NEOM’s elite dreaming: affective infrastructure and the aesthetics of global modernity

Abstract

This article analyzes the development of NEOM, a regional megaproject of four cities currently being constructed along the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia. It argues that development for NEOM is speculative, not only in that it these megacities are being built absent of real need, but that the projects themselves are a form of “elite dreaming.” Here, a global elite of designers produce speculative visions for new cities, an imaginary in which these cities serve as technological fixes for problems of climate change and sustainable growth. In so doing, elite designers allow for particular futures while absenting others, namely the people displaced by new cities and the workers who construct and maintain these infrastructures. To this end, this article pays particular attention to the way that design leverages particular aesthetics, narratives, and affects in ways that nevertheless have the power to drive real investment, movement, and construction.

NEOM is a $500 billion gigacity project the size of Rwanda to be built in Tabuk province of Saudi Arabia along the Red Sea. ‘NEOM’ combines the prefix neo- with ‘mostaqbal’, the Arabic word for ‘future’. Actually a proposal for four new cities, it shares many characteristics with new city development across the world, in that it bills itself as a sustainable, smart, future hub for information economies and creativity. Similarly characteristic of this endeavor is the bevy of Western architecture and design firms brought in to conceptualize these new cities. In this way these state-financed projects in southwest Asia gain the imprimatur of star architects from the global north. This is a mutually beneficial relationship, in which Euro-American ‘creatives’ can envision future cities made possible by the authoritarian contexts of their construction, while states gain entrance to global modernity and become sites of tourism, consumption, logistics, and investment. The concepts put forward by these firms are futuristic, matching the speculative financing of the project with a speculative imaginary of a future place, one that resolves problems of industrial modernity like climate change through technology and design. In this way, NEOM is similar to development in the nearby gulf states that seek to marry international finance, global recognition, and ‘smart’ design in a vision for cities of the future.

This article argues that the extensive promotional material documenting the design of NEOM evinces what Aiwha Ong and Ananya Roy call ‘elite dreaming’, specifically the speculative imaginary of contemporary urbanism that marries international finance with particular design aesthetics to conceptualize new cities across the Global South. ¹ Being speculative, these cities are temporally unstable sites, existing in an imaginary near future that may never come to pass, or which might be partially constructed before ‘failing’ in various ways. Instead of focusing on their potential ‘delivery’, this article closely reads and analyzes the design imaginary to tease out the ideological structures that speculative urbanism inhabits. NEOM is at the moment a ‘powerpoint city’, one whose ‘new future’ speaks to an audience of investors in a language of global cities competition. ² That is, rather than building a new city for real housing need, NEOM articulates an urbanism for consumption, which can be seen in its focus on speculative real estate investment, tourism, megaevents, and global logistics.

Following from the above, this article argues that NEOM’s design is composed of specific aesthetic forms that produce an affective relationship to the structures and infrastructures of new city urbanism. That is, the aesthetic forms of NEOM’s ‘elite dreaming’ are essential to eliciting specific responses and attachments that, in turn, present certain futures as inevitable while foreclosing others. Specifically, the aesthetics of NEOM suggest the particular temporal structures of development that moves, in a linear fashion, from a supposed empty site to a perfectly-crafted, modern finished structure. The empty site suggests a terra nullius – land devoid of inhabitance or use, whose emptiness connotes both a lack of productivity and a blank slate for designers, planners, and architects. ³ As such, the imaginary of a blank state emptiness evinces the colonial disposition of planning still at work, now in new contexts and new scales. Meanwhile, the voluminous, slickly-produced promotional material for NEOM – lengthy documentary-style videos, websites, digital pamphlets and books – works to narrativize the construction of the finished site (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Designers use a visual rhetoric of emptiness to suggest that The Line is being built on an ecological and social blank slate. THE LINE: Saudi Arabia’s City of the Future in NEOM. Directed by Discovery UK, 2023. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oamD9QoTH9M.

This narrative is in one part familiar, revealing the stageist logic of development that manifests modernity through planning and improvement. Similarly, it reveals the anxieties of Global South entities to join a global modernity defined by the state of its cities. At the same time, the envisioned modernity demonstrates the particular concerns of anthropocenic late capitalism and the contradictory aim to address climate change through technological and entrepreneurial solutions. Namely, NEOM is an attempt to transition Saudi Arabia from being an oil state to one of sustainable cities plugged into networks of elite consumption and logistics. It promises a sustainable future even though the completion and maintenance of massive new cities in a desert environment is self-evidently a massive environmental cost. These contradictions are resolved through the narratives of planning and development, which present ‘sustainability’ as an aesthetic and in so doing build an affective attachment toward the idea of NEOM, however belied that aesthetic is by the realities of construction.

