Saudi Crown Prince unveils plans for $500bn structure to house 9M people

https://twitter.com/Spa_Eng/status/1551627809973485573

by 55555 • 4 years ago

194 256 4 years ago

twitter.com

gpderetta• 4 years ago

Very cyberpunk.

birdyrooster• 4 years ago

How else are we going to get to the future we deserve?

walrus01• 4 years ago

Well, cyberpunk 2077 has more than a few bone saws already.

earthboundkid• 4 years ago

New Bone Saw City

no_butterscotch• 4 years ago

Yikes. Never gonna happen.

I mean, christ scale it back a bit no?

t-writescode2• 4 years ago

Given it’s designed in chunked neighborhoods with some sort of standardized system to allow commuting across the whole of its structure quickly, it absolutely sounds like something that could be built and tested in pieces.

mongol2• 4 years ago

Exactly. Cities evolve organically, over decades and centuries. An up-front design like this will never come to be. Something may come from it, but it will be much more similar to a regular city than this.

t-writescode2• 4 years ago

Designed cities are absolutely a thing in the two states that I've lived in. They'll build a bunch of amenities and a bunch of houses / townhomes all at the same time or near the same time and then people gobble up the town homes and already have a grocery store and a bunch of restaurants in this new, previously unoccupied area.

JumpCrisscross4• 4 years ago

up-front design like this will never come to be

Paris [1] and D.C.’s cores were engineered. Several cities after WWII were bombed to a blank slate.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_...

kgeist• 4 years ago

Cities evolve organically, over decades and centuries. An up-front design like this will never come to be.

Is it really different from what the communists did, except with a more modern design?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_planning_in_communist_...

downvotetruth3• 4 years ago

While the FSO Safer is a potential $20B humanitarian disaster in the Red sea that needs less than $20M more to start offloading the oil. Hope that the Houthi's do not sabotaged it to make him look like a fool.

JumpCrisscross4• 4 years ago

humanitarian disaster in the Red sea that needs less than $20M more to start offloading the oil

The Safer is at a Yemeni port [1], with recent UN safekeeping attempts having been inhibited by the Houthis. The environmental damage and economic cost will be borne almost entirely by western Yemen. Houthi territory.

TL; DR This is irrelevant to Riyadh’s global standing.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSO_Safer

downvotetruth3• 4 years ago

Look at the winter map - over half of the coast is Saudi by week 3.

inversefft• 4 years ago

City of the future built by a government stuck in the dark ages.

ahamedirshad123• 4 years ago

That's applicable for the US too.

whitepoplar• 4 years ago

No.

rutledjw• 4 years ago

What "city of the future" has the US built? We can barely get decent public transit in most cities? But we're certainly headed to the dark ages...

d2049• 4 years ago

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

panick21_10• 4 years ago

Not really. The US had its absurd large scale infrastructure spending. Looking at you Robert Moses. But they didn't just walk out into a field and start planning insane cities.

teleforce3• 4 years ago

If you're refering to dark ages it's only applicable to Europe just like Black Death is mainly European based pandemic [1],[2]. When Europe is in their dark ages the rest of the world seems fine. Heck it is only applicable to certain parts of Europe because some of the European countries and regions are doing really well [2],[3]. You probably know this anyway hence new account for trolling.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantinople

[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%B3rdoba,_Spain

bigDinosaur• 4 years ago

China and India likely had huge numbers dead due to the Bubonic Plague, but it's poorly recorded as far as I know. Definitely not 'mainly' a European pandemic, although it had such a great influence on European culture that we still talk about it today.

daenz• 4 years ago

I'd prefer it to a city of the dark ages built by a government of the future.

DocTomoe• 4 years ago

That exists, it's called Disneyland.

panick21_10• 4 years ago

I would prefer a city of the dark ages MANAGED by government of the present. And since the dark ages are just part of the middle ages and we stretch our definition a bit, that's mostly what we have in Europe.

somenameforme2• 4 years ago

Building something like this in a democratic society is probably impossible. The reason is that there would be massive opposition to this and rhetorically powerful claims that the trillions of dollars this would cost in a Western society could be put to better use. Even if, by some Deus ex machina, one administration managed to get this project going, the next to come into power would likely can it.

Space is a perfect example. There's no technical reason we haven't established footholds on Mars and even the Moon, beyond the dilemma posed above. One administration would start a grand space program, the next would cancel it with partisan criticism, and start their own. And this has been going on for half a century.

