Saudi Arabia 'forced to scale back $1.5trillion plans for 106-mile-long city The Line to just 1.5miles with workers already being laid off at desert construction site'

It was billed as a glass-walled city of the future, an ambitious centrepiece of the economic plan backed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to transition Saudi Arabia away from oil dependency.

Now, however, plans for the mirror-clad desert metropolis called the Line have been scaled down and the project, which was envisaged to stretch 105 miles (170km) is expected to reach just a mile and a half by 2030.

Dreamed up as a linear city that would eventually be home to about 9 million people on a footprint of just 13 sq miles, the Line is part of a wider Neom project. Now at least one contractor has begun dismissing workers.

The scaling down of Prince Mohammed’s most grandiose project was reported by Bloomberg, which said it had seen documents relating to the project.

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The project, which had been slated to cost $1.5tn (£1.2tn), was pitched as a reinvention of urban design. However, it has long attracted scepticism and criticism, not least after the reported execution of several members of the Howeitat tribe who had protested over plans to construct on their ancestral lands.

NEOM was first announced in 2017, with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman delivering a presentation on The Line in July 2021 - capturing the attention of both city planner, architects and the general public around the world.

In its original design, if built in the UK, The Line would have been able to stretch between London to Birmingham, or even from London into France.

In US-terms, it was longer than the distance between New York and Philadelphia.

However, unlike city sprawls we are accustomed to today, the vast metropolis would have been contained in two mirrored structures - each rising 500 feet above sea level, taller than the Empire State building - that would stretch out across the desert.

At just 200 yards wide, The Line was intended to be Saudi Arabia's answer to unchecked and wasteful urban sprawl, layering homes, schools and parks on top of each other in what planners term 'Zero Gravity Urbanism'.

Promotional material says residents will have 'all daily needs' reachable within a five-minute walk, while also having access to other perks like outdoor skiing facilities and 'a high-speed rail with an end-to-end transit of 20 minutes'.

For a train to travel 106 miles in 20 minutes, it would need to be able to travel at 318 miles per hour - 16 miles per hour faster than the Beijing to Shanghai speed line, one of the fastest railway lines in the world.

In his presentation, Prince Mohammed sketched out an even more ambitious vision, describing a car-free utopia that would become the planet's most liveable city.

Analysts noted at the time, though, that plans for NEOM have changed course over the years, fuelling doubts about whether The Line will ever become reality.

It was once touted as a regional 'Silicon Valley', a biotech and digital hub spread over 10,000 square miles.