Since there are enough 'Cons'; some of the 'Pros' that could be in in its favor..

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

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

- 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.

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

- 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.

- With proper planning of shades, HVAC, etc. climate control could be more energy efficient.

> Everyone on both side gets unblocked full vista.

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.

Fail too see why the fact it's a line would prevent redundancy. Do buildings have only one elevator ?

No idea how it will end up, and outside of the problem of the location, at least it's an urban area envisioned around high density, public transport and walking.

Not a suburban hellhole where you can't move without a car and where infrastructure push municipality into bankruptcy.

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

Eh. It's the same way for most train tracks around the world, single track and double tracks without frequent crossing. You could still push/pull them along with the next train, in case they have a single point of failure.

Other points still stand, but with that quite ambitious completion date well see sooner than later

Yes, but in most other cities you can get to the point via different routes for example in my city I can reach some points with 3 different routes, with no single point of failure.

Is this satire? Surely this must be satire. Because every point you just listed is wrong.

> 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.

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

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.

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

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.

And if you get a 500m restraining order against a fellow Line citizen, then they're stuck on one side.

Thanks for the balanced perspective. I would never live in such a place even with its benefits, but yes, it's not all bad.

This is what billionaire oil-money one-trick-pony-state brutal-oligarch attempts to legacy-project/appear-clever/innovate/desperate-to-be-relevant look like. Badged with the full force and blessing of the state propaganda machine. "Saudi-Arabia unveils". Indeed. "Heady fantasy" is correct. This calorie-free balony factory is all you're left with after you dismember everyone who opposes you.

By the time one gets through this slash ridden diatribe it looses any meaning.

You mean "hyphen-ridden" and "loses".

"loses" - thanks for the correction. Hyphens - yeah, lots of those along with the forward slashes.

Is anyone actually taking this proposal seriously? It's just not going to happen, and thank god for that because it would become the slum to end all slums in no time

Also

> 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...

Its not quite the same place, but this is the same area of the world with enough money to build

- 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.

There is literally not enough money in Saudi Arabia - or any country - to build something as patently impossible as this.

It will never happen, and not because of the money. The money is there, the "city" is just unfeasible from almost any angle.

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.

At least this commentary is somewhat skeptical:

> 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).

There is a lot of money to be made grifting off Saudi money.

I tend to agree, but I know quite a few people working on design teams for components of this right now.

Why not a spiral with roughly a mile between rings, filled with parks? Then, traversing between any point would be under 30min. The spiral would be 12 miles in diameter, with 6 rings, and all buildings would look out on “Central Park”.

This idea is so so sooo much better

Give this man a job

Adam Something did a decent teardown of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyWaax07_ks

I love that channel

After the war, Volgograd[1] was rebuilt as a linear metropolis.

Right now it's 50 km long. The urban part is served by light rail and the whole length by suburban train. But overall that design failed to provide any noticeable benefits.

1. https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=48.71167&mlon=44.51389&z...

Hey as a social experiment at least it wasn't brutal. Experiment means it doesn't have to work perfectly right away. That would be a leap.

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.

Like in Volgograd, most of action in Chile happens in almost round area of Valparaiso - Santiago - San Antonio. So it's not that linear after all.

Volgograd is quite nice but it loses locals due to its 'rust belt' legacy.

This project will never see the light of day.

Thunderfoot's take on this nonsense: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB_X5ZUcZlE

No, thanks. I'll take the "unmatched liveability" of my current home.

Those who would be our Masters never tire of trying to shape the world in service of their ego and fears, do they.

I don't really understand why one would make it a line? If the objective is walkability, wouldn't it make more sense to arrange apartments in a square or - if you want to go 3D - a cube to minimize distance between occupants and shops etc?

I think the assumption would be you could walk around your neighborhood portion, then take the train/mass transit to further away. Basically a city built along a train line.

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.

> I think the assumption would be you could walk around your neighborhood portion, then take the train/mass transit to further away. Basically a city built along a train line.