Real progress back towards space only meaningfully restarted when private companies (or the owners thereof) started to become wealthy enough to fund their own space programs, without any regard for social criticism or worry about their leadership being canned next year if they don't get enough votes. Ironically this helped also somewhat kickstart governments back towards a focus on space as well.

spywaregorilla7• 4 years ago

There's no technical reason we haven't established footholds on Mars and even the Moon

Lack of atmosphere, dangerous voyage, radiation, lack of easily available nutrients, dangerous weather, different gravity, likely one way voyages

and of course the everpresent lack of any particular economic incentive to do so

Retric2• 4 years ago

At 56k per person for both living and working space plus associated infrastructure, 500bn doesn’t seem like nearly enough.

frognumber• 4 years ago

Probably not, but I also wouldn't presume Western economics. Saudi has supply to unlimited low-cost labor from Africa. Things get built with virtually no labor costs relative to the West.

I think I would be miserable without a yard, though. I don't think I want to spend my life inside of a manufactured block.

bayesian_horse9• 4 years ago

Millions of people already live in manufactured blocks of some sort of other under worse conditions than presented here.

This is not a space habitat. It is climate controlled, it has access to the surroundings and there actually isn't that much building around you at any time. The major difference is that it is more thought out and uniform over a large area. It's not going to be built, ever, but it's a nice idea and some of the counter arguments aren't valid.

everforward3• 4 years ago

I still don't think it's close to enough.

At 170km long, 200m wide, 500m tall, the volume is 17,000,000,000 m^3. They're planning on spending just $29.41 per m^3.

Just trying to get a point of reference, the Burj Rafal is 308m tall with a 20,000 m^2 plot and cost $320M. Running the numbers they spent $520/m^3 on that, and it's shorter (I presume added height increases costs and complexity). Infrastructure was also likely already provided by the city, and not counted in that budget.

Honestly, I think even material costs are at least an order of magnitude higher than they want. The scope of this boggles the mind. They need 170M m^2 of mirrored glass just to cover the outside of this.

That's not even touching the foundation and reinforcement it takes to support a 170km long, 500m tall wall that's going to bear all the force of wind coming off the ocean. Wind speeds seem to peak at about 16m/s, so the force on a 1m section of the wall would be ~78 kN. That's roughly the force of 3 Tesla Model S' at full acceleration (but spread vertically). The force across the entire wall would be equal to ~381 Saturn V rockets at lift-off, or about 23 times the force that sunlight exerts on the entire Earth.

neals• 4 years ago

Make it a circle, get rid of the mirror, fill in the center. Bam! You got yourself a city.

ars3• 4 years ago

They want everyone to have a view of nature, not of city.

hristov2• 4 years ago

They are planning to pay a mighty high cost for a bunch of views of desert and stony mountains. Not that I am knocking the views, they have a certain serene value to them, but it is not that hard to get those types of views in Saudi Arabia.

mnd999• 4 years ago

Nah, keep the mirror. Then you can focus the light into the middle and you have a built-in incinerator for any dissidents / journalists who might pop up.

bayesian_horse9• 4 years ago

A circle is harder to build and has more issues regarding sunlight. The sun hitting the building(s) is both a benefit (solar cells) and a problem (heat generation) at the same time. A linear structure will get a much more even energy distribution than a circle.

Also one of the goals of the project is to reduce the energy needs of the population by making ways shorter. If you spread a city out on a circle, you got a much more complicated and expensive transportation problem than just the linear structure presented here.

bobthepanda6• 4 years ago

I think transport would be infinitely worse in a linear city.

In a traditional street network, there are many ways to get from A to B and one link being unavailable is not the end of the world. Forcing everyone onto essentially the same street is guaranteed to cause both high fragility and high congestion, since everyone has to squeeze into the same line.

anodari• 4 years ago

Also, a circle, you couldn't expand indefinitely

ouid4• 4 years ago

wrong on all counts. A disc has the same transit "solution" that a line does, just draw a spiral. for a line however, this is the only solution, and boy is it terrible. Imagine if society were all in one skyscraper and the only mode of transit was the elevator.

asah2• 4 years ago

Apple HQ ?

WebbWeaver• 4 years ago

Are they going to build it on Tiran island or?

What gets finished first Oxagon or The Line? NEOM is clearly having fun.

https://globetrender.com/2022/03/03/saudi-arabia-oxagon-floa...

cgb223• 4 years ago

It’s all fun and games until whatever transports people through the line gets blocked

Suddenly then you have “the segments”

zizee• 4 years ago

Concepts for linear cities have been around for a long time.

