NEOM executives provided updates on four main projects that are part of the Neom project revealing that they are all underway, but that flagship linear city The Line will take around 100 years to complete and populate.
Neom deputy CEO Rayan Fayez and chief development officer Denis Hickey presented at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos held January 20-24, 2025. They provided updates on current construction of Neom and its four major regions which are – from north to south, Trojena in the mountains, Magna on the coast, the Line and, the islands of Sindalah along with the port of Oxagon.
The Line and Oxagon are designed to be economic centers while the other areas will focus on tourism and nature activities.
While these are the main areas, the list of announced projects in Neom is remarkable and often hard to keep track of. In April 2024, Love That Design provided a list of 17 here.
As background, Neom occupies a territory in northwest Saudi Arabia about the size of Massachusetts or Belgium and is intended to be a driver of economic diversification for the kingdom,
The much-discussed The Line is conceived as Neom’s capital city and will reach a height of 500 m (1,640 ft) and with a width of 200 m (656 ft). Originally announced as being 170 km (105 miles) long, the current goal is for it to be 2.4 km (1.5 miles) long and serve as home to around 300,000 people by 2030. In February 2024, Neom described its earthworks and piling operations as the “world’s biggest” with “260 excavators and 2,000 trucks” working 24/7. According to Hickey, construction is expected to start going vertical later in 2025.
“It’s polarized the world, You get a spectrum of everybody. You’ll get some people say ‘This is the most incredible thing. What an amazing thing you’re doing for the world, getting rid of all of the transportation. I want to be a part of this’. And you’ll get the other cohort that says ‘This is horrific and terrible.’ It’s the lack of understanding that builds that spectrum. The onus is on us to communicate more and educate and inform so people can understand what it is we’re doing and what are the benefits.”
“We’ve got to start everything from scratch. Everybody wants to see things tomorrow, but we are building a whole new state, a whole new city, whole new infrastructure from scratch in a new part of the region, the kingdom. That’s our mission. It’s not about just building another city that houses people. It [has] to be themed, and it has to have a purpose. When we talk about the vision of Neom, if you look at it, it is about being the land of the future. It’s about building an economy for 100 plus years, which is driven by the sectors.”
Rayan Fayez also commented that, “We’re not doing things in the traditional way. How can we push the envelope and really test many of these technologies that maybe are a little bit high risk, but we have the risk appetite to do in Neom.”
Drawing on his residence in New York City near Central Park, Hickey commented that The Line should be thought of as a city rather than a building.
“Everyone thinks the Line is a building. It’s not. It’s a frame. It’s a city, and it has a framework and a grid structure to it. I think one of the misconceptions is that you’ll spend all your time in the Line; it’s actually not [like that]. If you think about it, I live on Central Park. Everybody goes into the park every day. Everybody in a tall building comes down, hits the park, goes into terra firma every day. You’ll do the same in the Line. The landscapes of the Line are incredible. You will come down and be in the parklands, and you’ll be living outside as much as you live inside. That’s one of the benefits. If you’re lucky enough to live near Central Park or Hyde Park or somewhere [similar], then you’re one of the privileged. What the Line does is gives everybody access to that environment. It’s actually much more egalitarian in terms of its ability to distribute access to nature for everybody.”
The video of the conversation with Neom deputy CEO Rayan Fayez and chief development officer Denis Hickey can be viewed here.
To read more, click here, here and here.
