Saudi Crown Prince unveils plans for $500bn structure to house 9M people
twitter.com
twitter.com
I personally can't get enough of this foolish mega-project, I love the dry reporting on it.
Here's one of the latest: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2022-mbs-neom-saudi-arabi...
There was also a very telling interview with architects, builders, concept people etc... and after talking about Neom in all enthusiasm for a bit the interviewer asked each a simple question: would you live in Neom?
And the uncomfortable shifting in the seats and vague answers that followed were very telling. No one believes in this, not even the people working on it.
So it's basically like working at a FAANG, except you have to go sit in the middle of a remote desert to work on your PowerPoints.
He doesn’t do a tenth of Jeff Bezos’ evils and journalists are not talking about Jeff Bezos’ actions on national TV.
(Although, to make matters worse, MBS is a criminal and a despot.)
It's so strange seeing these futuristic dystopian ideas coming from a ruling monarch that was born into the position. It's like they are preserving the worst of humanity's past and preparing to carry it directly into a dystopian future.
But that's really beside the point. The real issue is this project is a monumental waste of resources. Innovating on advanced technology takes a huge amount of investment, but it doesn't follow that a huge amount of investment, by itself, will result in useful advanced technology.
When picked up at the airport you are presented the two buckets. When either one is full, it is time to leave.
I expect all employment requires the same trade-off consideration, but I gather in those parts of the world, for ex-pats, both buckets feel like they fill up at an alarmingly brisk rate.
Another question, WHO will live in Neom? Saudi Arabia only have 19-20 million native citizens, the rest are all expats.
That's probably the point. It's a "city"/prison for people who have no other choice.
People from extremely poorly managed countries or countries unable to attract investment because of lack of law or other factors. The UAE is 90% or so migrants who will never become citizens. If you have quasi-competent government and are willing to allow migrant workers in you can print money. Paying people from a country where the average daily wage is $2 $20 per day leaves a lot of room for profit margin even in low profit margin low skill manufacturing like textiles, the classic way to kick start the transition from agricultural to manufacturing based economies.
The scale of the feeding trough is unimaginable. I saw an advert for NEOM on Piccadilly Circus, the whole entire e-wall, and the place isn't even built yet, so I'm not sure if they're using it to recruit. It's not just what you think of as traditional civil engineering which would require you to be in the desert. The thing is supposed to be a smart city, whatever that means, but every buzzword seems to be required. Machine learning, green energy, internet of things, they seem to want everything.
I did read an article saying the Saudi guy in charge was a bully, so maybe it's not at positive, but worth a look if you can be a sub contractor.
To wish the current system upon children and children’s children is selfish and cruel beyond imagination.
If people wanted, we could all wake up tomorrow and begin building that better future. It is literally a state of mind at this point — the technology and intelligence necessary is within our current evolutionary form.
But soon enough we added Medicare, 401k, IRA, etc as independent systems for similar reasons. While I doubt anyone would have ever created the current system from scratch, it’s just one of seemingly endless possibilities.
I understand the weight of what I say. The trillions of thriving future lives spread throughout our solar system and galaxy are easily worth our suffering.
I agree that the current system has little hope of saving anyone from anything, save a small minority from discomfort for the short term future at the cost of oblivion for everything else in the long term.
Saudi Arabia and a brutal legal system, however.
I've traveled a bit in my life and at the end of the day for the average untalented non rich person there's nowhere better than Northwestern Europe.
I was in Saudi Arabia earlier this year and I met quite a few Western engineers and consultants who didn't get as lucky as your friend and had been living in the desert near Neom for > 6 months. IIRC their visas didn't even allow them to leave the region surrounding Neom (which is pretty much just empty desert).
> the place isn't even built yet
It's not built at all yet or has it simply not been completed yet? I keep hearing different things about the status of the project.
"Guy in charge is a bully"
I certainly don't want to defend the saudis, but let's face it, everyone views the Saudis as semi-gullible fools to be parted with their money, it wouldn't surprise me if they are a bit gruff.
Look, Saudi Arabia should be the ... Saudi Arabia of solar energy, they have a huge amount of capital from oil, and Saudi Arabia is at the juncture of 1) the richest continent 2) the largest continent, 3) the second-largest continent, they have ports with the Mediterranean and Red Sea and Indian Ocean.
