Nine million people in city 170km long; is world ready for a linear metropolis?

> Everyone on both side gets unblocked full vista. There are no other buildings blocking the view or the sun.

This is meant to be 500 metres wide! Only the few on the outside get the view.

> Navigation is super easy. No getting lost in the city.

Navigation is really difficult if there's a blockage in your way or your destination is really far! You could also get lost - on foot! - in a three dimensional urban jungle.

> One single public (or private) transportation line (Metro, Bus, etc.), no criss crossing complicated routes. No calculation for what is the optimal route between two points in the city.

This is also reallllllly fragile. If there's a blockage, power failure, accident then you have real trouble.

> Same holds true for essentials like water, electricity, sewage etc. One straight uncomplicated pipe infrastructure - easy to lay, maintain.

See above, also getting water into this... thing... is far from uncomplicated in the first place. No rivers, no natural water. And if it's all supplied through the city (as in, through 170km or whatever) where's the redundancy? What if the water pipes break? What if the sewage pipes spill?

> Incase of emergency easy and super fast evacuation, everyone simultaneously 'spills out' of the walls on either side. No long travel through city, getting blocked due to traffic jams.

Great, you have successfully evacuated everyone into the desert. How are you going to keep them alive? Evacuate them? Which scenarios is this a benefit? I can think of - maybe - a fire? But then fires in high rise build are already extremely deadly and this is a big high building, so it's not going to help

> With proper planning of shades, HVAC, etc. climate control could be more energy efficient. Forget shade, there is none. Climate control - this is a 500m x 500m x 17000m building. This is never going to be efficent. EVER. Transport - distances between points have been absolutely maximised so it's also incredibly inefficient. Water? How do you get water in Saudi Arabia with NO RIVERS NEARBY? A massive desalination plant presumably - so again, NOT EFFICIENT.

Aren't the sides supposed to be completely covered in solar panels?

> Navigation is super easy. No getting lost in the city.

But your maps need to be inherently three-dimensional because of the verticality. Usually getting around in a city only requires a two-dimensional map until you enter the building at your destination.

> One single [...] transportation line

In other words, a single vehicle breaking down can take down the entire transit system.

> One straight uncomplicated pipe infrastructure

You still need to branch out from the single pipe in the same way as in a conventional city. Also, "one straight pipe" is a really bad idea because of the same issue as above. Good engineering is all about avoid single points of failure.

> Incase of emergency easy and super fast evacuation, everyone simultaneously 'spills out' of the walls on either side.

Into what is mostly inhospitable desert.

We're talking about a 170k long infrastructure. How is that easy to lay and maintain? At some point, the waste of 9 million people gets merged. That sounds too much to handle and a maintenance nightmare. And traveling in a circular city is a lot faster than in a linear one, of course.

But you lose the network effects of an actual 3d city. Want to work on the electricity. Every one on the wrong side loses electricity. Plus I'd hate to think of the scale required to get all these things through one pipe.

> Unveiled in July, the project is the latest heady fantasy to emerge from the kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s marketing machine, garnering breathless headlines and torrents of clicks (its videos have 400m views and counting).

which I expect from a respectable (to me) news site like The Guardian, but it seems like there are a lot of news sites and blogs that just report things like this so they get clicks. And of course here a commentator can muse about it and also gain page views (does The Guardian run ads, I'm behind an ad-blocker).

> If it looks like something from a Marvel movie, there’s a reason. The army of consultants commissioned to work on Neom, the $500bn urban region of which the Line is part, comprises not only urban planners but numerous digital artists from the special effects industry. According to a Bloomberg report, they include Olivier Pron, a designer who helped create the look of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy films; Nathan Crowley, known for his work on the brooding Dark Knight trilogy of Batman movies; and futurist Jeff Julian, who worked on the apocalyptic extravaganzas World War Z and I Am Legend.

I guess if there's a fat paycheck in it, I'd design a megalomaniac choppy-choppy prince's fantasy city too...

- the highest building in the world

- an indoor ski slope in the desert

- an artificial island group with 10,000 exclusive houses shaped like a tropical tree

- I could go on

I don't see why this isn't a serious proposal. With enough money, anything is.

Setting aside how you're going to build a "green" city in the desert, you can't just stuff an entire city into a line. This might work if it was a district (one of those live play work places) but as an entire city it just raises far too many questions. How would essential services operate? How is an ambulance supposed to work without roads?

Biggest hurdle is that there seems to be zero room for expansion or adjustment. You build this line and what happens in 20 or 30 years when the "city" is bursting at the seams, you have X Y and Z problem and no way to fix it because you build your city in a straight line and not like a normal city with room for expansion.

If this ever happens it won't be a "city" so much as it will be a tourist district. They have enough money to build this thing for sure, just not sure if they would want to go the "city" route since there are so many variables that will be out of their control and highly constrained by the design.

Chile is a linear country. The most linear country on earth, in fact. In fact there was a map on reddit, (from memory) where each country was replaced in its geographic boundary by its name. It worked great for every country except Chile, where they succumbed to writing vertically "CHILE CHILE CHILE CHILE CHILE" totally exceptional killed the game.

I bet I would love Volgograd. More than the locals.

The other place that is like that is SF, the Peninsula, and South Bay. They always talk about going North or South, like in Chile, never East and West.

But it's a sham. They'll never get 25% of the country's population into one building. It's just a PR exercise, a concept car if you will.

Also seems like a good way to control a large population. Can't have that large of a group gather and a small force can effectively cut the city in two (or more) segments. If you shut down the train system people can't go too far to other parts of the city. I imagine this was also a consideration.