> 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.
> 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).