Saudi Arabia released renderings of its 105-mile-long linear city that promises to have "zero cars, zero streets, and zero emissions." Called The Line, the concept was unveiled in early 2021. Now Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman shares more details, saying in a statement:

Some are calling it "a huge dystopian wall in the desert." One might also point out that it would be impossible for a young woman to actually fly around Saudi Arabia alone in jeans and a T-shirt as in the video, as Saudi women must have a male guardian. But let's put that aside for now and look at how the concept has evolved.

In our earlier post on The Line, we noted the idea of a linear city makes a lot of sense. Madrid had the first, with La Ciudad Lineal in 1882 built around a streetcar line. Edgar Chambless described "Roadtown" in 1910, writing: "The idea occurred to me to lay the modern skyscraper on its side and run the elevators and the pipes and wires horizontally instead of vertically." American architects Michael Graves and Peter Eisenman proposed the Jersey Corridor project in 1965.

We often quote Jarrett Walker's tweet, "land use and transportation are the same things described in different languages." I wrote previously that "the linear city, in all of its incarnations, is a demonstration of how the transportation system really is driving the built form and the land use concept. They are one and the same thing." Or, "how you get around determines what you build."

That's the driving principle of The Line: It is sitting on top of a high-speed rail line—previously a hyperloop—that can get you from one end to the other in 20 minutes. But when you get off the train and are in your own neighborhood, it's a 5-minute city.

It's really just a modern version of a classic streetcar suburb; you have your linear transport system and move perpendicular to it to get home, parallel to it to get services. Except when you add the vertical dimension, nature is never more than 300 feet away horizontally and you have multiple layers of services and housing above, all facing into a 105-mile-long atrium. Or, as they say on the website:

They do not reveal who the architects and engineers that put this proposal together are, but whoever did the architectural renderings deserves to be world-renowned; the late Syd Mead might have enjoyed these.

The renderings also remind me of the O'Neill Cylinder renderings by Don Davis and Rick Guidice, done for NASA in the '70s; they are both self-contained cities in hostile environments. This one is complete with parks, swimming pools, and down in the bottom right, a very non-Saudi wedding.

Whether or not this is the most appropriate place to put THE LINE—Chambliss wanted people to walk perpendicular to it into farmland—it's hard to argue with its ambitions:

We have spent too many decades prioritizing cars and roads over the needs of people's health and well-being. Linear cities remain a very interesting alternative form of development.

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