Representing spatial futures in the age of social media: unpacking the case of <i>The Line</i>

Purpose This paper is concerned with materials developed to represent and communicate state-commissioned spatial experiments on social media. Our objective is to reveal what such materials can do, even before – or whether–the projects they represent are built. Such materials can constitute an intervention in the way political territory is created, shared and made sense of. Design/methodology/approach We use empirical research of The Line, a new city set to be built in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), to explore this contention. Our research data is the publicly available visual, textual and audio-visual materials commissioned by The Line’s delivery company to be disseminated on digital platforms. Our methodological approach to these materials is a qualitative content analysis. Findings The materials do not provide a clear sense of fundamental elements of what The Line as an architectural project actually is. Rather the materials foreground three main tropes that disrupt existing notions of nature, space and temporality. Such disruptions propagate KSA’s official story of transformation as drafted in its Vision 2030. They lead us to understand The Line as a radical experiment to rework the Saudi territory and therefore reflecting the power of the state. Originality/value Exploring critically the ways in which material projects are embedded in predominantly visual digital cultural forms that imply architecture – and are compounded by affordances of social media – can illuminate much about how designed environments can be mobilized vis-a-vis political imaginaries.