Finally, these aesthetics make absent the labor required to build and maintain these cities, an erasure concomitant with the harsh, deadly conditions of temporary, migrant labor with uncertain legal status characteristic of gulf development. In this way, new city design aesthetics advance a narrative of who the built environment is for and what it should look like, and in so doing make different kinds of existences visible or invisible. NEOM becomes envisioned as a seamless world of leisure and technology, appealing to the eye of an international elite that does not see labor.

In sum, I argue that the specific aesthetic vision of speculative urbanism is centrally important to its political disposition. Contemporary urbanism expresses itself not just – and in some cases not even primarily – in built spaces, but rather through narrative world-building projects that suggest a particular if not myopic understanding of who the future is for. These narratives draw on the repertoires of colonial planning and imaginaries of modernity, adapting them to address questions of planetary sustainability and the scale of contemporary cities. Through unraveling their aesthetics, we can understand not only what kind of world they present, but also who and what is absented from their futures.

Aesthetic and affective infrastructures

NEOM consists of four related megaprojects. The Line is a completely linear city that is meant to house 9 million residents in a structure that is 500 m high, 200 m feet wide, and 170 km in length. ⁴ Oxagon is a proposed port city and floating industrial and logistics hub. Finally, Trojena and Sindalah are both tourist resorts, the former in the mountains and the latter by the coast, which will host megaevents and other leisure activities. Together, the developments suggest how Saudi Arabia proposes to use new city construction focused on logistics, tourism, technology, and speculative investment to join a global modernity. The design visualizations emphasize the scope and scale of these projects through the glossy technological futurity of the finished structures. These even take on aesthetically clean forms to emphasize their modernism: one city laid out in a single line, another in a perfect octagonal shape.

Urban studies has long dedicated itself to examining the political-economic and sociological functions of development, especially in the context of existing cities. In this way, it has sought to account for the sociality of space and role of criticism to advocate for spatial justice and a right to the city. ⁵ Urban theorists have also considered the lived experience of everyday city dwellers, asking how this experience diverges from both urban planning’s representational conception of space and the political elite’s desire for smoothly-operating neoliberal cities without dissensus. ⁶

More recent work, however, has begun to think about the role that aesthetics and affect play in the development of urban spaces, and not only in or adjacent to existing urban spaces but in spaces proposed and imagined – even in those that are never built or completed. This work has also taken an infrastructural view of urban development, asking how cities participate in global supply chains and networks of production and consumption. ⁷ Here the aesthetics of cites are not just a second-order expression of their ‘underlying’ political-economies, but more dynamically related and productive of their political expression. As Rich, Rizzuto, and Zieger argue, development infrastructures are not simply ‘public works’ but can be more capaciously considered ‘flexible and temporally unstable structures that organize biological and social life’. ⁸ This instability refers to the capacity for development to have an existence outside of its progressive material visibility, for example in its speculative imagination or half-unfinished final state. To read infrastructure past its materially visible and sensory existence, then, is to attend to the way the aesthetics of its other registers open up the capacity for politics. This political capacity also forecloses others in the same gesture, such that ‘state and corporate projects require the management of Indigenous, migrant, and enslaved populations to erect the systems that make modern life function, while barring those populations’ knowledge formations and ecological practices from entering into the calculus of how and why such infrastructures are made’. ⁹

In this way, the increasingly voluminous production of design and promotion for new cities like NEOM form the aesthetic conditions of possibility for development. They help to narrativize development, making it legible while also suturing its many lacerating contradictions. It’s not that this process works perfectly (or even well), but an analysis of design helps to understand affective response it seeks to elicit and direct and the role of cultural narrative in the production of cities. Kai Bosworth notes that ‘affect’, here, works in two related ways: as the affects generated by designs and structures and as a way to think about political-economic organization itself. For the former, NEOM’s designs, like those for other megaprojects and new cities, suggest that the ‘specific temporalities of infrastructure systems – expectation, repetition, decay, repair, maintenance, and everydayness – are generative of specific kinds of affects, such as despair, frustration, or hope’. ¹⁰ The goals of such ‘design’ are not necessarily about planning practical, sustainable, workable spaces but about eliciting specific affects while occluding others.

