There are various visions of ecological transition competing for our attention, not all of which will deliver on what they claim. Too often, companies, governments, and other political groups use utopian ideas and stunning visuals to greenwash projects that would have profound and troubling consequences. These campaigns seek to distract us from consideration of whether the futures they offer us are materially possible on a planet with finite resources; would entail deeply dystopian outcomes of systematised and enhanced social control; or would even be desirable in the first place. But those are the very questions we must ask when we consider how to transition from fossil fuels to renewables, and what kinds of communities we want to inhabit in the future. 

Saudi Arabia isn’t a place that typically comes to mind when we think of the future, let alone a sustainable one. Ruled by an authoritarian monarchy sustained by vast oil wealth, the country is better known for human rights abuses, the suppression of women’s rights, and the dismemberment of journalists. But if the architectural renderings and exceedingly well-funded advertising campaigns are to be believed, Saudi Arabia is about to reinvent itself by establishing an economic region in the desert that will demonstrate its supposed technological and ecological credentials.

Announced in 2017, NEOM is at the forefront of that vision. It’s supposed to be an urban megaproject in the northwest corner of the country near the border with Jordan, made up of a series of initiatives that each have their own focus — or, we might say, their own gimmick. The project is presented as a central plank of the ‘Saudi Vision 2030’ to diversify the economy away from oil and gas, but it’s also about trying to rebrand: to change perceptions of the petrostate in a world where its oil wealth may not be enough to continue justifying its close relationship with the United States.

Among the attractions of NEOM will be an octagonal port city with a large floating island, called Oxagon; a ski resort called Trojena; and an island resort aimed at yacht owners, called Sindalah. But most fantastical is the centrepiece of the entire project: two 170-kilometer-long horizontal skyscrapers running across the desert in parallel, to be known as The Line. It’s promoted as a ‘revolution’ in urban living, but it’s hard to believe the project will even arrive, let alone live up to its publicity.

The NEOM vision for Saudi Arabia’s future is just the latest in a long line of techno-utopian architectural projects designed to captivate without changing anything for the better. Those plans claim that social, economic, and ecological challenges will be overcome if only vast amounts of resources and energy can be deployed to build entirely new environments. So far, such mega-projects have helped to lock us into existing crises, producing new negative impacts while distracting us from real solutions that could improve the places where the vast majority of people live.

Where smart cities fail

In a critique of utopian architecture in The Nation, journalist Kate Wagner writes that, ‘Design, while obviously involved in the process of world transformation, cannot by itself solve social problems related to climate and urbanization’. Megaprojects like NEOM present the fantasy that societal challenges can be overcome with the right design, without anyone having to think about the difficult politics that gave rise to the challenges in the first place. This form of salesmanship is typical of Silicon Valley tech giants, which often roll out grand visions for disruptive technologies, such as the idea that Uber would lessen urban traffic, or that self-driving cars would eliminate road deaths.

Such utopian promises of the future are used to justify human cost in the short term. Despite the publicity images of NEOM rising from an empty desert, the House of Saud will have to displace about 20,000 Huwaitat tribespeople who have long called the area home. They have been forced out by Saudi security services — with lethal police action and even judicial death sentences. Violent displacement is a hallmark of urbanisation processes in all contexts of segregation, real-estate speculation, and authoritarian politics. The green, techno-utopian promises of projects like NEOM tend to start off in moral deficit, when their foundations have been laid so distinctly within the ‘old world’ of colonisation and violence.

And that’s if they are ever even built. Beyond their extreme cost (NEOM’s is currently pegged at around US$1.5 trillion), such projects tend to flirt with impracticality. As an idea, linear cities like The Line have been around in some form since the 19th century. In the 1920s, Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier was pushing a plan for a ‘Ville Radieuse’ that was ultimately never built, while Soviet urbanist Mikhail Okhitovich was sent to a gulag in 1930 for an ‘economically crippling’ proposal to build a linear city in the Soviet Union. 

Beyond NEOM, urban megaprojects claiming to be sustainable smart cities have been common boondoggles over the past couple of decades. South Korea launched a plan to build its own low-emission smart city in 2001; today, Songdo has a great water filtration system and pneumatic tubes for garbage disposal, although residents have described it as ‘cold’ because of the lack of human interaction. Its wide thoroughfares are notable for the absence of pedestrians, yet are packed with cars — not a successful alternative to the bustling urban core of Seoul, with its great transit network, a mere 30 kilometres away.

A similar story can be told of Masdar, the United Arab Emirates’ plan to build ‘the world’s most sustainable eco-city’ outside Abu Dhabi. Announced in 2008, the project was supposed to show that the petrostate was preparing for a green future. It would be a car-free environment with a pod-based transport system, along with an innovative wind-tower cooling infrastructure. The whole development would be completely powered by solar energy. But by the mid-2010s, those visions had been abandoned. Officials admitted that the development would never eliminate its emissions, even though the scale of the project had been significantly curtailed. They wanted it to be free of cars, but it lacked transit connections to anywhere beyond its boundaries. It has become a ‘failed city’ that is more of a research hub than a thriving, multi-use community.

