Why Saudi Arabia’s The Line might be humanity’s first climate-proof city
I wrote this essay a couple of months ago, and I really don’t know why, but I never published it. And then suddenly the news broke out that Saudi Arabia had to halt most of its futuristic projects due to the oil price. They have truly been running the country like a startup with some sort of technical promise from an investor. And suddenly the money has been drawn back and the project has to change.
But I think the fundamentals of my essay still stand, even if they are not able to execute the whole project itself.
I know that some people see Saudi Arabia as evil, but I see a country that is trying to evolve as fast as it can, because they are extremely dependent on the price of oil. And the current trend shows that time is running out for them.
I am very interested to see what they will do now in terms of survival, because they will have to make drastic changes very fast.
I hope you enjoy my essay.
I watched a fascinating critique of Saudi Arabia’s The Line project, and the longer I listened, the clearer it became that the person behind it has probably never lived in a hot climate. They did not seem to understand the reason behind the design at all.
I live in southern Spain, in the Málaga region, and last summer was gruesome. There were weeks when it was so hot the city center was absolutely dead during the daytime. No one wanted to move anywhere. If you had to, you would walk from shadow to shadow like a lizard on survival mode.
The way people live here in the south often gets funny comments from neighboring countries, or even from northern Spaniards, because the climate is so completely different. In summer, mornings are sacred. That is when you do your groceries, your errands, everything essential. From noon onward, it becomes unbearable.
That is also why during the holidays, Spanish families go to the beach early in the day, but after lunch almost no one goes back. It is just too hot. Of course there are always those who stay from morning till night, but it is becoming rarer as the temperatures rise.
From around 2 p.m. until 9 p.m., everything slows down. The city falls quiet. Everyone waits for the sun to drop, hoping the evening will finally bring some relief. But some nights are tropical now, barely cooler than the day. And it is getting worse every year.
I have lived here for eleven years, and it was not like this a few years ago. It is getting harder and hotter.
That is okee reason why local restaurants and bars saw their revenues drop last summer. Daytime was unlivable. There were weeks on end when it was just too hot to sit outside. The terraces were empty. The streets were silent.
My friend from Finland visited me in July, right during a heatwave, and it completely threw a curveball to everything we had planned. We seriously had to map out which days we could do what. Which days were too hot. What time of day we could go outside. There were even activities we had to abandon completely because of the heat. It was unbearable even for me, and I live here all year. I actually had to tell her that we should not go out that day. It was not a good idea.
And I remember thinking that if climate change continues, tourism here in the summer will become impossible. And if the heat does not take out the tourism, the rising sea level will wipe out our beaches, and no one will come here anyway. I do not know which is more terrifying.
When you live through that kind of summer, you stop thinking of climate change as a distant future. You feel it breathing down your neck. And that is when projects like The Line suddenly stop looking like dystopian vanity and start looking like a preview of survival.
Saudi Arabia sits in one of the hottest and harshest climates on Earth. The environment is not friendly to life, yet people live there, and they are trying to design a livable future. A city like The Line is more than a sci-fi fantasy. It is a potential survival prototype.
Imagine a linear city that can be fully air-conditioned, energy-efficient, and shielded from the outside elements. It does not matter what the temperature is in the desert. Life could continue comfortably inside. You could move, work, and socialize without worrying about burning asphalt or collapsing heat waves.
And honestly, that might be humanity’s reality in a few hundred years if we do not get our act together. The world is heating up. Some places will become too hot. Others too cold. People will need enclosed cities to survive. In that sense, the Saudis are not building something dystopian. They are building ahead.
Living in a hot region teaches you how much your life depends on the sun. You plan your errands around it. You walk your dog before 9 a.m. You time your groceries before the streets melt. Your freedom literally shrinks with the heat. So imagine the freedom of living in a 170 kilometer city where temperature does not dictate your every move. That is not dystopia. That is innovation.
Of course, there are controversies and ethical concerns around The Line. But let us be honest. What in this world is not problematic? We humans have already devastated nature and wiped out countless species.
Currently, we are destroying the coral reefs, one of the most significant ecosystems on the planet and a widely recognized tipping point for global stability. They are dying right under our watch, and we have caused it by heating the oceans over the last two centuries.
So no, one city is not going to destroy it all. Especially if it is designed to be carbon neutral, with no cars inside, only public transportation, which is the greener option.
Of course, carbon neutral also does not mean zero carbon. Building a megastructure of this scale carries enormous embodied emissions from materials and construction. Critics are right about that. But at least it is an attempt to innovate within a broken system, to build forward instead of pretending that the old way of life can last forever.
It is not perfect. But it is an attempt. And maybe, just maybe, The Line is not the end of the world. It is a glimpse of how we might survive it.
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