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

https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroFuturism/comments/uh9mhp/the_l...

lotophage• 4 years ago

Imagine the constant thwack! sounds of birds flying into the glass.

booboofixer• 4 years ago

Isn't sand going to start piling up on the side that the wind usually blows from?

ars3• 4 years ago

If I were building this I would leave a large space open on the bottom, I would not have the walls go all the way to the ground.

Aside from sand, it also lets animals, humans, and vehicles pass through.

bayesian_horse9• 4 years ago

Doesn't matter how large the space is, it will fill up eventually.

bayesian_horse9• 4 years ago

I think it would have regularly spaced tunnels traversing the structure and they would just move sand with machines if necessary.

They could also put nets some kilometers in front of the thing to catch most of it and deposit itself as dunes there, maybe try to fixate is with some vegetation if at all possible.

jeffbee• 4 years ago

This is basically the New Urbanist plan from the book “Carfree Cities” but with more of a vertical dimension and all the curves of the central railroad unfolded into a straight line. It doesn’t seem totally impossible.

ars3• 4 years ago

Doesn't the ground move? How are they going to keep it in ... a line?

They would have to build independent sections that, over time, will shift relative to each other.

bayesian_horse9• 4 years ago

Or the segments don't shift but rather the connections to their foundations move by a few millimeters a year. Then the foundations would be independent and move and the whole thing can still be perfectly straight the whole time.

olalonde4• 4 years ago

265,000 people per sqkm, that's some nice population density. Cool concept, but I wonder what they mean by "equitable views". I presume not all housing units will be on the edges given that it's 200m wide.

LeoPanthera• 4 years ago

Maybe housing will be on the edges, with commercial and industrial zoning in the middle.

panick21_10• 4 years ago

Population density is really the most important factor when considering building in a desert.

olalonde4• 4 years ago

I had the same thought but at the same time, population density can be desirable in itself and not just out of necessity. I'd definitely rather live in a dense city rather than in the desert country side.

paulpauper• 4 years ago

$500 billion..and to think bezos + musk + one google fonder can fund this alone. crazy

but it would probably cost way more than $500 billion

spaceman_2020• 4 years ago

Already reports of the project being unable to retain key executives because of irrational demands by government officials. [0]

This is going to be much harder than anyone realizes.

0: https://www.wsj.com/articles/expatriate-executives-flee-saud...

random314• 4 years ago

Its going to be an unmitigated disaster!

9M residents housed, 170 km traveled in 20 minutes- all for the low low price of 0.5T USD. An obsession with narrowing the width of the city to 100m! This is some kind of "visionary fantasy" of an idiot who has become a dictator. Sounds like a plan a 10 year old would chalk up.

aryehof• 4 years ago

Reminds me somewhat of a human ant colony. Surprised it isn't underground, but then ecological concerns seem not to be a priority.

fancymcpoopoo• 4 years ago

there's a similar concept a couple years ago that proposes excavating new york's central park and building skyscraper walls on all sides. seems like egotists around the world are interested in this type of concept because it is simple to understand.

JetAlone• 4 years ago

It's sure shaped like a human ant farm.

hristov2• 4 years ago

Ok. This guy is unhinged. I very much doubt this goes much farther beyond CGI.

voltist• 4 years ago

linear prison

synu• 4 years ago

Neo has a nice video on this, though without the new design update from the tweet. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=41sgRP0G6y4

slg• 4 years ago

Ignoring all the baggage that of comes along with who is planning this, this gives real strong Sim City 2000 Arcology vibes.

unsignedchar• 4 years ago

From the Atlantic profile of MBS earlier this year:

“What struck me was that Neom’s vision is really an anti-vision. It is the opposite of the old Saudi Arabia. In the old Saudi Arabia, and even to an extent today, corruption and bureaucracy layered on each other to make an entrepreneur’s nightmare. Riyadh has almost no public transportation. No matter where you are, you cannot walk anywhere, except perhaps to your local mosque. No one in Neom mentioned religion at all. Even Neom’s location is suggestive. It is far from where Saudis actually live. Instead it is huddled in a mostly empty corner, as if seeking sustenance and inspiration from Jordan and Israel.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/04/mohamme...

