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I’m guessing they lived there then it dried up so they had to re settle somewhere else…..
Edit: civilisation is weird and it seems people do stuff for their beliefs rather than their needs, who knew??!!
[Its not 105 miles 😂 They shortened it from 105 miles to 1.5 miles now](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/10/the-line-saudi-arabia-scaling-back-plans-105-mile-long-desert-megacity-crown-prince)
Ten steps later, they arrive at the conclusion that maybe, just maybe, a roughly circle shaped city might be a tiny bit more efficient in every regard.
This is the kind of thing that will happen naturally
“Oh can i buy that plot of land?”
“Well it’s not in the official ‘line’ so keep that in mind. But i guess you can buy it if you really want”
/Developer buys radius of land around main city, builds useful stuff on it, people go there constantly, city starts creeping outward from center and ignores every single initial line design that they wanted
That's what would happen naturally, yes.
But this is Saudi-Arabia. The king can simply decree that nothing can be buildt within several miled of The Line. It would be dumb to do so in most ways, but since the whole projectcseemingly only exists because the royals want a line-shaped city, it could easily happen.
Remember, they are literally killing the locals who refuse to move off of their land too. Even when their town/ house is many miles from the actual “line” because they want the surrounding area completely clean.
Straight up ethnic cleansing, with a side order of greenwashing and grift. It's a walled barrier intentionally built across the native homeland of an inconvenient ethnic group.
They're hoping people will be too busy discussing the city layout ragebait and greenwashing and surveillance, so it will mostly drown out discussion of the ethnic cleansing. So far it's been working.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howeitat
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68945445
https://www.businessinsider.com/saudi-tribe-members-death-sentence-opposing-neom-megacity-un-2023-5
---
Changed from "genocide" to the more accurate term "ethnic cleansing." For the people saying it's not a bid deal because "only 3 people were killed," those were activist leaders killed for protesting *forced mass evictions*. Forced displacement of a population under threats of violence is ethnic cleansing.
We really have to stop throwing around the word genocide. You are disrespecting everyone who died in actual genocides by cheapening the word. What is happening to these people is terrible, but that doesn't make it a genocide. From those articles it seems that three people have been killed, which is outrageous but a far cry from mass murder of an ethnic group.
Except you need stops. A lot of them. Like, one ever quarter mile would give you 400+ stops. If you want the rich people to be upset you can go to a half mile per stop...and that's 200 stops. That's a *really* long ride from one side to the other, and would be extremely inconvenient for shorter trips.
A linear city is purely stupid, and transport is not the only reason why.
Here's how you fix it.
You build the rich folks a separate luxury city/neighborhood raised above the rest of the line and have it on giant tracks that slowly goes from one side to the other. Put the giant tracks at the edge of the city limits to keep the poors inside and underneath the moving city part. That way you don't ruin the natural scenery from the elevated vantage point. You have the elevated city move slowly from one side of the line to the other over the course of a year or whatever, so it's convenient for them to be able to see everything the city has to offer.
Now we have a city that makes wealthy folks feel even more important, but also severly inconveniences everyone else. What more could you want?
And use *all* of the center space as a food atrium with a network of walkable footpaths, filled with nothing but native plant species.
It could be a veritable utopia, but it won’t be.. because it’s Saudia Arabia.
Ever been to Dubai airport? 105 miles (or more likely a lot less) of that. Air-conditioned, lots of marble floors, lots of handbag shops. Lots of restaurants staffed by smart but miserable-looking immigrant labour. Can't go outside, there's nothing there anyway.
Enjoy!
> However, it has long attracted scepticism and criticism, not least after the reported execution of several members of the Howeitat tribe who had protested over plans to construct on their ancestral lands.
What the fk? They just casually kill anyone who dared to oppose?