Around the world, smart eco-city projects have continually failed to live up to the promises made by the countries and developers that marketed them as an important step into a better future. If they were realised at all, they tended to be vehicles for real-estate speculation rather than social progress. They are envisioned less as environments for the average resident of the countries where they were built, and more as areas of seclusion for the local elite or wealthy foreigners, where homes cost far more than the national average and amenities do not accommodate those with lower incomes. In her Nation piece, Wagner points to the example of Oceanix City, a concept for a floating community developed by Bjarke Ingels Group. Not only was it a revival of failed architectural experiments from decades past, but it presented a vision of ‘ecological escapism’, where a sliver of the population could flee to a floating structure supposedly protected from Category 5 hurricanes, while everyone else was left behind in cities unable to cope with worsening natural disasters.

Greenwashing corporate control

Projects like NEOM or Oceanix City are just one part of a broader campaign to shift our focus away from our everyday realities and collective challenges, toward fantasy architectures that offer a false sense of salvation. They are outside the realm of ecological transition, and rooted instead in the realm of public relations. But that works for the powerful players who launch and profit from them, and the industrial status quo, which is given a green veneer of technological innovation (without proven scalable capacity) alongside its share of the profits. 

Building smart eco-cities from scratch is also incredibly energy- and resource-intensive. These resources flow through a system of global extractivism that leaves a trail of destruction in many communities and ecosystems, mostly in the Global South. Even after all that construction, the alleged gains in efficiency and technology would be unlikely to make any real difference to the emissions coming from other parts of society. Philip Oldfield, head of the School of Built Environment at the University of New South Wales, estimates that The Line would produce upwards of 1.8 billion tonnes of embodied carbon dioxide. All those emissions would ‘overwhelm any environmental benefits’, he said, in an interview with Dezeen. 

When developments of this kind are established within existing cities, the situation is not much better. In the latter half of the 2010s, Google-backed Sidewalk Labs announced plans to build a smart city ‘from the internet up’ on Toronto’s waterfront. Despite only getting a small parcel of land, the company immediately set its sights on a much larger area and hoped eventually to deploy its proprietary technologies like self-driving cars and a city-management platform throughout Canada’s largest city with little democratic input.

The visuals for the project, called Quayside, presented a dream of sustainability, with few cars, timber skyscrapers, and plenty of community and public space. But as Kevin Rogan explained in Real Life, the impression was false. After digging through the concept photos and the site’s master plan, he found that Sidewalk Labs was being intentionally deceptive about how its technologies worked, overstating their convenience and understating how they enhanced corporate power over the urban environment. At the heart of this project was an attempt to divide the city into two: one experience for ideal consumers and knowledge workers; another for the workers who would make it run, and the other less desirable populations.

‘Quayside will effectively exist as two cities’, explained Rogan. ‘In one, citizens will enjoy the dreamlike novelty of streets, spaces, and services that seemingly respond to their every desire; in the other, woven in and through the first, workers will be confronted with machines that likewise demand they become more machinic’. A technological dystopia that enhanced Google’s power over the city was marketed as a green utopia, but it was not successful. Residents eventually turned against the project over concerns about data privacy and corporate power. It was officially cancelled in 2020, in what has become a wider trend.

Even NEOM, despite the mountains of Saudi oil money behind it, has recently had its ambitions scaled back. The Line hasn’t been abandoned yet, but now only a fraction will be built by 2030, with fewer than 300,000 residents expected, down from 1.5 million — and even that sounds overly optimistic. If and when the reality of the ‘smart’ petrostate steps out from behind the deceptive promotional renderings, it is hard to imagine many people wanting to live in it.

Rejecting the smart eco-city

The history of these megaprojects shows that they’re no solution for the climate crisis or any of the growing social and economic problems our societies face. At best, they represent visions of elite escape or domination through digital monitoring; mostly, they bear no fruit at all, merely enriching a few at the expense of many during an abortive process. NEOM looks poised to result in something; but that something seems unlikely to resemble the expansive vision once touted to international audiences.

While Saudi Arabia has been promoting its architectural dream-region, it has also spent millions to lure top football players, major fighting events, and golf tournaments to the country, while making huge investments in video games and continuing to court major tech companies for partnerships. Clearly, the House of Saud wants to soften the image of its brutal dictatorship while doing as little as possible to change how it operates. In the same period, Saudi Arabia conducted a massive military campaign in Yemen, contributing to one of the world’s major humanitarian crises. In providing billions of dollars in humanitarian aid both before and after the ceasefire, it was only emulating the long-honed practice of Western nations.

No ecological salvation will be found in projects like NEOM. Real improvements require a political vision paired with the collective power to move it forward. Decades of neoliberal rot have been exploited to convince much of the public that government action couldn’t deliver such benefits by itself, even if it wanted to. But there are many ways that our existing communities can be reoriented to provide better lives for the people who live in them, while using less energy and producing fewer emissions. The same forces pushing visions of smart megaprojects are the ones who stand in the way of such a future, and their technological fantasies serve to distract us from the work of assembling both the necessary vision and popular will: A 15-minute city with better transit routes, high-quality public housing, and improved social services is forced to compete with glossy mirages that seem pulled from science fiction movies. But it’s in those more mundane technologies and community transformations where the real social and ecological benefits will be realised.