Meanwhile, as a way to conceptualize political-economy, we can ask, how is political affect is produced and circulated? How does it produce the capacity for political action? Here a notion of ‘affective infrastructure’ is more than just the generation of the above affects and temporalities but a theory to explain how they are circulated and amplified. The aesthetics of development are not simply the products of a material determination, but rather aesthetics and material development relate to each other in a more dynamic, overdetermined manner. ¹¹ To this end, Dominic Davies reworks Raymond William’s formulation to think about how culture works through ‘infrastructures of feeling’ to affect and condition relations of power. ¹²

In this way, the ostensibly practical and technical aims of planning and design become caught within their own speculative mythology. For example, Keller Easterling notes the way that the ‘zone’ becomes a repeatable urban space throughout the world, particularly in the Global South. The zone acquires a protean form: it is both an open site of free trade and a closed and securitized site of controlled labor, a city ‘doppelganger’ that become a city in its own right. ¹³ Furthermore, gulf cities like Dubai, and now NEOM, are constructed as city-state zones that divide into sub zones as if they were biological cells, each producing specialized products and knowledge (science parks, industrial centers, tech cities, etc.). The end result is that the zone, ‘for all its intentions to be a tool of economic rationalization, it is often a perfect crucible of irrationality and fantasy’. ¹⁴ That is, its pretensions to being an open and economically efficient means of rationalizing production are often undone in reality, but it is nevertheless reproduced in increasingly esoteric forms around the world. The speculative and fantastical aesthetics and affects that attend design, then, come to govern the political production of a new city like NEOM, transforming absurdity into common sense.

Finally, as many scholars of infrastructure note, development works through an idiom of modernity that is redolent of a colonial disposition. Indeed, since the designers of NEOM frequently conceive of its site in the Tabuk providence as an ‘empty’ planet, ripe for colonization, we can think about both the legacy and political technics of colonial modernity. Again, I am not only interested in how colonial modernity justified its interventions through reference to development, but how the aesthetics of that development functioned to define the limit the conception of modernity itself. As Brian Larkin observes, infrastructure functioned as a kind of ‘colonial sublime’, a spectacle through which political power could be made manifest. ¹⁵ New cities like NEOM suggest that the scale and stakes of that sublimity have to be continually increased to aesthetically resolve the contradictions that development generates. For example, and as we’ll see in the following, NEOM not only presents itself as sustainable, but as best solution to anthropocentric climate change, not despite, but because of its massive scale. Urbanism turns to the speculative to produce this sublimity.

Elite dreaming, speculative urbanism, and the imagination of new cities

The archive of new cities’ promotional material indicate the way that urban design aesthetics relate to and are constitutive of formations of power. This is even the case when considering the circulation of speculative design aesthetics for infrastructures that have not been, and may never be, fully complete. That is, rather that wait until these projects reach some appropriately ‘final’ form to evaluate their operation, we can read them as fabulations that nevertheless mobilize massive real-world investment, movement, and construction. Moreover, the way these aesthetics circulate indicates how and at what scales power moves and operates. Specifically, new city design aesthetics circulate through what Ong and Roy call ‘inter-referencing’, that is, ‘practices of citation, allusion, aspiration, comparison, and competition’. ¹⁶ As they write, these comparative

inter-referencing practices operate as a kind of elite dreaming, as when leaders in Mumbai wonder when it will become the next Shanghai . . . inter-referencing practices are thus inseparable from and in fact constitutive of an emerging system for the judgment of urban value. Through the favorable mention, allusion, and even endorsement of another city, actors and institutions position their own projects in a language of explicit comparison and ranking, thus vicariously participating in the symbolic values of particular cities. ¹⁷

‘Elite dreaming’ suggests a hazy type of class consciousness, a global elite that thinks in terms of speculative fantasies that are only latently connected to the practical technics of planning and building, and yet serve to powerfully mobilize them, in part through the way that these dreams draw concrete investment. They serve as a common sense not only in their insistence that new cities be created at increasingly astonishing scale and speed, but also in the uniform way they connect their supposed ethos of sustainability and technology to a particular aesthetic of modernity.

Urban developments like NEOM or those in the gulf states have a speculative quality in their purpose, design, and imaginary, even when they are ‘realized’ in some form. Christopher Marcinkoski defines speculative urbanism as ‘the construction of new urban infrastructure or settlement for primarily political or economic purposes, rather than to meet real (as opposed to artificially projected) demographic or market need’. ¹⁸ Speculative here refers to financial speculation and its attendant politics. Those politics include the spectacular design of, for example, skyscrapers and artificial islands in Dubai or the outlandish megacities of NEOM, all for the sake of producing cities as sites of investment. This is certainly the case in the UAE, where ‘most significant sources of income since 1990 have likely been land sales to foreign investors’. ¹⁹ Aimee Bahng refers to this mode of speculative investment as the ‘financial colonization of the future’. ²⁰ Though she is primarily referring to financial products like futures, here speculative investment also produces a concrete geography in the form of new or expanded cities. This includes rather voracious and rapid land acquisition for the sake of producing sprawling megacities ²¹ ; sometimes this speculative development is for ‘smart cities’ that exacerbate local inequalities, while in other cases it produces uninhabited ghost cities. ²²

In this way, speculative urbanism shapes the creation of very real geographies. What fuels this is not only investment in these spaces, but the design imaginary that precedes that investment. As such, speculative urbanism also involves a speculative fiction – futures sold on the basis of design and promotion – which Marcinkoski calls the ‘hubristic pursuit of a global paradigm of fast-track city building, replete with all the requisite superlatives–largest, longest, most expensive, tallest, and so forth–in a spectacular accumulation of luxury-driven postmodernity’. ²³ Here the spectacular and the speculative are conjoined, with the modernity of the latter relying on the aesthetics of former. That is, cities become branding projects, or ‘powerpoint cities’, whose value is driven by an appeal to the aesthetics of a techno-futurity.

