Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dan42 | Hacker News Reader

I doubt it will get built, but they really have people who understand the fundamental concepts behind Arcology. Honestly I'm surprised at how many parts of the design are well thought-out and well adapted to the desert environment. Sunlight from the sides, but not so much that it overheats the city. Heat escapes up. 5-minute walkable neighborhoods. The proximity to services of cities combined with the roominess of suburbs. At least in theory it's the perfect place to live.

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.

View on HN

It's also super similar to the dystopian cyberpunk of the 1980s. With the added dimension that it's ruled by an absolute monarch who presently deploys moral police to stop outrageous things like women stepping outside the house without male relatives accompanying never mind outrageous capital crimes like protest, journalism or homosexuality, which is the sort of society you really don't want to have smart autonomous systems monitoring everything. And a petrostate, so theoretical eco-credentials are going to be taken with a pinch of salt.

The actually built utopian housing and retail projects of the 1960s are widely regarded as dystopian in most Western countries too...

You should edit or remove parts of your comment. There isn't really the so called "moral police" existent to the level you're describing. Lots of my fellow Americans don't really seem to understand the changes Saudi is undergoing, so I'm not surprised someone would write a comment like yours.

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.

How the government uses its surveillance and what is and isn't permitted is extremely relevant to the topic of a smart city proposal (and even more relevant to the subthread on whether it could be perceived as "dystopian").

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.

Reminds me of atrium-like structures but extended to a massive scale to fit cities. [1]

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?

[1] https://youtu.be/VuOyygDRN-w

That's an interesting video, but it focuses on entirely enclosed "interior cities". But the lack of sunlight and connection to the outside has been a known weakness of those places for decades. This "LINE" design at least attempts to address that by providing a massive view to the outside via two 500m-tall transparent walls.

Yes, I guess it does address the lack of exposure to the outside ; my point is that it must be quite difficult to disconnect from "the city" -- advertising billboards, noise... In this case, the outside is even completely devoid of life.

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!).

That’s what does it for me. You live in a weird tube and all of the nature is artificial. If you do leave, you’re in the desert.

The dystopian side is the lack of squares to protest on ;)

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.

I posted down below as well, but I think wind is going to be a big issue for them. A 170km long, 500m tall wall is about the least aerodynamic thing I can think of. I would anticipate that wind issues will be substantial.

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.

> In all seriousness though, the project does look very realistic and I can't find any major flaw

Except, you know: all the infrastructure needed to build it in the desert. And maintained. And repaired

> 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.

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.

>5-minute walkable neighborhoods. The proximity to services of cities combined with the roominess of suburbs. At least in theory it's the perfect place to live.

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.

imagine train lines that stop at prime number stations. so line 2 would stop at station 2,4,6 like 3 would stop at 3,6,9. if you want to get to station 10 you could take line 11 directly to station 11 and then line 1 back. alternatively, you could use an app to calculate the best route based on when you arrived

That probably depends on how many rails and when trains can cross onto other rails. I.e. a basic flow is all trains go one direction on one rail, and they all go backwards on the other. You can use the "wrong direction" rail to pass another train, but only if there's no oncoming train. Waiting for a train to go through so you can cross is effectively the same as stopping at a station.

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.

The video says it's 20 minutes end to end, somehow.

The numbers in my post have some significant errors — I mashed it in just before my plane was taking off — but the argument is one I have seen carried out more carefully elsewhere.

175 km in 20 minutes would be roughly the top speed of the fastest train ever built. I'm doubting that.

With an express train from the easternmost stop to the westernmost stop, zero in-between stops... possible, but not very practicable.

A train system wouldn't have to stop at every neighborhood linearly. They could optimize for connections.

Because this is the exact opposite of trying to live at one with your environment. Not saying that cities aren't, but this just screams "wrong" on so many levels.

Why do people go camping? Because it feels so right to connect with the environment.

Hmm, I guess this argument makes sense for the more hippie-oriented types, but as an urbanite the idea of having the convenience of a big city without the overcrowded downsides has me downright drooling.

I go camping once a year to connect with the environment; I wouldn't want to spend the 360-ish other days that way.

There would be a lot of more places to go camping to if everyone lived in such cities. See how Manhattan would look like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs-10eEGEe0

I’m in love with the concept itself! I’d love to live in something like this. I love the walkability idea and the mirror design on the outside.

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.

The mirror idea is really interesting, maybe they want to make the city seem "invisible" to the outside?

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 biggest issue is evolution. Cities are evolutionary to support change and shifts.

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.

Even if you like urbanism, this promotional video (from neom themselves) has convinced me that it would be dystopian. All the nuance and uniqueness of places replaced with a homogeneous form, nope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs-10eEGEe0 "How would Manhattan look with the vertical urbanism being adopted for THE LINE?"

have you read anything about the proposed legal structure?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com