They state this explicitly in the 2-minute intro video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0kz5vEqdaSc

Regarding controlling the population: to me it seems like one large prison. I wouldn’t want to live in such a place.

I think the argument is that the long-distance transport needs no curves so it run faster.

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.

some of the architecture books have talked about it - they theorize the perfect city is about two miles wide and indefinitely long. You run a rail line down the middle (run four, local lines, express; or six and have a middle distance one) and now everyone by definition is about a mile or two from a station and a mile or less from farmland/extreme rural areas.

Sounds more like a basic unit of understanding or modeling a larger system than an actual ideal. Like a single leg of a hub and spoke flight system.

Econ has a similar concept for competition , iirc, “Hotellings line”.

The series of books of which A Pattern Language [253] is part of strongly argues for it as an ideal and a design principle, not just as a spherical cow.

[253] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language

The Dutch town of Almere was, more or less, built along a rail line. Every neighborhood has its own station.

Why square if you can have a circle?

If it were in the middle of a forest, you'd just be a minute's walk away from nature... Maybe MBS' next fantasy is the reforestation of the desert.

Good luck with that! Though it might be worth trying, as the desert will be even more inhospitable than it already is in the years to come.

These other shapes will need taller walls to keep the desert sand out.

I think this is an interesting (albeit extremely costly) urban planning experiment.

I like many of the ideas.

I am pretty sure that it won't work as planned, but humanity can learn from it.

The importance of architecture and urban planning can't be overstated, and unfortunately most of what has been done during the 20th century has been mediocre and, in some cases, catastrophically bad.

We have some good models for cities and architecture, but unfortunately, as with any technology, we only have a choice between innovation and decay.

Judge Dredd's Mega-City One comes to mind. Although this is a more refined design, one which minimizes the amount of public gathering space.

"Let's build 170 km of skyscrapers back to back in the middle of the desert. Also let's make it straight, because the natural circular shape of cities is kinda boring."

Sounds like a great idea, can't wait to see it become a reality... /s

Most of the houses won't have sunlight?

Might as well just get a tunnel boring machine & do the entire thing underground. Cooler (temp) wise too

And still gets you the straight line that they want for inexplicable reasons

It's going to smell unpleasant after a while with that ever-accumulating pile of dead migratory birds at the base.

That problem will solve itself in 1 to 2 migrations when all the birds die though.

Fun fact, MBS was an avid player of Age of Empires 2 Age of Kings back in the day. One of the strats (albeit a very rarely used one) is one where the player builds a line of buildings all the way to the enemy base to get better vision. Take a hint ;)

No one is forcing you to live there. I’m all for people spending a bunch of money to make something cool and unique. Maybe it will work or maybe it will be a slum, who knows, in the end it will still be cool to see.

How about Judge Dredd? They will probably have those too at some point. Wasn’t the futuristic city of Dredd something similar?

Why is it not a set of circles with hub and spokes instead? Would be cheaper on movement / transportation.

I've looked into this idea more and watched and read some additional content[1] about Neom. I encourage people to please ignore the marketing and read their words, instead. It will become very obvious what kind of a vision Neom's ownership has for us.

> To keep Neom safe, cameras, drones and facial-recognition technology will let Saudi intelligence services track everyone.

> MBS also wants Neom to host innovations like the “Apollo” project with Softbank, which will create “a new way of life from birth to death reaching genetic mutations to increase human strength and IQ.” Softbank declined to comment.

My interpretation is this is a merger of climate change religion as well as transhumanist ideals. The vast, vast majority of the world will never accept something like Neom even if its theoretical implementation is exactly like the actually-created-by-computer-graphics-artists marketing.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-princes-500-billion-desert-dr...

I don't get it, surely transhumanism is not compatible with wahabi religion? Surveillance state, sure. Transhumanism? I doubt it. No way they will accept this type of philosophy in Neom?

poop trucks. That is all.