BurningFrog• 4 years ago

It's as far from the enemy (Iran) as possible.

scythe3• 4 years ago

That corner of SA is a little cooler due to latitude and the seabreeze. It's also designed to sit atop and support a desalinated water pipeline. So that part seems reasonable.

incompatible• 4 years ago

Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32206301

lurker6162• 4 years ago

What will this solve? What if a fire breaks out? Can protestors block a single street? Where are people going to dry clothes? Won't those who live at the base feel claustrophobic?

bayesian_horse9• 4 years ago

Most of these problems are probably already solved or could be solved. You are of course using dry cleaning services in some form. Fire suppression systems are built in. The structure is quite narrow, so you have a view to the outside from pretty much anywhere, and it's not much worse than any skyscraper, better probably because of (hopefully) better design.

As to social aspects... That is my major concern also. Of course this city has a police force and would clean up anybody blocking the central hubs. There is no street btw, but rather different kinds of corridors for walking and trains of different speeds and ranges. I guess it is relatively easy to disturb the system, on the other hand if realized there would probably be an authoritarian kid of police force making sure nobody does.

plumeria• 4 years ago

You are of course using dry cleaning services in some form

People are moving out of dry cleaning into "wet cleaning" to avoid chemical solvents. Wet cleaning requires a drying machine.

lurker6162• 4 years ago

Makes sense. What about sports and entertainment - can it fit football fields or concert venues?

gumby• 4 years ago

This is a relaunch of another such plan over a decade ago. Yawn.

bayesian_horse9• 4 years ago

Both awe inspiring and frightening, considering the source.

Technological utopia meets sociological dystopia.

ohgodplsno• 4 years ago

Dictator announces mega city, just like dozens of dictators before him. See: New Cairo City

Animats2• 4 years ago

That's been built. Looks like an inland southern California suburb.

panick21_10• 4 years ago

If there is anything we need more of its subburben sprawl.

plantwallshoe2• 4 years ago

$500bn to house 9m would be a steal. I’d definitely buy a condo there for $55k

colinmhayes• 4 years ago

Not that this will actually be built, but construction costs are probably low in Saudi Arabia since they use quasi slave labor.

eric4smith• 4 years ago

30 years from now this mega structure will begin to socially fall apart and be run by drug dealers.

We’ve seen this movie before.

Judge Dredd all over again.

timeon• 4 years ago

Kowloon Walled City

RadixDLT• 4 years ago

this is what you'll expect if you plan t live there https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc_cHzviGn4

stanete• 4 years ago

Why so tall? First plans we saw were underground structures.

missedthecue3• 4 years ago

Humans really haven't figured out a cheap way to dig a lot of dirt yet. It's also painfully slow.

It's about $175 per cubic meter if you have a huge project and are able to benefit from any economies of scale. A cubic meter is about 1.5 tons of soil.

And then you've got to truck all that dirt somewhere.

BiteCode_dev• 4 years ago

If you wanted to create a wall to defend some part of the world without raising alarms, it would be a good way to do it.

missedthecue3• 4 years ago

I don't think there is enough extractable riversand on planet earth for that amount of glass.

dmurray• 4 years ago

Glass is made from melted sand, so taking the raw materials from the desert is just fine.

Ekaros2• 4 years ago

Yes, that is easy. Now the concrete inside this thing on other hand...

missedthecue3• 4 years ago

Desert sand doesn't contain enough silica. It's mostly gypsum.

chemmail2• 4 years ago

This is the city imagined in the dystopian books we read as children warning us to never reach.

ilaksh• 4 years ago

Totally unrealistic. How long do they have to build this? A few years? Even the worst slave driving culture ever can't get enough slaves for something this crazy in that time frame.

It's a really interesting concept though.

mirekrusin2• 4 years ago

I don't think they need to build 170km at once.

MisterBastahrd• 4 years ago

So when someone finally gets fed up with them and declares war on the Saudis, they can basically terrorize a large fraction of the nation just by setting fires to the giant structure at regular intervals. Imagine trying to evacuate from that thing.

_the_inflator• 4 years ago

Reminds me of the movie Snowpiercer in reverse: desert instead of snow, static instead of moving. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowpiercer

the_omegist• 4 years ago

Which was an adaptation of a French comic from 1982 : Le Transperceneige.

baby2• 4 years ago

Is it good? Worth getting?

apexalpha• 4 years ago

Bloomberg has a good running series on this 'city of the future'. As you will expect consultants are making good money on this.

I personally can't get enough of this foolish mega-project, I love the dry reporting on it.

Here's one of the latest: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2022-mbs-neom-saudi-arabi...