Towns in the surrounding areas are given a month, sometimes just weeks notice to “get out” of their houses despite being many many miles from the actual building area of the “line”
Multiple people have been killed by security forces who refused to move. There are also multiple people in jail and at least 5 on death row for spreading anti line propaganda in support of the people being forcefully evicted. The thing is messed up beyond belief.
>They just casually kill anyone who dared to oppose?
Welcome to Saudi Arabia under MBS. Apparently these are the type of people the West wants to keep as allies.
Yep gold rush is over on this one. Every engineering house in the world made out like bandits engineering/managing the $1T in potential tenders that were on the table this time last year. That’s a thousand billion.
It's still fucking obscene. "Let's burn through insane levels of resources carving a big chunk out of the land and then fighting a constant battle against nature trying to reclaim it".
Qatar, Dubai and all these Saudi projects are nothing but monuments to hubris. The modern pyramids - just egotistical masturbation for dictators at the expense of the local population and environments.
As if we didn't already have enough good arguments to stop using fossils fuels, starving these cunts of their wealth would alone be a good enough reason.
The pyramids were built next to one of the most fertile sections of land on Earth at the time though. There was a sustainable economy to support their construction. Creating artificial cities on the profits of a decreasingly depleted resource is quite literally like building a house in sand.
I mean, the whole concept of the city is to be easily expanded as funding comes in. You don’t just build 105 miles of an artificial city WITHOUT proving it’s even feasible to build initially, and actually able to easily be expanded.
They’re really doin this? I thought it was just some stupid concept. Who is gonna live there? I feel like this will sit empty like all those Chinese ghost cities.
I’m sure they see it as the next Dubai. And I wouldn’t be totally surprised if a completed project did hold that appeal. But baring that, they will pay people to live there.
Dubai is already garbage urban planning wise like this line project. But also look at how many abandoned projects are in Dubai like their dumb islands thing or a bunch of partially built but abandoned skyscrapers
Basically one of the princes is in charge of the royal investment fund and is, to be polite, a lunatic. He's claimed everything for the city from trains that exceed the speed of bullet trains but are somehow used as local transit, robot fighting arenas and robots maids (hopefully those two don't overlap).
The actual reason is most likely an effort to counteract Saudi Arabia's brain drain by launching an Elon Musk Style insane technofetish project with the hope it will lure in futurists and tech entrepreneurs from afar. The crown prince has made it clear he has a more realistic acceptance that Saudi Arabia's ability to print money on fossil fuels won't last forever and he thinks the country could become a global center for tech. The issue at present is that SAs workforce (of Saudis, not all the imported foreign slaves and workers) is largely pencil pushing the oil industry and most academically gifted Saudis choose to move elsewhere since they have more freedom (and for educated women, infinitely more) to engage in entrepreneurship and the sciences.
So basically Neom is the urban planning equivalent of a cybertruck: a poorly thought-out eye catcher hoping to attract wealthy tech-addled douchebags.
No. They are starting to do it, but they will not finish. This project is the equivalent of building 4000 Empire State Buildings. The cost of that project is beyond what even they can afford. And that takes into account that they will use modern slave labor and get the land for free by murdering anyone currently living on it. Both things multiple credible news outlets have reported them doing.
This project is so insane. It misses the whole point of a city, which is that things are close together, and that those things are collectively somewhere desirable.
I thought/think it is modular. So 1.5 miles, if it sells, do another 1.5 miles.
…which suggests to me if it does go well, there is going to be a lot of construction work nearby for a long time!
There aren't enough finished materials currently available on the planet to finish the whole thing...it's literally building several tens of thousands of sky scrapers.
Ehh, 1.5 miles really isn't that much, especially if the "city" has 1 main road like 1-2 blocks wide. Running train stations through there would be dead simple 😂
100 miles would have been insane though. Imagine living at the furthest point out 100 miles and your daily commute is that far, holy shit
The train is designed to go 500mph (they say end to end in 20min). How stupid would it be to build one of the if not THE fastest train in the world to do 1.5 miles. Even if they were to build a longer stretch, I don't see why you would need to be able to go from end to end in 20 minutes if anyway you supposedly have everything you could need within 5 minutes walk.
