Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund has asked consultants to review the feasibility of its “THE LINE” gigaproject, Bloomberg reported on Monday.

The move follows an announcement from Aiman al-Mudaifer, the project’s acting chief executive, in April that the city would be subjected to a “comprehensive review”. Sources told the Financial Times that the analysis was “taking place in an environment of limited resources … Some things were done that need to be looked at again”. It also follows last year’s reports that loosened the schedule for the Line, which has been roughly priced at $500bn. The initial target was that 1.5 million people would live there by 2030. This was superseded by the goal of 300,000 residents living in a 2.4km-long city by that date.

A NEOM spokesperson told Bloomberg that the review was “typical with large-scale, multi-year projects”.

In 2023, Rafael Prieto-Curiel of the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna told GCR: “A line is the least efficient possible shape of a city. There’s a reason why humanity has 50,000 cities, and all of them are somehow round.”

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