1y ago

Plans for Saudi Arabia’s linear city cut from 170km to 2.4km

www.newcivilengineer.com

Neom | Plans for Saudi Arabia’s linear city cut from 170km to 2.4km | New Civil Engineer

Saudi Arabia’s wildly ambitious plan to build 500m tall, mirrored, 170km long parallel skyscrapers, forming a 1.5M population desert city has been curtailed to 2.4km long.

The news was broken by the financial news publication Bloomberg, which said that Saudi Arabia’s government had “scaled back its medium-term ambitions” for Neom, of which The Line is the most significant sub-project.

The Saudi government had hoped to have 1.5M residents living in The Line by 2030, but this has been scaled back to fewer than 300,000, according to the report. It is unclear how it intends to house a higher concentration of people considering the proposed length (and therefore area) has been massively slashed.

80 comments

The stupidest idea for a city that I've ever heard has gotten marginally less stupid.
At least now you can get from one side to the other quickly in an emergency.
Not that they'll even build these 2.4 km.
- I think it came up like this: Saudi king at his last visit at Chinese Wall. „Uw, one can see it from the space? That’s awesome.“ At home: „Servants, build something as big as the Chinese Wall that is visible from the space, so everyone sees how great I am.“
  
  I'm pretty sure the whole "can be seen from space" is wrong.
  
  It was the crown prince, not the king, but I'm pretty sure that's more or less how it went.
  
  That would be crown prince Mohammad bin Salman, because king Salman has retired in all but name
- Ask anyone who's ever built a house and they can tell you what a stupid fucking idea it would be to have a foundation that large.
  
  Even if they somehow had some magical way to solve the foundation issue, with the original plan... could you imagine having to go from one part of the city to another for pretty much any reason? In a linear city? You better hope that other part is really close. Especially if it's a personal medical issue or a dying loved one.
- I see this a lot and I’m not sure whether to attribute it to ignorance or racism, but Saudi Arabia isn’t the UAE.
  
  Huh. Both in my case. Education will helpe in both issues. Thanks.
- You might be surprised how many places have a system like that in the developed world.
Do we have a list of stupid city ideas? I think El Salvador’s Bitcoin City and Egypt’s new capital should belong there.
- If you're interested in the inner workings of shitty civic planning check out James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State. He's an anthropologist who took a particular interest in why top-down societies always seem to miss the mark in infrastructure, ecology, agriculture, and social services (among others). A significant portion of the book is spent critically analyzing Le Corbusier's work and his ideological contemporaries. With Brasilia as a case study for the failures of "high modernist" ideology and design philosophy. It's a great read and I think a lot of these new urban planning projects that are obviously insane and impractical owe a lot to these batshit crazy people from the past that founded this particular flavor of foolish
This is truly the most moronic project ever, but at least I had a good laugh about it today.
- It's even dumber than dumping sand into the ocean in the shape of a palm tree and calling it a suburb.
🤏
It is unclear how it intends to house a higher concentration of people considering the proposed length (and therefore area) has been massively slashed.
I got a brilliant idea: extend it slightly to the sides, maybe in a round shape. This allows for a more efficient way to house a high concentration of people.
I think at that point it's a town.
- That's not a big problem since this is in a desert. Getting any water there in the first place is the problem. And, based on the mockups I saw, there's supposed to be a lot of greenery.
  
  water policies of saudi arabia are straight up insane. riyadh takes half of water from seashore desalination plants (that burn massive amounts of oil, so big that it cuts into their oil revenue very significantly). for the other half, they have somehow found non-renewable water, literal fossil water, and it'll run out in decade (might have misremembered). at the same time there are no water meters in the city at all
- It would just fry anyone who stands there for more than five minutes.
  
  probably beats living in saudi arabia
The ~~Line~~Dash
Huge waste of time and money. That effort could be focused on many better and more reasonable projects. This is what happens when fucking idiots get a ton of money inherited from their parents. We should never have relied on Saudi oil, it's been a drain on humanity.
Lol
I guess they read about China’s recent success with a fusion reactor.
- How recent are you talking and by what measure of success? Because I'm not finding anything when I search and, as far as I know, the world is still a long way away from fusion as a practical energy source.
  
  Try South Korea instead. I think they're the ones who achieved a 48s run recently.
  
  https://www.livescience.com/chinas-1-trillion-artificial-sun-fusion-reactor-just-got-five-times-hotter-than-the-sun
- fusion won't generate anything but hype. if you want reliable power source, just build normal uranium fueled nuclear powerplants like a responsible government, not overhyped garbage like hedge fund manager that just got his shipment of good idea powder

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