There was also a very telling interview with architects, builders, concept people etc... and after talking about Neom in all enthusiasm for a bit the interviewer asked each a simple question: would you live in Neom?

And the uncomfortable shifting in the seats and vague answers that followed were very telling. No one believes in this, not even the people working on it.

pavlov• 4 years ago

"As more of them arrived, foreign employees began describing their experiences with a joke: When you start at Neom, you bring two buckets. The first is to hold all the gold you’ll accumulate, and with so many living expenses taken care of, it will soon grow heavy. The second bucket is for all the shit you take. When that bucket is full, you pick up your bucket of gold and leave. It often doesn’t take long; many people Neom hires last less than a year."

So it's basically like working at a FAANG, except you have to go sit in the middle of a remote desert to work on your PowerPoints.

ignoramous• 4 years ago

The difference in media coverage and the reaction that follows when folks in the West (say, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates) dream up ambitious future, and when folks in the East do so, is quite telling.

lrem• 4 years ago

I work in the G and it doesn't seem to be like that. First point, the average tenure in my team is somewhere between 6 and 8 years.

Jedd• 4 years ago

Hmm, a friend of mine worked in Saudi in the mid 1990's, and the (similarly metaphorical) story he told me was slightly different.

When picked up at the airport you are presented the two buckets. When either one is full, it is time to leave.

I expect all employment requires the same trade-off consideration, but I gather in those parts of the world, for ex-pats, both buckets feel like they fill up at an alarmingly brisk rate.

baybal2• 4 years ago

There was also a very telling interview with architects, builders, concept people etc... and after talking about Neom in all enthusiasm for a bit the interviewer asked each a simple question: would you live in Neom?

Another question, WHO will live in Neom? Saudi Arabia only have 19-20 million native citizens, the rest are all expats.

bambax3• 4 years ago

the rest are all expats

That's probably the point. It's a "city"/prison for people who have no other choice.

barry-cotter• 4 years ago

Another question, WHO will live in Neom? Saudi Arabia only have 19-20 million native citizens, the rest are all expats.

People from extremely poorly managed countries or countries unable to attract investment because of lack of law or other factors. The UAE is 90% or so migrants who will never become citizens. If you have quasi-competent government and are willing to allow migrant workers in you can print money. Paying people from a country where the average daily wage is $2 $20 per day leaves a lot of room for profit margin even in low profit margin low skill manufacturing like textiles, the classic way to kick start the transition from agricultural to manufacturing based economies.

lordnacho2• 4 years ago

A friend of mine works on the NEOM project, and it really is like winning the lottery. Remote work with an occasional field trip to look at the place. But Google level salary to tell them how to save some data.

The scale of the feeding trough is unimaginable. I saw an advert for NEOM on Piccadilly Circus, the whole entire e-wall, and the place isn't even built yet, so I'm not sure if they're using it to recruit. It's not just what you think of as traditional civil engineering which would require you to be in the desert. The thing is supposed to be a smart city, whatever that means, but every buzzword seems to be required. Machine learning, green energy, internet of things, they seem to want everything.

I did read an article saying the Saudi guy in charge was a bully, so maybe it's not at positive, but worth a look if you can be a sub contractor.

lr• 4 years ago

People can’t seem to get enough of science fiction, but every time something is presented that would move the needle in that direction, the detractors line up in droves. With attitudes like this, it really will be the 25th century before humanity does do anything of significance (if we even live that long).

codethief• 4 years ago

A friend of mine works on the NEOM project, and it really is like winning the lottery. Remote work with an occasional field trip to look at the place. But Google level salary to tell them how to save some data.

I was in Saudi Arabia earlier this year and I met quite a few Western engineers and consultants who didn't get as lucky as your friend and had been living in the desert near Neom for > 6 months. IIRC their visas didn't even allow them to leave the region surrounding Neom (which is pretty much just empty desert).

the place isn't even built yet

It's not built at all yet or has it simply not been completed yet? I keep hearing different things about the status of the project.

AtlasBarfed6• 4 years ago

"It's like winning the lottery"

"Guy in charge is a bully"

I certainly don't want to defend the saudis, but let's face it, everyone views the Saudis as semi-gullible fools to be parted with their money, it wouldn't surprise me if they are a bit gruff.

Look, Saudi Arabia should be the ... Saudi Arabia of solar energy, they have a huge amount of capital from oil, and Saudi Arabia is at the juncture of 1) the richest continent 2) the largest continent, 3) the second-largest continent, they have ports with the Mediterranean and Red Sea and Indian Ocean.

cinericius• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/NI1eP

N19PEDL22• 4 years ago

[...] and after talking about Neom in all enthusiasm for a bit the interviewer asked each a simple question: would you live in Neom?

