Line, one book claimed, seeks to attract “free thinkers” to its “carefree open urban space.”

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Visitors explore models of The Line project during an expo in Riyadh on Nov. 15, 2022. Balkis Press/abacapress.com via Reuters

The project is not without its critics, and there remain serious questions about its feasibility. As of now, no train exists that can travel as fast as what the PR materials about The Line suggest. It’s unclear how the city’s architects will ensure fire safety and how ambulances would get around without streets. Furthermore, studies indicate that a circular city would be better for the environment. Little thought seems to have been spared for birds that could fly into the gigantic mirror walls, wildlife that could no longer cross the desert, or the people who already live there: Up to 20,000 of the area’s current inhabitants, members of the Huwaitat tribe, could be displaced. Human rights groups have said the regime has severely punished critics of the project, and one activist from the tribe has been shot dead.

Still, a regime run by a fundamentalist royal family is appropriating avant-garde ideas to rebrand itself—not just as “modern” but as distinctly hip and free. In this sense, it is comparable to the artistic experiments of the very early Soviet Union, before Joseph Stalin opted for a conventional approach to art and architecture. Of course, the art and music industries have never had a problem appropriating cultural products meant to subvert them. But just as capitalism makes no concessions when it comes to profit, so autocrats make no concessions when it comes to control. The coffee table books featured not only hipsters but also uniformed staff whose attire looked as if it had been inspired by representatives of the Empire in Star Wars.

As the architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne recently put it, “utopian architecture, as distinct from other varieties, happens twice: the first time as critique, second as control.” The Line, after all, will be “run by AI” as the world’s first “cognitive city.” Nobody has explained what this means, though full-scale surveillance seems inevitable.

It would be a mistake to dismiss everything that is happening in Saudi Arabia as PR or to assume that all that is PR is necessarily effective; even articles that associate Mohammed bin Salman with “cyberpunk” or “cool Arabia” contain the name Khashoggi. The real lesson is that new-style autocracies need narratives and spin. The more fantastical the project, the more potential for enticing stories. Other rulers will get the point, and they will talk—and maybe even one day build—accordingly.