They tried setting up all the satellite colleges in Saudi Arabia, and they couldn't get students to actually try. The US higher ed is full of party students getting rubberstamp diplomas, but there are also a segment (usually harder sciences and premed/prelaw/etc) that work REALLY hard. As I understand it, all of the saudi schools are just rubberstampers, they can't get the hard sciences students.
MBS probably needs to have a really nasty streak, because there is such massive corruption in the Saudi ruling structure.
But again, I don't want to seem like I'm defending them. I cannot wait for alternative energy and BEVs to drop the floor out from under them. They SHOULD have a soft landing with all that sovereign investment money, but... those slush funds can disappear fast... And once America DGAF about the middle east from a security standpoint, they'll just be a bunch of lazy billionaires.
Once the oil is meaningless, America's military shield is gone. Shiite Iran can invade Saudi Arabia, and Iran actually has fighting forces. Saudi Arabia does not.
> 1) the richest continent
North America is the richest continent, as I say this as a European.
Europe I guess is historically the richest (except again China before the British invasion).
I wonder what the architect of this building [0] would have answered the same question. However, many people live there.
[0] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/07/0c/1f/070c1f5ab8a54d907cca...
The building you posted is most likely a public housing or some kind of government trying to build housing for the poor.
That's a good point.
It's better housing that what you find in many parts of the rich West, at least Western Europe.
You can live a pretty solid middle class life in those buildings and you're not losing much, if anything, you learn a lot, being so close to other people.
“What struck me was that Neom’s vision is really an anti-vision. It is the opposite of the old Saudi Arabia. In the old Saudi Arabia, and even to an extent today, corruption and bureaucracy layered on each other to make an entrepreneur’s nightmare. Riyadh has almost no public transportation. No matter where you are, you cannot walk anywhere, except perhaps to your local mosque. No one in Neom mentioned religion at all. Even Neom’s location is suggestive. It is far from where Saudis actually live. Instead it is huddled in a mostly empty corner, as if seeking sustenance and inspiration from Jordan and Israel.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/04/mohamme...
One thing I'm a bit puzzled about is why so many people here describe this as a dystopia or prison. This is super similar to the old utopian sci-fi designs from the 60s/70s. Sure today it seems a bit dated/naive, but hardly dystopian.
Why do people go camping? Because it feels so right to connect with the environment.
I go camping once a year to connect with the environment; I wouldn't want to spend the 360-ish other days that way.
The actually built utopian housing and retail projects of the 1960s are widely regarded as dystopian in most Western countries too...
By the way, everyone could be writing about how on every American or European-adjacent topic, those governments are involved in terrible things too (need we talk about torturing people, killing civilians, colonization, genocide, racism, etc.) Anyways, with American support for Saudi, everyone is "implicated" in this.
Let it speak for what it is, and stick to the topic. There's a place for these criticisms, and they are sometimes necessary, but they drown out the idea we should be discussing for low-hanging, emotionally-charged fruit.
Unlike the paragraph you devoted to "what about the US/Europe" (and discussion of US/European political problems seems to crop up in every discussion of smart city tech in the US/Europe anyway...), which is of no relevance to whether a culturally Saudi $500bn city designed for Mohammed bin Salman's needs would be a utopian dream or a stylish dystopian nightmare. City planning isn't orthogonal to politics either; ask anyone who's paid any attention to Nay Pyi Daw.
As for changes, whether the Crown Prince decision to reduce the formal powers of the "moral police" and make them subordinate to his civil police are characterised more by [slightly] liberalising an extremely illiberal society, window-dressing for Western observers or increasing his personal authority and whether such reforms would accelerate or sharply regress under his successor(s) might have been a more interesting tangent than whether I should shut up. I can understand if you don't wish to speculate on such things, though, especially if you can potentially see yourself living where such discussion is banned in future... in an efficiently monitored, fully-enclosed space shaped like a line.
Regardless of the feasibility of this mega-project, what concerns me is how difficult it would be to escape from living in what is essentially a big mall. Maybe that's what feels dystopian to most people here?
