Saudi Arabia’s dystopian futuristic city project is crashing and burning

It appears that Neom—Saudi Arabia’s hugely expensive, architecturally bizarre urban development project—is floundering and close to collapse. A new report from the Financial Times cites high-level sources within the project to paint a picture of dysfunction and failure at the heart of the quixotic effort.

Neom was envisioned as a vast series of fantastical urban developments spread across the coast of the Red Sea. At the center of the project is The Line—a proposed 105-mile-long city which developers had initially projected could house as many as 9 million people by the year 2030. The Line is defined by bizarre architectural flourishes that, as the story notes, have seemed impossible even to the execs tasked with making them a reality.