Model City Monday

Every time I hear NEOM The Line I think about a very tangentially related video game called Spec Ops: The Line, set in Dubai. It’s a pretty interesting game from the Call of Duty era, although the gameplay is a shrug. Might be worth playing if you think this video about it is motivating or you want to look at destroyed Dubai vistas for a few hours. https://youtu.be/kjaBsuXWJJ8

This seems like a rather weak takedown, but I'd be interested in reading a more thorough one if someone knowledgeable has written one anywhere.

In particular, I feel like building the city out in one direction, seems like it's a pretty good idea in terms of "factory made" construction, you're just repeating the same tasks, so specialist workers and tools like cranes just move onto the next segment when done.

Building something the height of the twin towers is hard, but building something the height of the twin towers, directly next to something that already exists and has elevators in it, that is the height of the twin towers with easy access on three sides seems a lot more doable.

I totally agree with the anti-royalty, totalitarian dictator stuff, so don't want to detract from that, but building sustainable cities in your country seems a reasonable use for the money in the abstract. And an oil-rich nation building a car free city, with 100% renewable power seems like a good sign generally.

There seems to have been a few 'wild' construction projects in the general area, would be interesting to see an expert take on if those seemed to make more or less sense once complete, and what percentage of them did get completed, and how sustainable they are in the long term, are they basically burning money unsustainable and what's the human and environmental cost of building them (deaths of workers etc.).

I think they also have a few other 'sustainable cities' that have been around for a while, which provide another good benchmark, if they're basically building ever larger prototypes.

This is the existing one I was thinking of, Masdar City in UAE:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masdar_City

This line

> Dictators robbing the public purse to build cool monuments that make them feel special.

reminded me that there are pyramids not far away from where NEOM is to be built. Hadn't thought of them this way though, but now does sound very similar.