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 the planning, design and engineering.
The proposal is to build a 500m-tall city that would extend inland from the Red Sea coast in northwestern Saudi Arabia in a footprint 170km long and 200m wide. The first phase would cover a 2.4km long stretch of three 800m 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 to design the first phase includes Austrian firm Delugan Meissl Associated Architects as urban designer. NEOM has appointed San Francisco-based Gensler as the city’s urban planning consultant and asset design architect for infrastructure, including transportation hubs and public spaces. And UK-based Mott MacDonald is the city’s infrastructure engineer, who will manage the city’s vertical and horizontal structures as well as utility systems.
“The Line is a very complex project with the ambition to change the way we think about urban life,” Cathy Travers, group managing director of Mott MacDonald, said in a statement. “It requires deep technical expertise across multiple engineering, planning and design disciplines, and together with our partners we are well positioned to make this vision a reality.”
The announcement of the team came a day earlier NEOMThe board of directors announced that the company’s CEO, Nadhmi Al-Nasr, had stepped down and that Aiman Al-Mudaifer would act as CEO. Al-Mudaifer currently oversees PIF real estate development.
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 It also previously announced AtkinsRealis as a delivery partner to provide construction management and related services for The Line under a five-year contract.
Foundation works for The Line project are already underway. NEOM says crews are launching more than 120 foundation piles for the first phase. In addition, last month NEOM announced that it had partnered with Saudi contractor Asas Al-Mohileb to install and operate a $186 million concrete plant with a capacity to provide 20,000 m3 per day to serve the project.