The branding of NEOM is intended to reach a familiar audience of global, cosmopolitan, neoliberal investors. That is, ‘although the initiators of new cities may vary (e.g. either the state or non-state actors can kick off new city projects), new cities are always considered a pivotal means of place promotion and city branding’. ²⁴ Here a variety of state and inter-state entities come together to transfer knowledge and reconceptualize places. As Hend Aly observes, NEOM’s launch event featured the CEOs of Blackstone, Boston Dynamics, Siemens, and others – ‘all stars in the world of business, entrepreneurialism, and technology and control huge shares of the global market’. ²⁵ Place branding is thus a political act, one that discloses the ideological disposition and power dynamics of a new city’s myriad developers. ²⁶ Similarly, when city-oriented knowledge workers are brought in to present on other Saudi projects, they are composed of a ‘handful of “visionaries” and “thought leaders,” [and] are international starchitects . . . invited to provide ten-minute TED talk–style lectures, or what the NCF [New Cities Foundation] calls “espresso shots of innovation.”’ ²⁷ In this way, speculative urbanism involves – years before any construction – high profile, celebrity-driven events that ostensibly exist to lay a foundation of ‘good design’ for these new cities, which works to produce an imaginary to drive investment and raise the global profile of the project and those associated with it.

The contours of this elite dreaming also disclose how contemporary political-economic power structures are shifting. NEOM, for example, is being developed as more of a corporation than a city, with policies that are strategically more socially liberal than those in the rest of the Kingdom, and yet ultimately produced through an undemocratic corporate structure. ²⁸ Thus, as Sarah Moser writes, ‘urban megaprojects that are fundamentally undemocratic are presented as prescient, modern, and socially responsible investments—something to which leaders in emerging economies should aspire’. ²⁹ How these projects are supposed to look is subject to different kinds of consensus building. For example, many speculative cities in the region are imagined, designed, financed, and built in a process that evinces the ‘dubaification’ of urban development, as the policy goals of Dubai’s construction are transferred to other sites and projects. ³⁰ The relationship between these projects is a ‘complex sociospatial process of emulation and transmutation that has uneven consequences for cities and citizens that cannot necessarily or easily be separated from the contexts from which they were spawned’. ³¹ A project like NEOM both adopts a well worn apparatus of elite place-making while at the same time transforming it into something new.

On the one hand, one can see in these projects the way that the tensions of neoliberal capitalism come to the fore: in order to create the city of the future, private entities have to be enthusiastically enlisted by authoritarian regimes or governments working in deeply undemocratic ways (including in the Global North). This mutually beneficial relationship excludes civil society as ‘regime-affiliated entrepreneurial elites [are] at the receiving end of the economic benefits of neoliberalism while ensuring, in the process, their power in the governance scheme’. ³² This governance scheme, meanwhile, is presented as apolitical and non-ideological.

On the other hand, some argue that a development like NEOM perhaps shows the limitations of existing frameworks, including that of neoliberalism and state entrepreneurialism, to describe the production and reception of these new cities. Instead, new city development is ‘following patterns that do not simply recapitulate any single development model of what has come before’, even while it forms an aesthetic consensus based on inter-referencing speculative designs from projects all over the world. ³³ To account for these shifts, some have argued that it is indeed important to not only focus on elite dreaming, but the way these dreams are unevenly, incompletely, and differently created and experienced in practice. ³⁴ It is thus important to both consider what is theoretically and structurally ‘new’ about new city development while also thinking about tentative relationship – still in play in contemporary development – between the plan and the on-the-ground reality.

That said, these contradictions, for example between late capitalism and what might coming after, are not simply binary options but can be productively theorized together. What is interesting about NEOM are the way its designers both acknowledge and attempt to resolve contradiction in the same aesthetic gesture, one that reveals the fissures and limitations in existing paradigms and frameworks. For example, there is an irony that while NEOM is ostensibly being developed to house a massive population, these are ‘high-end, luxury products destined for an economic elite . . . focus[ing] on a very small fraction of the real estate market’. ³⁵ Similarly, there is a contradiction in these projects being state-led, with significant up-front financing, and yet at the same time neoliberal in their structure and framing. This leads to a situation, as Federico Cugurllo notes, in which the plan for new city design and development is both presented as cohesive and unitary and is at the same time fragmented in its economic, geographic, and social integration (or lack thereof) with existing polities and infrastructures. ³⁶ How, then, are such fragmentary and contradictory practices still mobilized toward development? Do NEOM’s investors, planners, and designers even have a full understanding of how the final product, whatever form that takes, will organically function? I argue that a large part of what pulls development concretely forward are the ways that the project is narrativized, how those narratives fit within a hazy notion of global modernity, and how narrative mobilizes and sustains particular affective responses to new city creation.

