Once upon a time, in 2005, we wrote about Solare, architect Paolo Soler's ambitious concept of the Lean Linear City of the future, a city without cars and without urban sprawl. Robert Ipsen describes the basic concept of how a city might be successfully configured to achieve that result:
The first step is not design. The first step is choosing the spine.
The corridor comes before the city
The Lean Linear City is organized around an arterial spine. In the book, that spine is both technical and symbolic: high-speed rail, pedestrian circulation, utilities, energy distribution, civic access, and the shared metabolic infrastructure of the city are concentrated into a single linear system. The inhabited modules attach to it. Growth proceeds along it. The landscape outside it remains legible because the city has not spilled everywhere at once.
This is the crucial difference between a linear city and sprawl. Sprawl also grows outward, but it does so by multiplying roads, pipes, wires, parking lots, and private parcels in every direction. The lean linear form grows by intensifying a corridor. It accepts length while refusing dispersal. It says: if the city must extend, let it extend along a shared artery rather than dissolve into an asphalt mist.
It's the stuff of science fiction dreams. But in Saudi Arabia, it served as a foundation for a real-life megaproject: Neom. Here's a video introduction:
But it turned out to be a lot harder to execute than to draw up. The ambitious project has been severely scaled back. Matt Bevan of Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) News looks at what happened to the city of the future in the following 13-and-a-half minute video:
That report was in 2024. But is "The Line", as the Neom megaproject is known, really dead? The two percent of the project that wasn't defunded is still going forward. Here's The B1M's video report on the city's project from December 2025, which digs into the construction challenges of actually building the linear city:
As conceived, the linear city is a bold vision of what the city of the future could be. Given the challenges of making the project viable, it might always be.
Labels: ideas, technology
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