This concern doesn't stop me from being fascinated by urban megastructures such as the "LINE", I'm just not sure I would like to live in them (and I love living in a crowded city nonetheless!).
In all seriousness though, the project does look very realistic and I can't find any major flaw with it except that the glass wall will need to be a triple-mirror which is ridiculously expensive.
The other unknown is how an idealized architecture like this stacks against real-life humans who don't care to maintain anything if they're not paid for it.
I do hope they build it.
Except, you know: all the infrastructure needed to build it in the desert. And maintained. And repaired
Well they'll probably pay for it. I don't know if the idea is to rent or sell housing there, but in both cases it's pretty standard to have provisions for ongoing maintenance.
My napkin math said that if peak wind speeds hit it dead on, the wind will impart a force of 156N/m^2. A 1 meter wide slice will have to absorb roughly the force of 3 Tesla Model S' pushing on it at full throttle. Across the entire wall, the force is roughly equal to that generated by 381 Saturn V rockets at lift-off.
The other problem is price; they're almost certainly off by at least a couple orders of magnitude. The Burj Rafal is 308m tall with a 20,000m^2 base, and cost $320m, which comes out to $520/m^3. $500bn for this comes out to $29.41/m^3. That price for the Burj Rafal probably doesn't include public infrastructure (electricity generation, water cleaning, sewers, etc), and Neom will be way too big to piggyback on an existing system.
It's a neat idea, I agree I hope they build it, but I hope they do so cautiously. Build a kilometer or three and then revisit the design and costs. Starting with a 170km version of it almost assures that it never actually gets finished.
Sadly, this is not getting built as designed and double sadly is it’s being planned by a PoS running a PoS government.
Also I feel like cities aren’t meant to be designed this way. If nobody lives there, people aren’t gonna want to move there. If nobody is moving there, there won’t be anyone living there. Defeats the entire purpose.
It won’t ever be finished, of course, but I’d be curious as to what incentives they’d offer for moving there.
I think the hope is attracting investors maybe like Dubai. Turn it into another international hub. There are strong institutional issues with this (especially considering the Kingdom's saudification drive) but I think building it in a relatively sparser area is an attempt to circumvent this.
The problem with 175 km of continuous "subway" is that you probably don't want to walk more than 2.5 km to the train (if that, it's Arabian hot) so you have 35 stops (5 km apart) along the line at a minimum — with a blistering acceleration of g = 10 m/s^2 you're stuck at an average velocity of 18 km/h, so it's eleven hours of travel end-to-end assuming two minutes at each stop. Those are optimistic assumptions. You can mitigate it slightly by having express trains skip stops, but now it gets complicated, etc. To be anywhere near reasonable you probably want about five actual transit lines on the single "line".
A much less crazy plan would have 8-16 compact neighborhoods at various spacings along the line, where you can get the most out of the directional freedom of walking, and the train can go much faster without having so many stops.
175 km in 20 minutes would be roughly the top speed of the fastest train ever built. I'm doubting that.
The answer is to have more rails, but that takes more space, and I'm not sure how much space they're dedicating to the rail system.
Rail scheduling is fascinating; it does make me curious how fast they can make this system in a real world environment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs-10eEGEe0 "How would Manhattan look with the vertical urbanism being adopted for THE LINE?"
Unless the interior can be easily shifted in purpose and construction, but I kind of doubt it.
Then again, "overflow" settelements can function for evolution.
Soooooo many workers will die building even a part of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_city
https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroFuturism/comments/uh9mhp/the_l...
Los Angeles.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death
[1]Japanese History Documented in Chinese Writings:
https://studycorgi.com/japanese-history-documented-in-chines...
Space is a perfect example. There's no technical reason we haven't established footholds on Mars and even the Moon, beyond the dilemma posed above. One administration would start a grand space program, the next would cancel it with partisan criticism, and start their own. And this has been going on for half a century.
Real progress back towards space only meaningfully restarted when private companies (or the owners thereof) started to become wealthy enough to fund their own space programs, without any regard for social criticism or worry about their leadership being canned next year if they don't get enough votes. Ironically this helped also somewhat kickstart governments back towards a focus on space as well.
