The tower, which currently has no image or detailed description, will be built north of the Saudi capital, Riyadh. It will integrate a city called “The Line”, the most daring urban project of the moment, supported by “Neom”, a $500 billion Saudi public fund. The region, which spans Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, will be powered by renewable energy and fully “automated”.
Neom was announced in 2017 and is part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 strategy to diversify its economy and become less dependent on oil. The area will be populated by more robots than people and powered by solar panels and wind farms.
Utopian future city
To limit its environmental impact and space consumption, “The Line” city would be about 170 kilometers (100 mi) long but would rise several hundred meters high. The city has no streets or cars where residents can access all essential services by elevator or metro. According to the project’s promoters, who include Prince Mohammed bin Salman and former Google and Uber executives, the city, protected from the desert and heat, will take about twenty minutes to drive from end to end.
In 2018, British architect Norman Foster, who sat on Neom’s board of directors, temporarily suspended himself from the project following the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Its two-kilometer-tall skyscraper, if one day completed, will be the tallest in the world, doubling the current Burj Khalifa in Dubai which reaches 828 meters.
