Drone footage reveals The Line megacity under construction in Saudi Arabia
dezeen.com
dezeen.com
Every serious accounting of the project says the same: it's batshit insane.
The scale is ridiculously big (170km long, 500m high), the location is ridiculous, the shape is the opposite of what you want in urban design (a straight line means the opposite ends are going to be disconnected, no matter how good your trains are), and every single design element is made to look good on a video presentation before being practical.
Management is reportedly made of oil barons who get violently angry if anyone questions their decisions, and foreign contractors who know the project is doomed but don't want to speak up while the free money is flowing.
It's a huge farce.
100% agree. I really don't understand why they didn't design it as Apple Campus-style, with a giant natural park inside (if this is possible in the desert), and railway lines along the diameter every 22.5° or so to connect opposite points of the circle, with an interchange station in the center.
Typical cities are circles with most of the density being in the middle, and the 4 spoke optimizes for that.
If on the other hand density is in a line around the perimeter, that’s the best place for rail.
Again, you're humoring them way too much.
A better question would be "I don't understand why didn't add two vaguely-circle-shaped cities at the base of the Line so that the phallic mentality behind the project could be even more clear."
Just like the great pyramid of Ghiza seemed to the Egyptians.
Only, several orders of magnitude more insane. In its 170km x 200m x 500m = 17B m^3 volume you can fit over 6000 great pyramids of 2.6M m^3 each.
If it does ever get built, its ruins will make a suitable 8th wonder of the world.
Meanwhile, construction on another mega project, the kilometer tall Kingdom/Jeddah Tower, has stopped since 2018 [1].
[1] https://science.howstuffworks.com/engineering/civil/jeddah-t...
I mean, if you really believe your immortal soul is going to be empowered by building a giant enough monument or whatever, then it makes rational sense to build something at the edge of your kingdom's logistical capacity.
And if nothing else, it's always good for bragging and showing your kingdom's superiority to its neighbors. And there were previous projects of smaller scale that proved it was feasible.
The Saudis aren't (deliberately) building a giant tomb. They expect people to live in that monstrosity. Even if (huge if) they can build something to the stated dimensions, it's only going to stand as an empty monument to their colossal resource-wasting hubris, a shell of concrete and steel and glass that will inevitably break down as nobody moves to live in there and nobody pays for maintaining the stupid thing.
I would definitely live in a city like that, it looks great to me. There are lots of people who have a preference for high density cities as it comes with lots of benefits. It's also more eco-friendly than low density living[0]. I just wish it was built in a more liberal country.
1) Shenzhen went from fishing village to a ~15 million population city in around 30 years. So there's a precedent for building a massive city in a relatively short period of time.
2) The Line is expected to house 9 million people. Assuming 2 people per house and given the $500 billion cost-estimate, it comes out at $110,000 per house. I've seen brand new apartments in Istanbul going for around that price and that's probably way above the actual construction cost (e.g. it includes land cost, developer's profit, etc.). Remember that the land here is free and there will probably be massive economies of scale due to the massiveness of the project.
— Percy Shelley
Why anyone would want to live in a giant shopping mall in the middle of a desert in a country with an oppressive, theocratic regime I have no idea.
Just because something doesn't go along with your view doesn't make it oppressive. And FYI, SA govt isn't fully theocratic. Islam doesn't support hereditary monarchy at all.
Was this something the people of Saudia Arabia wanted? Was the population clamoring to live in a giant Line in the middle of nowhere?
Did they ask what people wanted, or even look at where they are naturally gravitating to? Was that even a consideration in this project?
Most cities build up over time as more and more people have a reason to live in a particular area. At some point it becomes self-reinforcing because more people want to live there because everyone lives there.
Historically, efforts to create cities by decree have not worked well.
Aren’t there a number of big cities that have been built by decree and work well? I’m thinking of capital cities like Canberra (AUS), Brasilia (BRA) and Washington DC (USA). Granted, these are not quite so ambitious as The Line, but they turned mostly uninhabited swampland and farmland into major cities.
I lived in DC for many years. There were people living there beforehand. It's at an intersection of 2 rivers. The original planning has been able to grow and adapt organically since then. But, go try to drive anywhere during rush hour (or anytime really) and ask again how well it works.
It's also worth noting that all three examples are capitals of their respective countries, which is a built-in reason for people to need to live there. The Line doesn't have that, so why are people going to upend their lives and move there?