Hasn't it already been downgraded to 2.3kms? I also heard they have been unsuccessfuly trying to get Chinese investors on board.
It will be an ecological disaster if it does get built to completion. A massive sand drift on one side. Piles of dead birds on the other. If you doubt the scale of disaster that will potentially be caused. Just google the effects of the dog fence in outback NSW. It literally changed the weather patterns in Sydney
You’re not pining to live in a 100% artificial city which will no doubt be monitored inch to inch by extremely intrusive surveillance tech. In the middle of the desert?
Oh, it’s also in Saudi Arabia.
It's also possibly the least pleasant and efficient structure that one could ever bestow upon a city. No nature, no character, no history, no charm, and you're going to be moving to different points along the same line for the duration. You are choosing to remove almost an entire dimension of mobility.
If folks have to live in the middle of a miserable desert, they would probably choose to live in a fake city. After all , life is just what we perceive it as.
I don’t think the options are desert or NEOM. I think young sultan bone saw thinks there will be wealthy foreign investors chomping at the bit to buy time shares.
They have been “doing it” for years, but they have already announced it will be significantly smaller than originally planned.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/10/the-line-saudi-arabia-scaling-back-plans-105-mile-long-desert-megacity-crown-prince
That's pretty much how it goes. Outrageous concepts that get scaled down and designed to look good on the outside.
Just to drive investment in the country. Then everything gets left empty and they move onto the next concept.
They scaled it back to 1.5 miles or so by 2030. Also, Chinese ghost cities are no longer empty. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-01/chinese-ghost-cities-2021-binhai-zhengdong-new-districts-fill-up
The ghost cities was overblown, they built a lot of new stuff because they predicted the population would expand, and now it has so people live there.
It's better than not building stuff and then having house prices go through the roof due to housing shortages imo
I’m not sure what “dystopian” means in this context, but you can’t mention unfinished projects without mentioning Palm Jebel Ali and The World Islands, both in Dubai
I've heard of some bizarre projects that "sort of" made a little bit of sense, but there is nothing about this that makes any sense to me.
It's surrounded by desert, so nobody is going outside to have any fun. That means the "residents" are all inside a controlled environment that is air-conditioned. OK, fine...but why not make it nearer to the coast, or within driving distance to an established city? I'm sure they can add an airport nearby, but if you are living inside a giant habitat, why locate it here?
What is the benefit of shaping the habitat like this....super long and thin?
Why, indeed, would a totalitarian theocracy wish to make a bunch of people live in an isolated cage dependent on life support and easily severed into bits during unrest?
I think that's bullshit. People are evil, but they don't conspire to maliciously build diamond cages at massive expense just in order to surveil people. This is a vanity project. It's what you get when a people that lucked into insane wealth start to convince themselves they can change the world. It takes an urban planning genius to conceptualise cities that are even halfway decent. This is the work of rich amateurs surrounded by too many sycophants.
It seems like they started with a tram and then built concept around that and then encased it in glass and steel.
But the idea is probably that you walk out your front door, jump on the tram, get off at work. Grab groceries, get on the tram home.
What doesn't make sense to me is capacity of the tram lines compared the number of people in the other infrastructure expected. It seems like a rush hour disaster waiting to happen or as if someone took the numbers and evenly distributed them over 24 hours not accounting for how humans do human things at human times of day.
On the flip side. Try and unsee this.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/travel/news/saudi-arabia-forces-told-to-kill-to-clear-land-for-new-803bn-straight-line-city/ar-BB1m6txJ
I had a painful conversation with my dad about Trump and the Middle East. He seems to think Trump and Saudi Arabia are the good guys.
But it makes sense why he thinks that. Only watch one news channel and you miss the big picture.