A key element of these narratives is producing an updated conception of and attachment to ‘modernity’. Modernity is core to the project of 20th and 21st centuries planning, including in the post-colonial Global South where newly independent nations eagerly sought to join international society through urban and infrastructural projects. Contemporary new city design, especially in the Global South, builds on that repertoire of imagery and associations while expanding upon and transforming them. As such, ‘being “modern” is, in current world city-speak, maintaining a globalized entrepreneurial edge that is reflected in prominent urban restructuring – mostly geared towards efficiency and sustainability – as well as in the vitality of one city’s transformative and advanced producer services economy’. ³⁷ Michele Acuto writes that, for cities like Dubai, this becomes a kind of ‘supermodernity with a belief that humankind can control all the facets of social experience and overcome every environmental limitation with the application of technology’. ³⁸

This flexible and updated notion of modernity is articulated through a globally transferable design idiom. As Ayona Datta writes,

these new cities use the rhetorics of ‘crisis of urbanization’, the ‘impending Urban Age’, ‘sustainable futures’ and several other prophesies to highlight the urgency of their need. They are represented through impressive simulated walkthroughs, interactive maps, charts and graphs. They are conceived at a scale and speed unprecedented in modern times. They are part of massive masterplanning and mega-urbanization strategies of emerging economies. They incorporate all the modern features and amenities of global lifestyles, as well as the technology of physical and virtual connectivity for their future residents. ³⁹

In this way, elite knowledge production, often from the Global North, makes itself relevant and salient as a ‘scalable urban solution, transferable anywhere in the world, regardless of context’. ⁴⁰ As Van Noorloos et al. write, the transferability of the solution is part of its appeal, as reference to ‘the building of symbolic power through hypermodern ‘world cities’ in order to attract attention [and therefore] investment in the global economy is an important reason for local and national governments to become involved in such projects’. ⁴¹ The global character of the solution presents itself as necessary to those looking to ‘keep up’ with a global consensus.

At the same time, I would like to interrogate in what that ‘solution’ actually consists. After all, a project like NEOM’s the Line does not exactly replicate or transfer an idea existing elsewhere in the world; indeed, its novelty is a large part of its appeal and claim to innovation and originality. Instead, what is transferred is not some particular technical account of how to build ‘better’ cities. Rather, what is iterated upon is this design idiom of modernity. In this idiom, cities should not just be ‘world-class’ but entirely new, built upon a putative blank slate and at an improbably accelerated speed. Regardless and even in contradiction to their scale, they should speak everywhere of sustainability and demographic urgency, and they should promise an increasingly vast array of ‘smart’ technological fixes, now inevitably including artificial intelligence and robotics. ⁴² In so doing, they absent the practices of state land-grabbing, the erasure of indigenous populations, and the labor required to construct and maintain these fantasy spaces. What is transferred, then, is ultimately power – toward a global elite of investors, technology, military, and logistics corporations, and of course designers, planners, and consultants. The last of these offers, in return, a speculative, aestheticized structure of knowledge called modernity.

The Line: narrativizing a speculative future

The Line: Saudi Arabia’s City of the Future in NEOM is a short promotional documentary about the process for developing the Line city, the part of NEOM that has received the most attention. ⁴³ Designed by well known UK-based architects Peter Cook and Sir David Adjaye, ⁴⁴ the Line will be a linear ‘gigacity’. The proposed city will house 9 million residents in a structure that is 500 m high, 200 m feet wide, and 170 km in length. The envisioned interior looks like an endlessly repeating lobby of a luxury hotel, while all of the exterior will be mirrored walls on both sides. A promotional brochure for the project tells potential investors that ‘NEOM is positioned to become an aspirational society that heralds the future of human civilization by offering its inhabitants an idyllic lifestyle set against a backdrop of a community founded on modern architecture, lush green spaces, quality of life, safety and technology in service of humanity paired with excellent economic opportunities’ ⁴⁵ (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Interior visualizations connote the modernity of The Line. THE LINE: Saudi Arabia’s City of the Future in NEOM. Directed by Discovery UK, 2023. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oamD9QoTH9M.