It moved the capital far away from any population centre making the disconnection between central government and the people much larger. The city was designed with a vision of each city block providing all the basic amenities needed to live in the block: shops, office spaces, apartments, etc. This plan was scrapped by the military dictatorship ending with the city having pretty massive blocks where you need to travel long distances to do anything, it became a nightmare of traffic as it wasn't planned that people would require traveling all the time.
Like you mention, the only real reason there's a big population there is due to being the capital, all the bureaucracies of the State reside there and the cascade of employment created by that is basically its whole economy. As a Brazilian there is no reason to visit Brasilia except if you are dealing with the government (or feel like you need to see the capital's architecture for its own sake).
> Immediately after the end of the war, Canberra was criticised for resembling a village and its disorganised collection of buildings was deemed ugly.[96][97][98] Canberra was often derisively described as "several suburbs in search of a city Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies regarded the state of the national capital as an embarrassment.[100] Over time his attitude changed from one of contempt to that of championing its development. He fired two ministers charged with the development of the city for poor performance. Menzies remained in office for over a decade and in that time the development of the capital sped up rapidly.[101][102] The population grew by more than 50 per cent in every five-year period from 1955 to 1975.[102] Several Government departments, together with public servants, were moved to Canberra from Melbourne following the war.[103] Government housing projects were undertaken to accommodate the city's growing population." [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canberra#Creation_of_the_natio...
Arguably, Canberra's local economy was/is able to rally around the workers who built the city followed by the influx of civil servants due to centralization of government branches and administrations. The same can be asserted about Washington DC or Brasilia.
In the same vain: towns that emerge around a single economic activity. Like College / University towns. Or mining towns.
Their common ground is a clear appealing, albeit single, economic activity that gives people the motivation to flock to the city. Canberra's local authorities only started to invest in housing projects after a clear need was asserted.
That doesn't mean those cities are regarded as "livable" or "favorable". Brasilia, by and large, is viewed as a "workcity" where most of the daytime population consists of commuters who leave at the end of the day.
Whereas The Line puts all the infrastructure in place without there being a growing community that needs catering to. It assumes that the appeal of the infrastructure in itself is enough for people to be willing to move in. I'd say that's premature optimization.
can you list some examples? Cuz all i can think of (as mentioned in this thread) are places like Ankara, Astana, Saint Petersburg (matter of fact i think _most_ cities in Russia were created by decree in a swamp) etc.
It's also interesting that all the examples you gave as well as the other reply, are (or were) capital cities of their respective countries. Of course, if it's the seat of the national government, people will need to live / work there and there will be a city. The Line doesn't have that, though.
When I first heard about it I thought it's going to be vaporware. I can make no sense of it. The deign and the location seem to indicate huge costs for no benefits in many areas. There's no fresh water over there. Complete glass facade in the desert requires a lot of cooling. The interior will require electrical illumination. And then there's the transportation issues caused by it being a line instead of a circle. Lack of streets compensated by flying taxis? Virtual on-line school for children I assume because you can't transport them to central schools? "AI" managed utilities? And I could go on and on and on.
What do you make of this, from a practical standpoint?
The location doesn't seem to make much sense though. And what exactly will be the industry that supports this place economically? Most cities have some kind of local industry.
In this case couldn't you just walk across the street and take the opposite direction train? I may be misinterpreting the idea in my mind, but it seems like it could be treated as an extremely long, skinny ellipses (this sentence begs for a math nerd to comment with the correct terms.)
You could even have multiple (or 60 each way, oil tycoon style) trains if utilizing tunnels and overhangs for people to 'walk through' the lines of running trains.
With a circle, in the worst case you have to travel 85km.
That's it.
Actually because of the line concept it makes it easier to reach any part of it using a single high-frequency and high-density transportation line. With a circle design you need a lot more transport lines to reach all areas, and not all of them can be high-frequency and/or high density.
I’m not an architect but her points make sense to me. Seems like equal parts clueless Saudi billionaires and willing grifters.
https://www.dezeen.com/2022/10/17/neom-death-sentences-saudi...
From the linked https://www.dezeen.com/2022/08/08/sustainability-liveability...
I mean, I have no idea about architecture and city planning but 200m, a single building sounds awfully small. But just a little wiggling of, say (170km/2 = 85km) x 400m or even (170km/3 = 57 km) x 600m would have made it so much more compact and, to me, still 100% captured the spirit of "a very long line along some train tracks".
We won’t learn without doing and I hope either they succeed and build the amazing city they set to do or share enough experience and knowledge for the next one to be successful
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia
Going from one side to another (170 km) one would need an average(!) speed of 510 km/h (170 km/20 min * 60 min/h) . I think they would need something like Hyperloop to do that.