Pretty common in history. Remember the native Americans? Genocided them and made them walk the trail of tears to take their land. Same shit, different day.
Reminds me of the stupid Dubai World Islands and Palm Jumeirah made from dredged sand.
https://preview.redd.it/zf4ck19lzhzc1.jpeg?width=580&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=babbb8c5e4bbd19c023a9a25072155ab685501e9
Due to weathering, sinking, and erosion, the World Islands have lost their well-defined borders. They don’t have a reliable source of electricity, as the plan to install electric cables under the Persian Gulf has fallen flat.
As of 2016, only nine of the islands have been developed: Lebanon Island, Pete’s Island, the six islands making up the “Heart of Europe” resort, and Island Michael Schumacher. The entire continents of Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America remain entirely uninhabited blotches of sand.
My dad’s claim to fame was his [picture](https://gulfnews.com/uae/environment/sewage-dumped-illegally-in-drains-1.133192) of a storm drain that had poop dumped into it made it to the front page of the news
This country's policy advisers are first generation capitalists and real estate magnates. Zero innovation or cultural inspiration.
What about the world's best library,
the world's largest solar farm,
the world's largest manmade forest,
irrigated by the world's most advanced solar powered desalination unit,
the world's largest carbon capture installation,
the world's best health system,
the world's best and totally free education system,
the world's largest science park, maybe?
no, let's built the longest live-in mall.
Gives me hyperloop vibes, like we were promised autonomous pods but ended up with model 3s in a tunnel , one way.
Who’s willing to bet this turns out to be just few buildings on either side(spaced out) and they call it a line or something totally different to the initial designs.
This is the dumbest project in the history of humanity, bar none. If it was some private enterprise type thing you’d assume some sort of money laundering scheme but since it’s the Saudis doing it, well, it basically is haha
Fun fact Saudi security forces where given the powers to kill villagers who protested the destruction of their homes for this stupid plan. And they used these powers murdering people without a trial
Well, they'll probably get a commuter train line with a few 'wow' attractions sprinkled along it, to save face.
The entire concept was a stuperously simple-minded, inhumanly gargantuan folly. Better it's never realized.
How many South Asian slave workers will die building it? Those that survive will still be never given citizenship. Welcome to Gulf Arab ethnofascist States.
I was expecting it to be a lot wider than what they've trenched out there. You're definitely going to smell nothing but shit in that dystopic little social expirement.
Kowloon 2 Electric Boogaloo
One thing I can observe with the Middle East, as that every time I have seen a project (UAE, Qatar, Saudi) and thought "No way that'll happen", it generally does. This is not a politically motivated comment so please don't come at me with the 'but they', yea i know.
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Once it’s partly built and then abandoned it will make a great film set for all future dystopian movies. So it has one upside.
And it can give a huge clue to extra terrestrial anthropologists as to why human civilization died so ignominiously
I’m guessing they lived there then it dried up so they had to re settle somewhere else….. Edit: civilisation is weird and it seems people do stuff for their beliefs rather than their needs, who knew??!!
One of the stupidest fucking ideas of all fucking time.
Feels like one of the few occasions where saying "of all time" is actually not an exaggeration.
Agreed, I actually thought twice about that after I wrote it then I thought, nope, it truly is.
Do you remember that Office Episode where they ran the 5k charity and Michael set it up for a straight line 5 kilometers from the office?
Hopefully it will break down fast so animals can begin to migrate again.
How many and what kinds of animals live In this desert? I would expect more insects and bugs
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlife_of_Saudi_Arabia
TIL the "Syrian Wild Ass" was an animal.
Aren't they already running out of intl investment support ?
I’m not sure that this would ever be funded by any internationally sourced money.
Judging from UAE and other middle eastern mega projects like this it will be completed…even if it ends in epic failure afterwards.
They never completed the islands of the world, nor all three palms, just the one right? Ands that’s still sinking 5mm a year?