The promotional material for the design and development of the city includes a plethora of brochures, fact sheets, and design statements in addition to gallery exhibitions and faux-documentaries. Together, they tell us about the ethos of design through its aesthetic sensibilities, which include what they decide to present as well as what they decide to absent. The Line documentary consists of interviews with mostly white, mostly male architects and consultants, in addition to interviews with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. ⁴⁶ These are a ‘global intelligence corps of planning elites and starchitects . . . [and the] imaginings they put into circulation are part of a fast-growing market for new city models that is sustained by commodified urban policy exchanges taking the form of policy tours, consulting services, and elite conference events organized by new city builders and stakeholders’. ⁴⁷ In many ways, it is a self-hagiographic exercise, with the interviewees discussing the visionary design and potential of NEOM.

That is to say, the documentary focuses on the intellectual labor of these architects and consultants as they collaboratively imagine a particular urban form, while remaining relatively silent on the other types of labor that is required to construct the maintain these megaprojects. Like other smart cities, the effect is to occlude the ‘ideological forces and politics behind smart city making and the absences and silences that shroud the discourses perpetuated by its most enthusiastic supporters (both public and private sector)’. ⁴⁸ In this way, the documentary and promotional material more generally foregrounds particular temporalities of the project, such as the ‘empty’ desert and the finished city, while pushing to the background the temporality of its (speedy) construction and the duration of its existence well into its supposedly sustainable future. Sustainability, here, becomes reified, congealing into the speculative digital images of the city to come, rather than referring to the processes and practices that might ensure long term futurity.

First, the documentary and other promotional materials emphasize the supposedly empty and untouched state of the land in the Tabuk province. In fact, though the state describes the site as ‘virgin’ and unoccupied, it is the home of the Huwaitat tribe, 20,000 of who have been removed, in some cases violently. Those who protest the developments have been charged using terrorism laws, and three individuals have been sentenced to death after posting videos critical of the project on social media. One activist, Alia Hayel Aboutiyah al-Huwaiti, noted the irony in an interview with The Guardian: ‘For the Huwaitat tribe, NEOM is being built on our blood, on our bones . . . It’s definitely not for the people already living there! It’s for tourists, people with money. But not for the original people living there’. ⁴⁹

The Line documentary, however, contains no reference to existing peoples or indeed anything that would suggest that the land has a history and is connected to larger ecologies. For example, Saudi crown prince Mohammad Bin Salman (MBS) describes the land at various points in the documentary as an ‘empty place’ and as the whole of northwest Saudi Arabia as ‘untouched, almost empty’. ⁵⁰ Visually, these types of claims throughout the documentary are paired with drone footage of the mountainous, desert land. This footage has the effect of visualizing the land as a blank slate, a chance to think ‘think from scratch’ in the words of MBS. Indeed, as Hend Aly writes, ‘viewing NEOM as a no man’s land of opportunities and presenting the new residents as settlers who bring civilisation to the empty desert is a poor replication of colonial discourses’. ⁵¹ The terra nullius of the empty site thus repeats the colonial gesture and disposition that is arguably foundational to planning as a profession. ⁵² The aerial footage in particular crafts the space as a monochrome vastness waiting to be filled, with the brown and beige landscape presented in a soft, at times hazy light that creates a sense of serenity and quiet.

These serene landscapes are contrasted with footage of American and European cities that communicate the opposite. The film presents New York and Los Angeles, for example, as crowded, overly full, and sprawling, and pairs this with architects and designers discussing the type of design a putatively empty space affords, which the film’s narrator tells us is ‘every architect’s dream challenge’. As Peter Suska (Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering) describes in the film: ‘We are limited by legacy systems. And so we’ve inherited the medieval city, we’ve inherited the roads from the romans. When you work with all of these constraints, it constrains you to thinking inside the box . . . Europe is very crowded and we just don’t have that space. That region, that NEOM is being built in, just has that freedom’. This is a common disposition in new city planning. As Côté-Roy and Moser observe, ‘several assumptions on the new cities model emphasise its indispensability for urban development, a view that is rooted in pessimism about the existing city. Elite stakeholder rhetoric on new cities relies on the assumption that existing cities are a lost cause and that new cities are the optimal solution to address rapid urbanisation’. ⁵³ There is a thus a sense of a need to ‘start from scratch’. This takes a core contradiction of the new city – an impractical megacity that is nevertheless environmentally and socially sustainable – and resolves it into a necessity. Suska and others put the blame for environmental degradation, overcrowding, and even social conflict entirely onto existing cities in order to present the Line as the only viable solution (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Visualizations attempt to contrast the urban sprawl of cities like New York with the economical form of The Line. THE LINE: Saudi Arabia’s City of the Future in NEOM. Directed by Discovery UK, 2023. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oamD9QoTH9M.