I wonder what the architect of this building [0] would have answered the same question. However, many people live there.

[0] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/07/0c/1f/070c1f5ab8a54d907cca...

panick21_10• 4 years ago

Those are different things. The promise of Neom is to be this amazing tech city that will attract people to live there.

The building you posted is most likely a public housing or some kind of government trying to build housing for the poor.

oblio4• 4 years ago

As someone who's lived in a commie building, smaller than the one you show, though, I can tell you something.

It's better housing that what you find in many parts of the rich West, at least Western Europe.

You can live a pretty solid middle class life in those buildings and you're not losing much, if anything, you learn a lot, being so close to other people.

asimpletune• 4 years ago

I wonder how this would compare to paying a similar amount to reverse desertification?

Panzer04• 4 years ago

Why a line? Surely a square grid would be better in every way? Less energy loss, more places within walkable distance, better transport scaling..

Cool idea, sounds pretty impractical as stated.

planetsprite• 4 years ago

176 km. Why don't they make a 1 kilometer proof of concept then plan the other 175 once they've ironed out the kinks?

qprofyeh• 4 years ago

That’s too scary, what if the product doesn’t find market fit? Let’s just build the complete product first with VC money.

ddalex2• 4 years ago

If you would be the designer of this thing, how soon would you want the gig to be up ?

The purpose of this thing is not economical, or political, or social - the purpose is to satisfy the ego of an autocrat, and as long as that ego is getting stroked, the money will continue to flow.

IIAOPSW2• 4 years ago

Oh, so the purpose of this thing is political.

alexonaci• 4 years ago

Of course, we should live in overpriced, crowded, “sustainable” matchboxes while Their Highnesses will continue to live in x000 sq foot mansions.

seydor• 4 years ago

Accessible nature = scorching-heat desert. Great for cycling i guess

This whole project - Why? Whoever sold this to the Saudis, bit prankster

langsoul-com• 4 years ago

I wonder who would live there? Somehow I really doubt people from first world would go. Then third world? Doesn't seem like a cheap place.

true_religion• 4 years ago

Presumably he’s building it to house his own people, and people of a similar culture to them.

He is a prince after all, developing the nation is one of the first duties of an monarch since the country “belongs” to you.

fmajid• 4 years ago

Good. All the money wasted on this boondoggle won’t be spent on bombing Yemenis or funding ISIS and Al-Qaeda.

bambax3• 4 years ago

Or assassinations.

Dan423• 4 years ago

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.

hammyhavoc• 4 years ago

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.

Dan423• 4 years ago

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.

olalonde4• 4 years ago

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

notahacker2• 4 years ago

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...

erenyeager3• 4 years ago

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.

taink2• 4 years ago

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

code_runner• 4 years ago

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.

Dan423• 4 years ago

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.

cynusx• 4 years ago

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.

dmitriid• 4 years ago

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

sofixa• 4 years ago

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.

everforward3• 4 years ago

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.

lovehashbrowns• 4 years ago

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.

erenyeager3• 4 years ago

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.

scythe3• 4 years ago

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.

satyrnein• 4 years ago

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

unethical_ban2• 4 years ago

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

londgine• 4 years ago

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

mkj• 4 years ago

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?"

ouid4• 4 years ago

have you read anything about the proposed legal structure?

AtlasBarfed6• 4 years ago

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.

baby2• 4 years ago

I’m getting flashbacks of the dubai palm island when they were constructing it. Everyone was wondering why, and who would even live there. But they don’t care, these places are basically like NFTs, they make so much money selling spots that it does not matter.

Ekaros2• 4 years ago

To me it kinda made sense. A beach front single family properties. Suburbs are a thing so why not one even more upscale version.

The world however was lot more questionable.

jjeaff2• 4 years ago

It's not a guarantee. Around the time when they built the palm island thing, they also build the islands that look like a world map. Quite a bit of what was built is now melting into the ocean, never built on and unmaintained.

lizardactivist• 4 years ago

I would love to see someting like this happen. It's a shame there seems to be so many petty, envious people hoping it fails.

Balero• 4 years ago

I'm not hoping it fails. But I will take some joy in the inevitable implosion of an obvious white elephant project obviously made for political (corruption) reasons.

