Work begins on the largest building in the world: 9 million inhabitants

The overwhelming and superlative project undertaken in Saudi Arabia to build the biggest building in the world has started walking. The photographs and videos taken in the place show that the works of The Line They have already started and are progressing at a good pace. The idea, which initially seemed bizarre and called for staying alone in a beautiful power point, has already jumped into the real world. It is a mega-construction located in the middle of the Saudi desert for the capacity to 9 million people, half a kilometer high and 170 kilometers long.

The adjective pharaonic falls short to describe the dimensions of the building-city The Line, which is nothing more than one more of the pieces that will integrate the city Neomthe great project promoted by the Saudi regime and that will also include a large ski slope, as explained in this link, after the country of deserts has been chosen as the venue for the 2029 Asian Winter Games.

In reality, this mega-building will consist of a kind of gigantic wall, uniformly lined with mirror, which will cross the desert for 170 kilometers until it reaches the shores of the Red Sea. Its height will be comparable to that of the Empire State Building. The width, on the other hand, will be modest: about 200 meters.

Inside that wall Isolated in an air-conditioned environment, with large wooded areas, lakes and all kinds of establishments and services, the residents will live. Dwelling in the desert, you will not really notice any of its rigors, as it will be as if you live inside a space base.

An anthill of bulldozers and trucks work non-stop in the Saudi Arabian desert to clear the land where The Line will sit. In this video you can see the situation of the works a few days ago:

The promoters of the project highlight its totally ecological character, since this entire structure will work with 100% renewable energy and all transport within the city will have zero emissions. To go from one end to the other of this 170 kilometer block, a high-speed train will cover the journey in about 20 minutes. The services, shops and other centers to which residents must go on foot will always be about a five-minute walk away, says the project.

The Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who is also chairman of the board of directors of the company Neom, sees this gigantic city as a demonstration of the sustainable future his country is committed to. “New and imaginative solutions are needed” to deal with the “inhabitability and environmental crises facing the cities of our planet,” said the prince.

This web page follows the development of the project continuously over time, with information on all its novelties, apart from showing spectacular images of what will be inside The Line.

Where will the water come from?

One of the great challenges facing not only The Line mega-building, but the entire city of Neom, including its ski complex, will be where to get as much water as its residents and public infrastructure will need.

The construction of huge water treatment plants, which will bring water from the Red Sea to the residents, will be the solution. And, although the project contemplates that these desalination plants will work with electricity obtained from renewable sources, there are experts who doubt that the technology is advanced enough to run stations as large as this one using solar energy. Otherwise, the CO2 emissions to produce the electricity needed to desalinate these quantities of water could be very considerable.

In fact, the emissions derived from the very construction of buildings (machinery, transport, obtaining materials, etc.) will already generate large emissions of CO2 that it remains to be seen if they will be compensated in the future by the sustainability mechanisms announced by the Saudi government.

In addition to environmental doubts, the project exposes the lack of freedoms and the rickety human rights that characterize this country. Several organizations have denounced that some residents of the area have been forcibly evicted from their homes to carry out the works and that, in addition, they would have been sentenced to death at the beginning of this month of October.