This allows for what architect Reinier de Graaf describes in the film as ‘a project (the Line) of a certain radicality that you rarely find in the West or that you simply don’t find in the West’. Here, the supposed emptiness of the site – what in other contexts would be called greenfield development – can be the basis for architecture marked by its futurity, freedom, and radicality. To a place marked as desolate and used, architecture brings the time of the future. As opposed to those spaces that have history (roman roads, medieval cities, etc), the planners here have a disposition of discovery. They have found a place that is ‘unseen, unheard of completely . . . like discovering a new planet’ (Oliver Pron, First Idea).

The description, from the Saudi Kingdom and in NEOM’s promotional material, of the land as empty and untouched does different kinds of rhetorical work. First, it disavows the long presence of Huwaitat communities, figuratively emptying the land of its occupants while engaging in material practices of Removal. ⁵⁴ Second, the empty quality of the land renders it ideal for development of the new city, which can be then characterized as being a non-destructive process. This rhetoric is aided by the fact that the land in question is a desert, which itself connotes qualities of unoccupied barrenness as opposed to a land existing within broader ecosystems. The architects in the documentary speak in more explicitly colonial terms, describing the site as ‘discovering a new planet’. In this figuration, the site becomes alienated not just from existing human community but from the Earth itself and is instead imagined as a recently ‘discovered’ planet, ripe for colonization, development, and improvement. The colonial sensibility of design and planning is here refracted through a science fiction trope to create a futuristic aesthetic for the project.

If the documentary defines present of the NEOM site as empty and untouched, it also speculatively imagines the future built space. Importantly, the temporality that the architects, designers, and the film itself invoke is not one in which the city is ‘under construction’ nor its long future; rather, the film calls attention to the particular moment when the city will be completed. It does this through presenting visualizations of the future city, in many cases graphically placing those animated visualizations over real footage of the site, thus juxtaposing the ‘before’ and the (speculatively imagined) ‘after’ of the project.

Many of the visualizations present a model of a horizontally sprawling city, sometimes taking a real city like New York as an example, and then animating the condensation of this sprawl into the space of the line. Once the animation collapses the city into a linear structure, it fills in the surrounding area with greenery. Other visualizations are more typical futuristic renderings of what the space will look like, featuring, as is typical for contemporary architecture, a profusion of glassy surfaces and green spaces. In these renderings, the camera takes the position of a drone flying through the completed spaces, often past other drones or flying cars that further connote the futurity of the site.

The film at many points acknowledge the seeming absurdity of the project. It seems to want to acknowledge and head off criticism through its own rhetorical questions, asking for example if the Line ‘won’t just end up another failed vision’, if ‘is it practical, possible, or even desirable’, and if the city will ‘just attract the rich and curious, seeking a temporary adventure’. Similarly, the architects involved seek to head off criticism of their involvement by acknowledging the grandiosity of the design. Roger Soto of HOK admits that ‘honestly, you can’t look at this the first time and not ask yourself, “what are they thinking”’, while Reinier de Graaf of OMA indicates that his ‘immediate reaction was, what the hell is this’, while claiming that ‘many projects acquire their sanity as you move along’.

To account for and justify this absurdity, the designers make an odd move: they relate their intervention to the experimental architectural attitude of the postwar welfare state. Here, archival footage, for example of the New York World’s Fair or of images of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, is paired with a narration that suggests that ‘perhaps the bold experiments and confidence of the mid-20th century are exactly what’s need to help us confront and overcome our current challenges. Is the answer to modern problems more modernity?’ This retrofuturism allows the designers to foreclose criticism of the project (as unworkable or, in fact, unsustainable) by linking it to the experimental mindset of the postwar. They do this without, of course, referencing the fact that postwar architecture was created through a structure of state support. Rather, Peter Cook says at the beginning of the documentary that ‘there is a sort of moral atmosphere at the moment. “You shouldn’t be too clever, you shouldn’t be too experimental, don’t do anything too funky.” I came out of a funky period’. This framing both cements a figure like Cook as the continuing van garde of architecture and design while dismissing critics of the project as not clever, experimental or ‘funky’ enough to understand NEOM. It also helps to narrativize the political-economics of NEOM’s creation through a purely aesthetic comparison.

This experimentalism is linked to the democratic pretenses of postwar architecture and planning: as Christoper Beanland says in the documentary, ‘if we look at the 20th century we were really excited about the future. There was that kind of postwar idea that we could create a better, more democratic world. Those visions were very bold’ whereas ‘the era that we are living in now is one where we’ve become quite worried about the future’. The irony is that the democratic ethos of postwar architectural aesthetics sought to match the politics of its historical moment. This included commitments that paired modernism in architecture to social welfare initiatives and policies. NEOM is funded by the Saudi state, but its ethos is private and entrepreneurial, a city for a global elite that absents the labor of its construction and maintenance. Its connection to postwar development is that of a funhouse mirror, or as de Graaf says in the documentary, ‘the phantasmagoria of the late 60s is living its finest hour in the Arabian desert’.