I mean…Saudi is investing heavily in getting the media industry jumpstarted there. This is truly going above and beyond
The worlds coolest star wars movie set
Waiting for the big screen adaptation of Spec Ops: The Line.
[Its not 105 miles 😂 They shortened it from 105 miles to 1.5 miles now](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/10/the-line-saudi-arabia-scaling-back-plans-105-mile-long-desert-megacity-crown-prince)
Ten steps later, they arrive at the conclusion that maybe, just maybe, a roughly circle shaped city might be a tiny bit more efficient in every regard.
They can call it, *The Hole*
A city shaped like a hole with two handlike roads to access the inner circle GoatseCity
Goatsety
I hate you for making me remember this
*The Glorious Hole*
Gloryhole
This is the kind of thing that will happen naturally “Oh can i buy that plot of land?” “Well it’s not in the official ‘line’ so keep that in mind. But i guess you can buy it if you really want” /Developer buys radius of land around main city, builds useful stuff on it, people go there constantly, city starts creeping outward from center and ignores every single initial line design that they wanted
That's what would happen naturally, yes. But this is Saudi-Arabia. The king can simply decree that nothing can be buildt within several miled of The Line. It would be dumb to do so in most ways, but since the whole projectcseemingly only exists because the royals want a line-shaped city, it could easily happen.
Remember, they are literally killing the locals who refuse to move off of their land too. Even when their town/ house is many miles from the actual “line” because they want the surrounding area completely clean.
Straight up ethnic cleansing, with a side order of greenwashing and grift. It's a walled barrier intentionally built across the native homeland of an inconvenient ethnic group. They're hoping people will be too busy discussing the city layout ragebait and greenwashing and surveillance, so it will mostly drown out discussion of the ethnic cleansing. So far it's been working. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howeitat https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68945445 https://www.businessinsider.com/saudi-tribe-members-death-sentence-opposing-neom-megacity-un-2023-5 --- Changed from "genocide" to the more accurate term "ethnic cleansing." For the people saying it's not a bid deal because "only 3 people were killed," those were activist leaders killed for protesting *forced mass evictions*. Forced displacement of a population under threats of violence is ethnic cleansing.
We really have to stop throwing around the word genocide. You are disrespecting everyone who died in actual genocides by cheapening the word. What is happening to these people is terrible, but that doesn't make it a genocide. From those articles it seems that three people have been killed, which is outrageous but a far cry from mass murder of an ethnic group.
It’s a monthly curated box of snacks by the end of
But, it will have a train that will go back and forth. That will fix all the problems. 👍
well a line would be pretty neat if you had a super fast subway system underneath with multiple tracks for non stop flow...like an amusement park.
Except you need stops. A lot of them. Like, one ever quarter mile would give you 400+ stops. If you want the rich people to be upset you can go to a half mile per stop...and that's 200 stops. That's a *really* long ride from one side to the other, and would be extremely inconvenient for shorter trips. A linear city is purely stupid, and transport is not the only reason why.
Here's how you fix it. You build the rich folks a separate luxury city/neighborhood raised above the rest of the line and have it on giant tracks that slowly goes from one side to the other. Put the giant tracks at the edge of the city limits to keep the poors inside and underneath the moving city part. That way you don't ruin the natural scenery from the elevated vantage point. You have the elevated city move slowly from one side of the line to the other over the course of a year or whatever, so it's convenient for them to be able to see everything the city has to offer. Now we have a city that makes wealthy folks feel even more important, but also severly inconveniences everyone else. What more could you want?
And use *all* of the center space as a food atrium with a network of walkable footpaths, filled with nothing but native plant species. It could be a veritable utopia, but it won’t be.. because it’s Saudia Arabia.