Terrorist affiliated tribesmen who the Jordanian government ban tourists from visiting out of safety fears are a strange bedfellow for western world moralisers desperate to make other people hate this thing.
Skepticism is good. SpaceX had already working prototypes from early phases. Come on, being able to tell the difference the difference between an investor scam anda true innovation is not that hard, just look at the few numbers, you get quickly on how realistic the projet is. This city is not.
So is optimism. I see a whole bunch of flaws with what they are attempting here. What matters to me is that someone is at least trying.
Being a sceptic is the easiest job in the world, it costs you nothing to bet on how others will fail, when you win you parade about pretending you are incredibly knowledgable and when you are wrong you just morph in the background acting as though you said nothing at all. Where are the SpaceX sceptics today? What is their new focus on?
Building something new that shifts paradigms is incredibly hard. Given the money, how would you build a brand new city to attract people given the history of modern (< 30 yr) planned cities?
Notice how virtually none of these people saying how it will fail ever create their own designs for others to judge? Given the same resources, what would you do?
Delusional autocrats wasting loads of resources and probably human lives (just like at Qatar and the World Cup, this should be much worse) to build a an exceptionally unpractical city in the middle of the desert that nobody wants or needs. But yeah it's worth is since someone is "at least trying" .
> Given the same resources, what would you do
A great example of where to put loads of money you don't need is Norway. Despite having much less oil than the Saudis a country of just 4 million people now owns the largest investment fund in the world, which is worth more than Google and ~2x more than Tesla.
> Given the money, how would you build a brand new city to attract people given the history of modern (< 30 yr) planned cities?
Well first of all make it a circle instead of line. What the point of all than density if it's going to take you a shitload of time to get anywhere?
> Where are the SpaceX sceptics today? What is their new focus on?
For every success story there are 10+ (or even more failures). What's your point?
You don't get to try something when the physic is against you. So you approve the every now and then 'genious' that found some new free energy and claims everybody is against it ?
You mentionned first the sceptics of SpaceX, so you must have better sources than me on that. I don't remember any reliable critcs of Space X at the time.
I still hear news about it from time to time.
https://www.francebleu.fr/infos/transports/le-projet-hyperlo...
https://www.ladepeche.fr/2022/09/29/toulouse-hyperloop-a-fra...
It's funny tho, because outside of local french news, no media is talking about how scammy the project begins to appear
This is the kind of project where the experts criticising it seem to have very valid points, it doesn't make any sense when you look at it from the perspective of how humans organise into cities and the needs for such cities to be efficient.
Bold doesn't mean good just because it goes against the grain... It can also be completely stupid, even more when there is no force to push against it (like the market is for SpaceX and such). It can just eat resources away due to the whims of one egoistical dictator...
The same cities that many people despise living in yet do so for work? The same ones that basically everyone recognises aren't efficient at all. What is an ideal city in your opinion? San Fransciso? New York? Paris?
They are horribly inefficient places to live. Here in Sydney I know people who live in suburbia and need 20 mins in a car to simply buy a loaf of bread, there's no shops anywhere close by, it's just endless constant sprawl and 10 hours of commuting a week, 480 hours a year, and this is considered one of the most liveable places on Earth bizarrely.
I would love to hear what you think is a good proposal for a new city if this one is terrible?
> eat resources away due to the whims of one egoistical dictator
Not sure if you know much about the country, but prolific waste is basically their thing, as far as I'm concerned at least it's money not being spent on buying American bombs and military hardware. Every cent counts :)
Stockholm (my current city for almost a decade), Copenhagen, Berlin, Vienna, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, etc. are quite efficient and very pleasant to live in. The issue people currently have in those is cost of living.
I don't live in the US and I think American cities are horrors, just not as bad as in my native country (Brazil), which were completely "inspired" by American urban design.
Don't pigeonhole cities just in the ones you feel are terrible, get out of the bubble, there are plenty of examples of very livable and nice cities. The Americas are not in that category, generally speaking.
European cities are nice, but we know it is not possible for developing countries to repeat it, too expensive.
What costs are you talking about? There's nothing too expensive about doing decent urban planning in line with the resources you currently have, it's much more a question of follow-through on long-term plans than absolute cost of implementation...
The issue is much deeper and nuanced than cost, it's corruption, it's short-sighted politics due to populism and uneducated populations, etc.
Nothing is short signed, it is a decision over priority, and poor countries don't really have many options.