The idea is that irrespective of what you do for a living or what you earn, you share the same amenities in the same close proximity to you as everyone else. Plus we want to deliver equitable living. We will create a perfectly symmetrical balance between nature and humans, but on a large scale the likes of which you can’t find anywhere else – whether it’s London, New York, Paris or Seoul. The idea is to tread lightly, there are no eight-lane freeways or massive car parks.

And that natural desert will be improved through rewilding – to reintroduce native species, both fauna and flora – and the rehabilitation of land. In terms of tackling urban sprawl, our vertical urbanism approach will mean that land is given back to nature. And there’s no need for a car when you live on the 80th floor and everything is easily reachable, cars disappear when causes disappear. By default, it's a more efficient way of doing things. What we are achieving with 34 square kilometers of space through vertical urbanism would take 1,600 square kilometers in London, for example. The government has to put in the roads, the pipes, the cables, the airports, bridges and somehow tackle pollution and urban sprawl. How do you reduce that massive sunk cost? Because that's a central cost that any government has to pay. The expensive thing about starting a city is infrastructure.

The goal is to ensure people are only ever five minutes away from everything they want in the world because all will be directly below or above you. This is not just stacking everything on top of each other, we are reinventing things that exist in a conventional horizontal realm for a vertical close-proximity landscape. It will also be the first city in the world to be completely run by renewable energy – with a zero-carbon footprint. You can just go directly across at whatever height to the stadium. So if you're in module 40 and you need to go to the football match in module 44, you don't have to go down to go across to go up. As a resident or visitor, you’ll have the ability to travel easily between modules horizontally. This has never been attempted before, we're taking an entire city and putting it on a footprint that's 200 meters wide. This will be the very first vertical city with mobility built into its very core. Nearly nine million people will live on THE LINE when complete, most of the population of NEOM in fact.

It is the epicenter for all activities – the primary home for residents, as a vertical city with all the activities that will be there – from opera houses and libraries to stadiums and universities.

Creating map water in cities skylines