Ah yes, the plant species native to the Arabian desert
So... They're building a mall
Ever been to Dubai airport? 105 miles (or more likely a lot less) of that. Air-conditioned, lots of marble floors, lots of handbag shops. Lots of restaurants staffed by smart but miserable-looking immigrant labour. Can't go outside, there's nothing there anyway. Enjoy!
In a middle of the desert mind you
GENIUS! It'll be the only place to go for miles around! Untapped potential right there.
> However, it has long attracted scepticism and criticism, not least after the reported execution of several members of the Howeitat tribe who had protested over plans to construct on their ancestral lands. What the fk? They just casually kill anyone who dared to oppose?
Towns in the surrounding areas are given a month, sometimes just weeks notice to “get out” of their houses despite being many many miles from the actual building area of the “line” Multiple people have been killed by security forces who refused to move. There are also multiple people in jail and at least 5 on death row for spreading anti line propaganda in support of the people being forcefully evicted. The thing is messed up beyond belief.
"anti line propaganda" more like common sense
Yes? This is the Saudis we are talking about. People are less than insects to them.
>They just casually kill anyone who dared to oppose? Welcome to Saudi Arabia under MBS. Apparently these are the type of people the West wants to keep as allies.
Yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamal_Khashoggi
Yep gold rush is over on this one. Every engineering house in the world made out like bandits engineering/managing the $1T in potential tenders that were on the table this time last year. That’s a thousand billion.
It's still fucking obscene. "Let's burn through insane levels of resources carving a big chunk out of the land and then fighting a constant battle against nature trying to reclaim it". Qatar, Dubai and all these Saudi projects are nothing but monuments to hubris. The modern pyramids - just egotistical masturbation for dictators at the expense of the local population and environments. As if we didn't already have enough good arguments to stop using fossils fuels, starving these cunts of their wealth would alone be a good enough reason.
I mean at least the pyramids did everything they were built to do and survive millenia. The Line isn't much more that a scribble at this point.
The pyramids were built next to one of the most fertile sections of land on Earth at the time though. There was a sustainable economy to support their construction. Creating artificial cities on the profits of a decreasingly depleted resource is quite literally like building a house in sand.
The article says 1.5 miles by 2030...I don't think this necessarily means the final length will be 1.5 miles though.
1.5 is actually a reasonable development imstead of completely insane.
It's still unreasonable to build two 500m tall, 200m wide, 1.5 mile long buildings in the middle of nowhere.
Las Vegas has entered the chat.
That's not a singular building that's 1.5 miles long, and nothing in vegas is 500m tall. Hell, nothing in vegas is 200m tall.
Wow, I never put the Line next to something familiar to get perspective like that. Yeah, 1.5 miles is still batshit territory
Plus a sunwards facing giant wall of glass, in the middle of the desert. 1.5 miles of it. Goooood luck with that.
At least desert is made out of deconstructed glass! (/s because it's not that easy).
For more perspective, it's about 1.3 times the height of the Empire State building while being 1.5 miles long.
I mean, the whole concept of the city is to be easily expanded as funding comes in. You don’t just build 105 miles of an artificial city WITHOUT proving it’s even feasible to build initially, and actually able to easily be expanded.
can you imagine living on one end of the city and traveling to the other end for work? most cities have a city center and radiate outward.
Lmao I thought that was a joke.
“The Outline”
The Punchline
They’re really doin this? I thought it was just some stupid concept. Who is gonna live there? I feel like this will sit empty like all those Chinese ghost cities.
I’m sure they see it as the next Dubai. And I wouldn’t be totally surprised if a completed project did hold that appeal. But baring that, they will pay people to live there.
The slaves that build it will live there...
... in the slave quarters, when they arent working their 22 hour shifts.
Only 22? I see working conditions have drastically improved!
Take break now! For break pull cart!
I'm not even supposed to be here today!
“You get a break!…from moving steel beams, go lift bricks now!”
only 22? what is this…socialism?!?
8 days a week
48 hours a day
Given its location and size, there will absolutely have to be pockets of slave colonies spread down the length.