Lack of atmosphere, dangerous voyage, radiation, lack of easily available nutrients, dangerous weather, different gravity, likely one way voyages
and of course the everpresent lack of any particular economic incentive to do so
There also isn't our massive gravity well. If you have materials (see point 1) it is easier to build large installations. We should be able to build GIGANTIC underground habitats in the moon.
There was also the powers-of-ten energy use as we climb Kardashev levels. That only happens with space settlement.
The other economic fact is that we have too many people for the Earth to sustain already AT THE CONSUMPTION THEY WANT. Sure we can impose a resource restriction by fiat (communism/authoritarian) or availability/poverty (capitalism), take your pick.
Space will come more easily with cybernetics. In a hundred years humans may be very very very different. But footholds are worthwhile.
But ultimately your comment harkens to the lack of vision of humanity, mostly I view it as a sign of increased control by the leisure elite over the world. They control the money and politics, and all they want are status and enjoyment, and the rest of the world to support them.
We have a thin margin for species survival right now. It's kind of like how when the tipping point for global warming in the 1990s was happening, everyone in America bought SUVs.
Sad.
At immense, non-economical cost. This idea is great in sci fi but we have nothing close to the technology to pull it of cheaper than mining things on earth
>There also isn't our massive gravity well. If you have materials (see point 1) it is easier to build large installations.
Point 1 is still sci fi
> We should be able to build GIGANTIC underground habitats in the moon.
Immense cost for no benefit
> There was also the powers-of-ten energy use as we climb Kardashev levels. That only happens with space settlement.
... and significant advancements in energy generation / capture
> Space will come more easily with cybernetics.
More sci fi non existing tech
> In a hundred years humans may be very very very different.
Sci fi
> But ultimately your comment harkens to the lack of vision of humanity, mostly I view it as a sign of increased control by the leisure elite over the world. They control the money and politics, and all they want are status and enjoyment, and the rest of the world to support them.
Ok and your vision of what we need to be doing now seems to consist of liking science fiction and ignoring realistic constraints.
No really, it is.
That's the current crown of human achievement. All corporations and government know everything about you.
Written by you. I hope you're a total sociopath for your sake because all you can hang your crown on is enabling dystopia.
I can see why you don't want people in space. You can't spy on them as easily. The future of earth is authoritarian dominance and eventual death of the species.
The future of space at least has the hope of being better.
Have fun making the world a terrible place, dude.
It won't be easy of course, but it's entirely possible. And has been for decades. Wernher von Braun, architect of the Apollo program, was the first individual to lay out technical plans for the colonization of Mars. He would go on to ultimately retire from NASA precisely due to this specific conflict between politics and progress in space.
Overcome for what? 20 days? Have we overcome any of those items for say, a 1 year old stay? I doubt it.
Food is the easiest of everything mentioned. You just send them with enough food to last a while, and then send more
> But within those 53 years we've grown food in space
No, we've grown it in small controlled environments that are in space. We do not regularly grow crops in space to feed astronauts. The spatial requirements are too large to do it on the ISS.
> a far less hospitable environment than the Moon and especially Mars, and even achieved a few other useful things along the way as well.
They're pretty much equally hostile. On the moon the ground is super toxic dust. Mars doesn't really have soil like The Martian suggests. You might be able to make it work but again, not without a huge controlled environment.
> It won't be easy of course, but it's entirely possible. And has been for decades. Wernher von Braun, architect of the Apollo program, was the first individual to lay out technical plans for the colonization of Mars.
The only way we 'colonize' mars is by shipping them an absurd amount of crap and commit to the fact that they will do nothing productive aside from not dying there. They won't be able to farm. They won't be able to build domes or underground lairs. They'll sit in their starship heavies to hide from radioactive death beams and eat prepackaged food while a solar panel outside keeps the lights on.
