Finally, someone has invented the future. And it's none other than Mohammed bin Salman, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia! In his new city, everyone will live very closely together, with all their daily needs –
Simon Wilson: Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince invents 'utopia'
Those walls will become the world's largest structures, and yet the whole thing will be just 200m wide: the width of two rugby fields. Nine million people will live there.
And none of them will own a car. There won't even be any roads.
That's right: Saudi Arabia, the world's second-largest oil producer, is building an enormous car-free city, protected from all the adverse effects of climate change, using the billions it makes from reinforcing car dependency in the rest of the world.
"You see desert," they say, "we see opportunity." The place will be "a living laboratory, home to the brightest minds, dedicated to the sanctity of all life on Earth".
"All life", presumably, doesn't include the people Saudi Arabia routinely imprisons, tortures and often executes for such "crimes" as being raped, "behaving" in some LGBTQI+ way, criticising Mohammed or being a woman who leaves the house without permission. Or the untold number of workers, most of them migrants and treated little better than slaves, who will build The Line.
The value to MBS is clear enough: he wants to be known as a visionary world leader and not the guy who ordered the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
For the rest of us, extraordinary architecture is probably not the future but does pose a challenge. The Line asks us what we value in cities and how we might reconceive them in a zero-emissions, equitable way. We're not going to build our own Line in the sand, so what will we do instead?
It's also a warning. The Line affirms that the mega-rich will be just fine, whatever global warming does to the planet. They will build themselves fabulous pleasure cities, insulated from the world as it turns to desert.
And they will carry on mega-polluting, while their lackeys in politics and the fossil-fuel industries keep assuring the rest of us we really don't need to worry. We're going to see more projects like this.
You can check out The Line here.
Design for Living is a regular Canvas magazine series about bright ideas designed to make cities better.