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Paper short abstract

This paper analyses Saudi's 'The Line' megaproject to demonstrate how states use high-modernist spectacle to manufacture legitimacy. It argues that this 'strategic disconnection' between a glossy digital future and its coercive material reality actively obscures costs and justifies disposession.

Paper long abstract

The Line, a proposed 170-km linear city in Saudi, brings infrastructure into hyper-visible form, exemplifying the 21st century return to high-modernism as a symbol of progress and national ambition. This development is not merely a feat of engineering; it is a political instrument designed to consolidate state authority, attract global capital, and project an image of modernity.

While existing scholarship has examined infrastructural megaprojects as sites of financial risk (Flyvberg, 2014), displacement (Ghertner, 2015), and technocratic hubris (Scott, 1998), less attention is paid to how states actively engineer consent and construct legitimacy through these ventures. The Line’s planning and contested visions crystallise broader infrastructural politics, not merely as a collection of ‘invisible’ and discrete systems (Star, 1999) but as a contested site of governance, exclusion, and visions of the future. Futurity becomes a tool of power used to justify present-day dispossession and silence dissent. And, the pursuit of legitimacy actively obscures the material, social and human costs. Legitimacy is built on strategic disconnection, between a glossy, digitized future and the extractive, often coercive, material realities of its construction.

Its scale and aesthetic audacity demonstrate how form communicates power and possibility (Larkin, 2013) while the spectacle is weaponised to promote an inevitable future (Harvey, 2012). As a hybrid of urban planning and technopolitical vision, it mirrors Collier’s (2011) analysis of infrastructure as embodiments of economic theories — here, as a post-oil diversification strategy. The planning phase of this megaproject, where dazzle masks domination, reveals how states use infrastructure to manufacture legitimacy.