Let's look at von Braun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mars_Project
> In his introduction to The Mars Project, von Braun stated that his study was not yet complete. He said that he had omitted the details of some topics that would need to be addressed further, including the eccentric orbit of Mars, interplanetary astronavigation, meteor showers, and the long-term effects of spaceflight on humans.[2]
> There are other shortcomings in The Mars Project that von Braun could not have anticipated in 1948. He had not planned on any uncrewed exploratory missions to Mars taking place before the first human expedition, and he had not foreseen the technological advances that would take place, or the development of robot spacecraft.[4] It was not until 1965 that the uncrewed Mariner 4 spacecraft found that the density of the Martian atmosphere was only one tenth of what had been estimated, making it clear that the huge winged gliders planned by von Braun would not have had enough lift to be able to descend safely onto the surface of Mars.[1] The danger of high energy solar and cosmic radiation beyond low Earth orbit was not known in 1948. The Van Allen radiation belts were not discovered until 1958, and von Braun did not plan for the protection of the crews from such radiation, whether in space or on the Martian surface.[1]
The purpose of this thing is not economical, or political, or social - the purpose is to satisfy the ego of an autocrat, and as long as that ego is getting stroked, the money will continue to flow.
They have many already, all of them unfinished and unpractical. And then the money moves on the a new city of the future.
I think is basically just a status competition 'my city is gone be a revolutionary design'.
The guy after MBS will likely try a city in a spiral or something.
Also one of the goals of the project is to reduce the energy needs of the population by making ways shorter. If you spread a city out on a circle, you got a much more complicated and expensive transportation problem than just the linear structure presented here.
In a traditional street network, there are many ways to get from A to B and one link being unavailable is not the end of the world. Forcing everyone onto essentially the same street is guaranteed to cause both high fragility and high congestion, since everyone has to squeeze into the same line.
At the simplest there would be one line connecting from end to end, which should be the fastest and the one with the fewest stops. But then you have smaller lines, travelling in their own tubes, connecting local areas. That way you can travel between any two points relatively fast and avoid congestion. You can build redundancy into this system. But also, it's not a catastrophe on a normally 20 minute trip if there is blocked section and you have to walk a few minutes, take a local connection to bypass the blockage and then go on. Happens to me all the time...
The big benefit in a linear city is that the transport pods never need to turn around. You also don't need to manufacture curved rails or things like that. You can build structures like that in a "2D" city, but it's harder.
In 1D, you can build a linear railway. Cost scales proportionally to length (and hence population) if you assume that the the railway merely needs to get longer as population grows, but this gives a system where ridership on a given rail segment scales linearly with population, which is much worse. Time between two random points also scales linearly with population. The added costs associated with improving performance given the worse scaling seem likely to blow the whole thing up.
Your point about length is true, but about population scale might not, because it's still in 2D. There are still ways to segregate tracks.
I doubt this would work. Cities don't do this for a reason.
Transit lines get built according to transportation needs, not mathematical coverage of the space. You have pockets of housing that need to get to pockets of commerce. You can't practically run transit cars connecting [0,0] and [end, 0].
Beijing is a grid: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/Beijing_...
Shanghai is a grid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Metro#/media/File:Sha...
Tokyo is grid-like east and south of the Imperial Palace: https://i0.wp.com/transitmap.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/...
Taipei has a grid: https://english.metro.taipei/cp.aspx?n=1BE0AF76C79F9A38
The gridded portion of Manhattan has a grid between 14th St and Central Park: https://english.metro.taipei/cp.aspx?n=1BE0AF76C79F9A38. Buses fill out the grid in outer areas like the Bronx: https://new.mta.info/map/5366
Paris is gridded about as much as it can be due to the non-grid road layout: https://www.ratp.fr/sites/default/files/plans-lignes/Plans-e...
Berlin is gridlike: https://sbahn.berlin/en/route-map/
The length is also much less of a concern than in traditional transport systems because of less friction and less need to brake, so most of the energy is for accelerating and decelerating at the stops.
Of course it would blow up if you wanted to build a fully connected city that is twice that length or even longer, but that's not proposed.
Trains crossing perpendicular have to bridge maybe 6m at most. You’d have to bridge the entire length of city for this. And a fire would render any lines above or below unsafe to run until extinguished.
The idea that car-free or very limited car is only possible if you have absurd density is false.
Its totally possible to have nice suburbs that are totally walkable and don't require a car for 90% of the population.
If everyone in Hong Kong was shoved into one train line, it would also be congested.