This project is not based in reality, or has any consideration for reality. It is obviously inefficient in it's basic geometry (circle beats line) let alone after looking at the actual numbers. A 200m tall 170km long wall is not going to work. They claim you will be able to travel end to end in 20mins. Thats 510kph without acceleration or deceleration. That's 50kmph faster than the current fastest train (Shanghai Maglev) all whilst being within 200m of 9 million people.

And all of this will be zero carbon of course, with a passively controlled temperate climate in the desert. Nice of them to throw some trees in the graphics to show that.

This is made to pay consultants and businesses, and keep the man in charge happy. I'm not hoping it fails. If they reach all of these milestones and it even turns out to be vaguely ok, I will literally eat my hat, hold my hand up and say I was wrong. But when it doesn't I will take some joy in the mess of a story that comes out.

Gareth321• 4 years ago

I think this is fucking AWESOME. I get all of the criticisms, but if they can pull this off, it'll be so fucking cool.

knbknb• 4 years ago

According to German Wikipedia, former Ex-Siemens-CEO Klaus Kleinfeld is in charge of the NEOM Project.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Kleinfeld#Projekt_Neom/

panick21_10• 4 years ago

As usual in Saudi Arabia, more big PR about some magical technology city. Of course the other cities they have started with many of the same promises are now-where near complete.

Its an utterly absurd and incredibly dumb and expensive design. We literally know how to get the best cities already. This is just a way to hook people who have never thought about city design at all.

I guess you can't make nice marketing videos with the message 'we will design new city with traditional grid pattern and a mix of town-houses and apparent building designed with streets that are primary for walking/bicycle use while providing some transportation infrastructure'.

Even on a purely theoretical level, if you strip away all the practical issues, I still don't get how this city would be superior in anything.

P.S: MBS is literally an incompetent fool. His military and diplomatic policy when he came to office made him seem like a 5 year old who got on the computer to finish his fathers Starcraft game.

Kukumber2• 4 years ago

A lot of skepticism in this thread, even some form of jealousy

It's better than the soviet union like buildings they are promoting everywhere in the world, including in the US

We need to optimize cities as much as possible, that's for sure, this project is a step in the right direction

627467• 4 years ago

Maybe not jealousy, but you don't think skepticism is valid when Cities are (relatively) easy to build but ensuring they are livable<>populated is hard?

Kukumber2• 4 years ago

We need to get there no matter what, what's you plan?

If on earth we can't manage to build ultra optimized cities, then how do you expect we be able to build ultra optimized space stations, or bases on the moon/mars?

We need to experiment yesterday so we are ready today

It's better to invest our money in the next random Web3.0 project, that's for sure, why trying to optimize a whole city anyways? /s

avgDev• 4 years ago

I just like Saudi Arabia for their treatment of migrant workers and the Kafala system. The treatment of women doesn't help either.

anfilt• 4 years ago

Let me know if it breaks ground, a lot things like this just end up being basically vapor ware.

pontifier• 4 years ago

I was thinking about something like this a few years ago. I felt like a linear city could work if it was basically treated like a game of snake.

There would be a constantly advancing head region that pushed ever forward as new structures were needed.

It would prevent NIMBY because once constructed, changes would be minimal, yet there would always be a place where new projects were welcome.

As the snake wound its way forward, anything in it's path would be trampled or assimilated.

astannard• 4 years ago

Good for the environment? It will block animals and birds migrating. I can see that concentrated living to lower the footprint of cities is good but the design is like a big barrier

helloworld112• 4 years ago

Has nobody considered the possibility of such vast, shiny external reflector walls absolutely, very literally roasting the surrounding landscape when struck by the already ferocious Arabian sun? How would a person even survive openly coming close to this fascinating monstrosity from either side at certain times of the day? I remember a story about sunlight reflections bouncing from the "Walkie Talkie" Building in London to then scorch some poor fellow's car in the streets below at certain times of day in the summer. NEOM strikes me as a would-be case of this on a truly infernal scale.

hansword2• 4 years ago

You are missing the central point of the Walkie-Talkie and Disney-Concert-Hall controversies. These are Frank-Gehry(-style) buildings, and in those roughly half of all surfaces is a concave and half is a convex mirror. THIS concentration to one point is what turns the summer sun into death rays.

