View From Above

The Line Between Vision and Reality: Why the World is Watching Saudi Arabia’s Mega Project Unravel

In February 2025, Business Insider published a documentary that has since become one of its most-watched investigations to date. Titled “The Line: Saudi Arabia’s $1.5 Trillion City in the Sand”, the film has amassed a staggering 4.7 million views on YouTube.com alone, with 46,000 Likes, and nearly 8,700 comments, and—remarkably—not a single thumbs down. As someone interviewed in the piece, I’ve been struck not only by the documentary’s reach but by the overwhelming global resonance of its message: that this project, for all its ambition, is fundamentally flawed.

Part of Business Insider’s View from Above series, the documentary deploys satellite imagery and expert testimony to interrogate a question many are now asking: Will the 170-kilometre-long megacity known as The Line ever become a reality?

At the heart of this inquiry is the sheer scale of the challenge: The Line is the flagship development of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s “Vision 2030”, billed as a revolutionary rethinking of urban life. Stretching from the Red Sea inland, the project proposes a linear, car-free city powered by 100% renewable energy. But from the beginning, I and others have voiced serious concerns about its environmental, social, and logistical viability.

As the documentary outlines in forensic detail, the problems are many. Timeline and cost projections have “shifted in the sand”, to use the film’s own words. Human rights organisations and investigative journalists have raised the alarm over forced evictions and land clearances.

Back in 2022, I gave an interview to Metro UK, in which I warned that “building in the desert, particularly at the scale proposed, will cause widespread ecological damage and habitat loss for desert-adapted flora and fauna.” I expanded on these concerns more recently in my conversation with Silicon Republic, by saying “The promise of high-tech, high-efficiency living is seductive, but urban sustainability isn’t about glossy renderings, it’s about systems resilience, ecological integration, and long-term adaptability. The Line doesn’t account for the complex, interlinked environmental challenges it would amplify, not solve.”

When the Business Insider team reached out for my views for The Line documentary, I felt it essential to reiterate these perspectives. What’s different now, however, is the scale and clarity of public response. The YouTube comments section is unusually instructive—thousands of viewers are echoing the documentary’s and experts' scepticism. People see the gap between the project's utopian rhetoric and its real-world impacts.

Among the most powerful aspects of the documentary is its use of satellite imagery—irrefutable visual evidence of what’s actually occurring on the ground, far from the PR gloss. This technique has proven effective in other View from Above investigations, including “Built to Burn”, which shows how the aftermath of Los Angeles' January 2025 wildfires is reshaping the city, and the episode exploring the vast scale of Elon Musk’s infrastructure and energy ventures across the U.S.

In each case, satellite analysis cuts through the noise, offering a neutral, science-based lens. In the case of The Line, it reveals how miles of desert have already been scarred, entire ecosystems disrupted, and progress falls dramatically short of official claims.

This documentary marks one of several interviews I’ve given globally on The Line and the wider implications of megaprojects in climate-vulnerable regions. As awareness grows, so too does the realisation that no amount of money can undo the ecological and human cost of ignoring environmental and social systems science.

That the Business Insider documentary has reached millions, without a single downvote, tells its own story. People aren’t just curious—they're deeply concerned. The global public appears increasingly unwilling to buy into visions that pay lip service to sustainability while operating in ways that contradict it.

The ambition of Vision 2030, and of The Line, should not be dismissed outright. We do need bold thinking about how we live and build in the 21st century. But boldness alone is not enough. As I’ve said before, “sustainability is not a style—it’s a science.” And that science tells us that constructing a 170-kilometre reflective wall through delicate desert ecologies is not a step forward, but towards an untenable future like something out of a mid 20th century science fiction film. Put another way, we can’t say we weren’t warned, indeed there is an entire film genre that tried to do just that.

There is a line, quite literally, between visionary urbanism and a vanity project. What this documentary—and the response to it—shows, is that the world is increasingly capable of telling the difference.