There are still multi layer travel options available. And some previously unthinkable possibilities (e.g. moving walkways like the kind you see in airports, for short distances within a block – or different colored trains on different levels like ground/underground) are still possible.
Aside from sand, it also lets animals, humans, and vehicles pass through.
They could also put nets some kilometers in front of the thing to catch most of it and deposit itself as dunes there, maybe try to fixate is with some vegetation if at all possible.
This project is not based in reality, or has any consideration for reality. It is obviously inefficient in it's basic geometry (circle beats line) let alone after looking at the actual numbers. A 200m tall 170km long wall is not going to work. They claim you will be able to travel end to end in 20mins. Thats 510kph without acceleration or deceleration. That's 50kmph faster than the current fastest train (Shanghai Maglev) all whilst being within 200m of 9 million people.
And all of this will be zero carbon of course, with a passively controlled temperate climate in the desert. Nice of them to throw some trees in the graphics to show that.
This is made to pay consultants and businesses, and keep the man in charge happy. I'm not hoping it fails. If they reach all of these milestones and it even turns out to be vaguely ok, I will literally eat my hat, hold my hand up and say I was wrong. But when it doesn't I will take some joy in the mess of a story that comes out.
I think I would be miserable without a yard, though. I don't think I want to spend my life inside of a manufactured block.
This is not a space habitat. It is climate controlled, it has access to the surroundings and there actually isn't that much building around you at any time. The major difference is that it is more thought out and uniform over a large area. It's not going to be built, ever, but it's a nice idea and some of the counter arguments aren't valid.
At 170km long, 200m wide, 500m tall, the volume is 17,000,000,000 m^3. They're planning on spending just $29.41 per m^3.
Just trying to get a point of reference, the Burj Rafal is 308m tall with a 20,000 m^2 plot and cost $320M. Running the numbers they spent $520/m^3 on that, and it's shorter (I presume added height increases costs and complexity). Infrastructure was also likely already provided by the city, and not counted in that budget.
Honestly, I think even material costs are at least an order of magnitude higher than they want. The scope of this boggles the mind. They need 170M m^2 of mirrored glass just to cover the outside of this.
That's not even touching the foundation and reinforcement it takes to support a 170km long, 500m tall wall that's going to bear all the force of wind coming off the ocean. Wind speeds seem to peak at about 16m/s, so the force on a 1m section of the wall would be ~78 kN. That's roughly the force of 3 Tesla Model S' at full acceleration (but spread vertically). The force across the entire wall would be equal to ~381 Saturn V rockets at lift-off, or about 23 times the force that sunlight exerts on the entire Earth.
[1]
> I never seen something more dystopian
>> Come on, you are in Los Angeles, just go to the corner if you want to see something more dystopian.
[2]
> What about human rights ?
>> I dunno ask your government.
------------
1. Their strategy seems to be "Deflect. Deflect. Deflect.". They never address criticism. They just focus on other problems.
2. If your response to a question about human rights is "I don't know", everyone should be scared.
------------
[1] https://twitter.com/adara_salim/status/1551750220643307525
[2] https://twitter.com/keeganc15/status/1551678707672178697
The world however was lot more questionable.
Reflected sun, by definition, has a little less energy than direct sun. So, given the mirror walls are straight, as the designs show, you get (at maximum) 200% of normal desert sun energy, which isn't comfortable, but not a Gehry-style death ray.
As to social aspects... That is my major concern also. Of course this city has a police force and would clean up anybody blocking the central hubs. There is no street btw, but rather different kinds of corridors for walking and trains of different speeds and ranges. I guess it is relatively easy to disturb the system, on the other hand if realized there would probably be an authoritarian kid of police force making sure nobody does.
People are moving out of dry cleaning into "wet cleaning" to avoid chemical solvents. Wet cleaning requires a drying machine.
I mean, christ scale it back a bit no?
Paris [1] and D.C.’s cores were engineered. Several cities after WWII were bombed to a blank slate.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_...
Almost zero chance the labourers and support infrastructure is within the walls. Similar to how Manhattan (or any functional urban core) outlays low-value facilities.
(To be clear, I think none of this will be built. But it’s not fundamentally unsound.)
You really compared it.
Maybe something like Brasília or something is a better comparison.