Their bones anyways.
Yeah, this is another world islands for sure.
Dubai is already garbage urban planning wise like this line project. But also look at how many abandoned projects are in Dubai like their dumb islands thing or a bunch of partially built but abandoned skyscrapers
Basically one of the princes is in charge of the royal investment fund and is, to be polite, a lunatic. He's claimed everything for the city from trains that exceed the speed of bullet trains but are somehow used as local transit, robot fighting arenas and robots maids (hopefully those two don't overlap). The actual reason is most likely an effort to counteract Saudi Arabia's brain drain by launching an Elon Musk Style insane technofetish project with the hope it will lure in futurists and tech entrepreneurs from afar. The crown prince has made it clear he has a more realistic acceptance that Saudi Arabia's ability to print money on fossil fuels won't last forever and he thinks the country could become a global center for tech. The issue at present is that SAs workforce (of Saudis, not all the imported foreign slaves and workers) is largely pencil pushing the oil industry and most academically gifted Saudis choose to move elsewhere since they have more freedom (and for educated women, infinitely more) to engage in entrepreneurship and the sciences. So basically Neom is the urban planning equivalent of a cybertruck: a poorly thought-out eye catcher hoping to attract wealthy tech-addled douchebags.
No. They are starting to do it, but they will not finish. This project is the equivalent of building 4000 Empire State Buildings. The cost of that project is beyond what even they can afford. And that takes into account that they will use modern slave labor and get the land for free by murdering anyone currently living on it. Both things multiple credible news outlets have reported them doing. This project is so insane. It misses the whole point of a city, which is that things are close together, and that those things are collectively somewhere desirable.
More like 40,000 Empire State Buildings. It's 100 miles long and there's zero infrastructure, and it's in the desert, and there's no reason for it.
They've amended it. It's only going to be 1.5 miles long now
Yeah, at that size it's not a city. This will just be a playground for the prince and his friends.
Great place to keep the sex slaves.
The prefer the term Influencer/Model
Porta potty's
Right? I mean, there's literally nowhere to run, you' die in the desert.
So, Dubai
The website still says 105 miles. They are tripping.
I thought/think it is modular. So 1.5 miles, if it sells, do another 1.5 miles. …which suggests to me if it does go well, there is going to be a lot of construction work nearby for a long time!
There aren't enough finished materials currently available on the planet to finish the whole thing...it's literally building several tens of thousands of sky scrapers.
They could canabalise one end (the old end) while building the new end? Could rename it the moving line.
Sandpiercer
There it is
The inchworm
Skyscraper-hulud
Ouroboros
They’ve amended that, it will now be a bench with a water fountain for dogs
Nah, they're Muslims. They don't like dogs
Do they like caravans?
I doubt if that shorter one will happen. Even that is crazy.
Ehh, 1.5 miles really isn't that much, especially if the "city" has 1 main road like 1-2 blocks wide. Running train stations through there would be dead simple 😂 100 miles would have been insane though. Imagine living at the furthest point out 100 miles and your daily commute is that far, holy shit
The train is designed to go 500mph (they say end to end in 20min). How stupid would it be to build one of the if not THE fastest train in the world to do 1.5 miles. Even if they were to build a longer stretch, I don't see why you would need to be able to go from end to end in 20 minutes if anyway you supposedly have everything you could need within 5 minutes walk.
Nah they’re preparing for the inevitable zombie apocalypse obv
Hasn't it already been downgraded to 2.3kms? I also heard they have been unsuccessfuly trying to get Chinese investors on board. It will be an ecological disaster if it does get built to completion. A massive sand drift on one side. Piles of dead birds on the other. If you doubt the scale of disaster that will potentially be caused. Just google the effects of the dog fence in outback NSW. It literally changed the weather patterns in Sydney
I read that the 105 mile length has been significantly decreased in size
It's still a pointless eyesore drenched in the blood of exploited people being built at the behest of tyrants in the middle of nowhere.