Finally, there is an emptiness that not only provides for development, but survives development as an amenity, such that NEOM promises an ‘idyllic living environment . . . offering a comfortable and enjoyable community with the highest quality of life that includes a combination of beautiful beaches and mountains and untouched land’. ⁵⁵ Here planning poses itself as efficient for the amount of space conserved by its design, space that is then offered up for consumption by the cities future residents.

This aestheticization of post-development ‘nature’ comports with the overall characterization of the project’s ‘sustainability’. Some critics have noted a few ironies in the NEOM proposals. For example, built environment scholar Phillip Oldfield argues that the sustainability pledges of these gigacities are unrealistic considering that constructing the Line would produce 1.8 B tons of carbon dioxide, more than four year’s worth of the UK’s entire emissions. ⁵⁶ The Line itself boasts of using 1/5 of the world’s steel supply and being the largest buyer of the world’s construction material. In the imaginings of its architects and financiers, however, the real practicality of sustainability pledges is less important than the way ‘sustainability’ becomes reified as an aesthetic in the built structures of the proposed cities. That is, it is in the formal and aesthetic qualities of NEOM structures connote a sense of sustainability in a way that drives speculative investment and reaffirms the importance of global architecture and design firms, who have the cultural and intellectual capital to stamp their projects with the imprimatur of modernity. They work both to ‘green wash’ new city development while also serving domestic ‘nationbuilding projects’. ⁵⁷

In fact, the latter treat the new cities less as urban infrastructure and more as architectural structure whose form and purpose can be understood in a holistic manner. This is clear from the formalism of these projects, which are expressed in the familiar architectural language of materials and shape, thus contrasting a conspicuously formalist urbanism with the informal and thus implicitly unlivable and uncreative urban sprawls of the global south. In the case of NEOM, this includes the creation of one city in the form of a mirrored and verdant line and another, called ‘Oxagon’ in a perfectly octagonal structure. Ostensibly to maximize density and usability, the imaginary of cities in these precise shapes also connotes a certain economy of design, as if excising, through form itself, the sprawling excesses of unsustainable contemporary urbanism. Instead, the new cities fit neatly within the forms provided, and in so doing present themselves as minimally consumptive in relation to ‘nature’.

Conclusion: absent futures

The process of construction – including construction’s environmental harms, the social violence of removal, and its exploited labor – become subsumed to the processes of design. In this way, the only labor that is foregrounded is the intellectual labor of the architects, designers, and consultants in addition to the ‘vision’ of political figures like MBK. This is nowhere more apparent than in The Line documentary, which focuses exclusively on these visions and on the self-flattery of the starchitects and designers involved. The designers expound on the radicality and scale of their ideas, dismissing criticism as a matter of professional envy. They invoke the optimism of postwar welfare state planning as a model for their own new city development, despite the latter’s entrepreneurial ethos. This valorization of design labor congeals into the image of the Line city as a finished structure, a perfectly designed building that happens to be on the scale of a new city.

NEOM concerns itself with very specific temporalities. In general, the temporality of development is that of empty, homogenous time. Even when development establishes a speculative future horizon, it reaches toward that horizon via a rationalized process that eschews – deliberately – the possibility of a more revolutionary temporality, one that would imagine a more defined break with the material and ideological conditions of the present. In this way, the building of the proposed utopia happens through the methodical and technocratic processes of planning. This is a liberal ethos of improvement that seeks to find the most rational and optimized use of a given space. Despite its grandiose scale, NEOM, as a development project, operates within this temporality. NEOM indexes an imagined present, via the figure of the empty desert, and the particular moment in the future after the city has been constructed. That later moment becomes reified into the images of the finished structure, which reveals the labor of design but otherwise absents the process of construction as well as the long afterlife of a building/city as it changes, transforms, and decays.

Reading promotional materials for a development like NEOM uncovers its speculative ideology, one which juxtaposes the empty site with the finished structure as a before-and-after representation of its own modernity. In its own account, the transformation is effected through the visionary idealism of its politicians, financiers, and in the host of architects, planners, and consultants associated with the project. Importantly, here, this account tells us about the relationship that design has to labor, namely the way it absents labor from the scene of development, making it invisible due to its supposedly temporary status. The relationship between these Global North consultants and Global South political entities, meanwhile, indicates processes of governance and collaboration that similarly absent civil society from its decision-making process.

The relationship this article has explored have not been to the finished structures as they actually or might actually exist, but rather focuses on the ‘elite dreaming’ of the development imaginary to query how its speculative ambition relates to how it is situated globally. This speculation also refers to the contemporary ways in which national image is formed for an elite global audience, namely as brand to be associated with modernity as such. What’s excluded from modernity in this outward-facing presentation, then, is the labor necessary to construct and sustain it.