The team for the first phase of Saudi Arabia’s ambitious city building project, The Line, is coming together as the country’s NEOM development company recently announced it had selected firms for planning, design and engineering.
The proposal is to build a 500-m-tall city stretching inland from the Red Sea coast of northwest Saudi Arabia in a 170-km-long, 200-m-wide footprint. Phase One would cover a 2.4-km-long section of three, 800-m modules. Each module would include housing for 80,000 people along with spaces for work, education, health services and leisure activities, according to NEOM.
NEOM was established by the government of Saudi Arabia in 2019 to develop the estimated $500-billion economic zone on the country's northwest coast adjacent to the Red Sea. The company is wholly owned by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF).
The team helping design phase one includes Austrian firm Delugan Meissl Associated Architects as urban designer. NEOM has appointed San Francisco-based Gensler as city planning consultant and city asset design architect for infrastructure, including transportation hubs and public spaces. And U.K.-based Mott MacDonald is the city infrastructure engineer, which will handle vertical and horizontal structures, as well as city utility systems.
“The Line is a hugely complex project with an ambition to change the way we think about urban living,” said Cathy Travers, group managing director at Mott MacDonald, in a statement. “It requires deep technical expertise across multiple engineering disciplines, planning and design, and alongside our partners we are well placed to realize this vision.”
The announcement of the team came a day before NEOM’s board of directors announced that the company’s CEO, Nadhmi Al-Nasr, had left the role and that Aiman Al-Mudaifer would serve as acting CEO. Al-Mudaifer currently oversees real estate development for the PIF.
And Bloomberg reported on Nov. 13, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter, that Italy's state export credit agency Sace has agreed to provide $3 billion in loan guarantees to support the project.
NEOM also previously announced AtkinsRealis as its delivery partner to provide construction management and related services for The Line under a five-year contract.
Foundation work on The Line project is already underway. NEOM says crews are casting more than 120 foundation piles for phase one. Also, last month NEOM announced it had partnered with Saudi-based contractor Asas Al-Mohileb to set up and run a $186-million concrete plant with a capacity to provide 20,000 cu m per day to serve the project.
