Back in 2017, Saudi Arabia announced something that sounded almost too big to be real, an entire new region along the Red Sea coast, bigger than Belgium, built from scratch around clean energy, zero cars and a completely new way of living. Called NEOM, the project's most famous piece was The Line, a car free city meant to stretch 170 kilometres through the desert inside two mirrored towers, housing up to nine million people who would never need a road, a car or a single tailpipe. Nearly a decade later, the story has taken a very different turn. Costs spiralled, timelines slipped, and by late 2025 construction on The Line had actually been suspended, forcing Saudi Arabia to rethink just how much of this eco region can realistically be built. NEOM's unfinished mirrors now reflect something more instructive than the future they promised, a candid lesson in how ambition meets the slower, stubborn arithmetic of reality.
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