Reflected sun, by definition, has a little less energy than direct sun. So, given the mirror walls are straight, as the designs show, you get (at maximum) 200% of normal desert sun energy, which isn't comfortable, but not a Gehry-style death ray.

ouid4• 4 years ago

i have been on a street adjacent to a zero curvature mirrored building and it almost turned me into a terrorist

helloworld112• 4 years ago

You're grossly understating just how brutal it would be. While you're right about how concave mirror surfaces truly create lethal concentrations of energy, this vast reflective surface would still unbearably heat the land next to it at certain times of day. 200% of Arabian Peninsula levels of solar heat as only "uncomfortable"? You've got to be kidding.

mihaic• 4 years ago

To not assume complete stupidity, I'd imagine the Saudi's are looking at Dubai's success in locking in foreign capital into real-estate speculation, and want to imitate that. I'm sure they're hoping to stir up interest and lock in as much speculative commitment before anything is done and are treating it like the world is their Softbank.

Doing this while being surrounded by yes-men and not being grounded in reality is a recipe for disaster, I just hope they don't burn some pension fund money along the way.

I for one don't wish to see Megacity Wahid built, but I hope they burn as much money as possible along the way.

webmobdev• 4 years ago

Saudi Arabia has a looooong way to go before they can imitate Dubai's (or even the whole of UAE's success). One of the key to Dubai's success is that it's cultural climate is not restrictive and not as repressive as other countries of the middle-east (even the other emirates in UAE are way more open then Saudi Arabia). Compare that with the outlook of Saudi Arabia who think that women need to be segregated into their own city to be allowed to work ( https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/aug/12/saudi-arabia-c... )! Even muslims from many asian countries that make up the majority of expats working in the middle-east find Saudi Arabia's version of "Islamic Society" repressive (why wouldn't they - imagine not allowing muslim women to work because of their warped understanding of Islam, when the Islamic Prophet's first wife was an international business women who was once also his boss - https://www.news18.com/news/opinion/not-just-a-footnote-prop... !). Speaking anecdotally, I know many who work in the middle-east, who have declined to work in Saudi Arabia despite better pay, simply because they are concerned about the cultural environment of Saudi.

erenyeager3• 4 years ago

Saudi arabia is in a transitional era right now, if you visited post-covid you would see the changes occurring. This is not only because of MBS but he is a factor. I think it is hard to explain the workings of a society to one who has not visited. To give you an example, on a recent pilgrimage a few months ago, in the Holy Cities of Makkah and Madina, I saw both women and male workers. To be sure there are still many issues (labor notwithstanding), but I'm told the country post-covid is different than pre-covid.

Anyways, we can also say a lot about terrible things happening in the US and Europe, but with Saudi Arabia specifically I think people put misplaced hate on things when there are in reality problems everywhere.

sylware• 4 years ago

In efficient and mostly essential-focused civilization, enough money for a decent living cannot flow to households by only abiding to the supply-and-demand economic rules: this is dangerous to believe in such utopia, it is similar to the soviet one.

It is even more accute when related to being able to afford an accomodation: countries and cities around the world are increasing significantly their public housing share, to a point private housing becomes the lesser way.

Heard Singapore is at 80% and Vienna at 65%. But here, we are talking about Singapore and Austrian cultures, in which that amount of public housing could work, in many other cultures you will end up with unmaintained slums.

sbarbarian• 4 years ago

"...like nothing on earth seen before..."

was this video made by an AI?

eatbitseveryday• 4 years ago

Maybe this is a prison for all the world’s convicts. If you try escaping, you have to cross ocean or desert. This population has no choice where they live.

WaffleIronMaker• 4 years ago

It's interesting seeing the twitter comments:

[1]

I never seen something more dystopian
> Come on, you are in Los Angeles, just go to the corner if you want to see something more dystopian.

[2]

What about human rights ?
> I dunno ask your government.

------------

1. Their strategy seems to be "Deflect. Deflect. Deflect.". They never address criticism. They just focus on other problems.

2. If your response to a question about human rights is "I don't know", everyone should be scared.

------------

[1] https://twitter.com/adara_salim/status/1551750220643307525

[2] https://twitter.com/keeganc15/status/1551678707672178697

DemocracyFTW22• 4 years ago

I wonder about many things when I see this, but to pick out one detail: won't those mirror walls soon get damaged by the wind carrying sand? And, when you stand in front of them and the sun is up, won't that get quite hot? And, wouldn't it be better to somehow use the walls to collect solar power (thermal or electrical) from them instead of letting them just reflect the light? And won't birds in great numbers crash into the façade like people in a house of mirrors? And isn't it ugly?

Saudi Crown Prince unveils plans for $500bn structure to house 9M people

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