Is it really different from what the communists did, except with a more modern design?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_planning_in_communist_...
Technological utopia meets sociological dystopia.
Its an utterly absurd and incredibly dumb and expensive design. We literally know how to get the best cities already. This is just a way to hook people who have never thought about city design at all.
I guess you can't make nice marketing videos with the message 'we will design new city with traditional grid pattern and a mix of town-houses and apparent building designed with streets that are primary for walking/bicycle use while providing some transportation infrastructure'.
Even on a purely theoretical level, if you strip away all the practical issues, I still don't get how this city would be superior in anything.
P.S: MBS is literally an incompetent fool. His military and diplomatic policy when he came to office made him seem like a 5 year old who got on the computer to finish his fathers Starcraft game.
but it would probably cost way more than $500 billion
This is going to be much harder than anyone realizes.
0: https://www.wsj.com/articles/expatriate-executives-flee-saud...
9M residents housed, 170 km traveled in 20 minutes- all for the low low price of 0.5T USD. An obsession with narrowing the width of the city to 100m! This is some kind of "visionary fantasy" of an idiot who has become a dictator. Sounds like a plan a 10 year old would chalk up.
What gets finished first Oxagon or The Line? NEOM is clearly having fun.
https://globetrender.com/2022/03/03/saudi-arabia-oxagon-floa...
It is even more accute when related to being able to afford an accomodation: countries and cities around the world are increasing significantly their public housing share, to a point private housing becomes the lesser way.
Heard Singapore is at 80% and Vienna at 65%. But here, we are talking about Singapore and Austrian cultures, in which that amount of public housing could work, in many other cultures you will end up with unmaintained slums.
Doing this while being surrounded by yes-men and not being grounded in reality is a recipe for disaster, I just hope they don't burn some pension fund money along the way.
I for one don't wish to see Megacity Wahid built, but I hope they burn as much money as possible along the way.
Anyways, we can also say a lot about terrible things happening in the US and Europe, but with Saudi Arabia specifically I think people put misplaced hate on things when there are in reality problems everywhere.
And places that are very dense can still be worse then a US subburb in terms of feeling like a city.
One concept from a city planner said basically urbanism is not about density. Connectivity and access is what makes a good city, not density.
You can have a city with anywhere between 50k and 5M feel very livable and nice. And you can have a city with between 50k and 5M feel like a lonely place. Its all about the city design.
There would be a constantly advancing head region that pushed ever forward as new structures were needed.
It would prevent NIMBY because once constructed, changes would be minimal, yet there would always be a place where new projects were welcome.
As the snake wound its way forward, anything in it's path would be trampled or assimilated.
They would have to build independent sections that, over time, will shift relative to each other.
He is a prince after all, developing the nation is one of the first duties of an monarch since the country “belongs” to you.
We’ve seen this movie before.
Judge Dredd all over again.
It's a really interesting concept though.
Suddenly then you have “the segments”
was this video made by an AI?
It's about $175 per cubic meter if you have a huge project and are able to benefit from any economies of scale. A cubic meter is about 1.5 tons of soil.
And then you've got to truck all that dirt somewhere.
The Safer is at a Yemeni port [1], with recent UN safekeeping attempts having been inhibited by the Houthis. The environmental damage and economic cost will be borne almost entirely by western Yemen. Houthi territory.
TL; DR This is irrelevant to Riyadh’s global standing.
So the proposed strategy involves taking out the main rebel-controlled ports as well as their fisheries while doing aesthetic damage to Saudi Arabia? (Yanbu won’t be disrupted by an oil spill that far away.) This is nonsense. Hell, I see more sense in Riyadh busting the tanker.
Cool idea, sounds pretty impractical as stated.
This whole project - Why? Whoever sold this to the Saudis, bit prankster
It's better than the soviet union like buildings they are promoting everywhere in the world, including in the US
We need to optimize cities as much as possible, that's for sure, this project is a step in the right direction
If on earth we can't manage to build ultra optimized cities, then how do you expect we be able to build ultra optimized space stations, or bases on the moon/mars?
We need to experiment yesterday so we are ready today
It's better to invest our money in the next random Web3.0 project, that's for sure, why trying to optimize a whole city anyways? /s