The “Mirror Line” – a proposed 75-mile-long twin skyscraper metropolis in arid northwest Saudi Arabia – will liberate its proposed 5 million residents “from roads, cars, and emissions,” according to the Saudi Press Agency this week.
According to an English-language report on the project by Saudi news agency al-Arabiya, the “Mirror Line” will trap its expected 5 million residents in an environmental paradise where walking and a government-controlled high-speed train will be the only forms of transportation. The skyscraper development will include artificial agricultural sectors that make food, available to residents in “community canteens,” the Wall Street Journal reported last week, citing unnamed officials working on the project.
The project will also reportedly boast a sports stadium and a “marina” within the building complex.
The insular nature of the project raises many questions regarding civil rights, particularly the preservation of privacy and access to food and other basic needs for anyone deemed a political dissident, given that the sharia-ruled kingdom will control all access to them. The Saudi government has yet to address any of these concerns with specificity, instead highlighting the alleged “green” superiority of organizing citizens in an insular, vertical manner and doing away with private vehicles. The kingdom has also claimed that only wind and solar power will be necessary to maintain the development.
The Mirror Line is part of a larger development called “Neom” and spearheaded by Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, who reportedly told architects and engineers that he wanted to build his equivalent of the great Pyramids of Giza. Bin Salman claimed while debuting the project in 2017 that Neom would have an “autonomous” judiciary and law enforcement system. The Saudi legal system does not currently provide for any municipality or province to operate independently of sharia, or Islamic law – the law of the land as enshrined in the Basic Law. The official constitution of Saudi Arabia is the Quran, the Islamic holy book.
Under its current legal system, the Saudi state regularly engaged in a litany of human rights abuses, according to the U.S. State Department’s annual human rights report published in April. Among those abuses are:
[E]xecutions for nonviolent offenses; forced disappearances; torture and cases of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of prisoners and detainees by government agents; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; political prisoners or detainees; harassment and intimidation against Saudi dissidents living abroad; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; collective punishment of family members for offenses allegedly committed by an individual; serious abuses in a conflict, including civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure as a result of airstrikes in Yemen; serious restrictions on free expression and media, including unjustified arrests or prosecutions against journalists and others, and censorship; serious restrictions on internet freedom; substantial interference with the freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association, including overly restrictive laws on the organization, funding, or operation of nongovernmental organizations and civil society organizations; severe restrictions of religious freedom; restrictions on freedom of movement; inability of citizens to choose their government peacefully through free and fair elections; serious and unreasonable restrictions on political participation; serious government restrictions on domestic and international human rights organizations; lack of investigation of and accountability for gender-based violence, including but not limited to domestic and intimate partner violence; criminalization of consensual same-sex sexual activity; and restrictions on workers’ freedom of association, the role of trade unions, and labor committees.
The Saudi Press Agency published a dramatic video of computer-generated renderings of the project on Monday; planners predict the entirety of Neom, which will include other facilities around the Mirror Line, will house up to nine million people. The entirety of Tabuk province, where the project is expected to be located, is currently believed to be home to less than one million people. Tens of thousands of people are believed to be living in the space proposed to house Noem currently, however, raising concerns for their human rights as the Saudi regime attempts to displace them.
“The designs of THE LINE embody how urban communities will be in the future in an environment free from roads, cars and emissions,” the Saudi Press Agency declared. “It will run on 100 percent renewable energy and prioritize people’s health and well-being over transportation and infrastructure as in traditional cities.”
Mohammed bin Salman himself, in debuting the idea of a vertical city in 2021, proclaimed, “the idea of layering city functions vertically, giving people possibility of moving seamlessly in three dimensions to access them, is a concept referred to as Zero Gravity Urbanism.”
The Saudi Press Agency claimed this week that the skyscraper would put “nature ahead of development and will contribute to preserving 95 percent of NEOM’s land.”
The Wall Street Journal report on the project last week raised concerns about the reality of not disturbing the delicate desert environment.
“Neom employees … [have] raised concerns that people might avoid living in a high-rise environment following the pandemic and that the sheer size of the structure would alter the dynamics of groundwater flow in desert wadis and restrict the movement of birds and other animals,” the newspaper revealed last week.
The growing volume of reports, citing anonymous concerned former Neom workers, indicating significant setbacks in achieving the project has done little to deter publicity out of the kingdom. The Mirror Line promotional video published this week followed an extensive report by Bloomberg News revealing that Riyadh appears to be squandering prodigious amounts of money on consultants with little results, inviting radical feminists and McKinsey workers to offer opinions on potential Neom projects but doing little to advance them. Bloomberg quoted Bin Salman himself as enthusiastically telling the outlet that the promise of Neom is that it can be built “without having any public demands,” an apparent contradiction with his vow that the city would “put humans first.”
Neom is part of Bin Salman’s “Vision 2030” project, meant to end Saudi Arabia’s economic dependency on oil by diversifying its economy. The official government “Vision 2030” site describes Neom as “not just a place – it’s a mindset. It’s being designed, constructed and independently administered in a way that is free from outdated economic and environmental infrastructure that constrains other countries across the world.”
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