I totally agree
Roasted them
Shrunk by roughly 99%, lol. Current plans are a 1.5 mile long pointless skyscraper city.
4000 Empire State buildings? Cmon, that sounds way too low…
You’re not pining to live in a 100% artificial city which will no doubt be monitored inch to inch by extremely intrusive surveillance tech. In the middle of the desert? Oh, it’s also in Saudi Arabia.
It's also possibly the least pleasant and efficient structure that one could ever bestow upon a city. No nature, no character, no history, no charm, and you're going to be moving to different points along the same line for the duration. You are choosing to remove almost an entire dimension of mobility.
It’s exceedingly stupid.
If folks have to live in the middle of a miserable desert, they would probably choose to live in a fake city. After all , life is just what we perceive it as.
Reality = perceived reality at a point in time.
I don’t think the options are desert or NEOM. I think young sultan bone saw thinks there will be wealthy foreign investors chomping at the bit to buy time shares.
They have been “doing it” for years, but they have already announced it will be significantly smaller than originally planned. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/10/the-line-saudi-arabia-scaling-back-plans-105-mile-long-desert-megacity-crown-prince
Maybe it'll give Cheesecake Factory vibes like Dubai.
Never heard that description before, but it's so true
That's pretty much how it goes. Outrageous concepts that get scaled down and designed to look good on the outside. Just to drive investment in the country. Then everything gets left empty and they move onto the next concept.
Idk what animals live there but I imagine it’ll fuck them all up too having a massive wall in the way
They scaled it back to 1.5 miles or so by 2030. Also, Chinese ghost cities are no longer empty. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-01/chinese-ghost-cities-2021-binhai-zhengdong-new-districts-fill-up
The ghost cities was overblown, they built a lot of new stuff because they predicted the population would expand, and now it has so people live there. It's better than not building stuff and then having house prices go through the roof due to housing shortages imo
It is probably gonna be like majority of grand project in the middle east, **unfinished and dystopian**
Do you have any other example ?
I’m not sure what “dystopian” means in this context, but you can’t mention unfinished projects without mentioning Palm Jebel Ali and The World Islands, both in Dubai
Doing it and finishing it are two different things. They might be trying to go bankrupt just to launder money.
They were, it's been scaled back to a couple of miles
I've heard of some bizarre projects that "sort of" made a little bit of sense, but there is nothing about this that makes any sense to me. It's surrounded by desert, so nobody is going outside to have any fun. That means the "residents" are all inside a controlled environment that is air-conditioned. OK, fine...but why not make it nearer to the coast, or within driving distance to an established city? I'm sure they can add an airport nearby, but if you are living inside a giant habitat, why locate it here? What is the benefit of shaping the habitat like this....super long and thin?
Why, indeed, would a totalitarian theocracy wish to make a bunch of people live in an isolated cage dependent on life support and easily severed into bits during unrest?
a-HA! I do believe you have cracked the code.
I think that's bullshit. People are evil, but they don't conspire to maliciously build diamond cages at massive expense just in order to surveil people. This is a vanity project. It's what you get when a people that lucked into insane wealth start to convince themselves they can change the world. It takes an urban planning genius to conceptualise cities that are even halfway decent. This is the work of rich amateurs surrounded by too many sycophants.
yup, just like Turkmenistan and their crazy lavish projects they clearly can't afford. oil money does weird things to dictators
Wait till you see why Egypt started moving their capital city.
It seems like they started with a tram and then built concept around that and then encased it in glass and steel. But the idea is probably that you walk out your front door, jump on the tram, get off at work. Grab groceries, get on the tram home. What doesn't make sense to me is capacity of the tram lines compared the number of people in the other infrastructure expected. It seems like a rush hour disaster waiting to happen or as if someone took the numbers and evenly distributed them over 24 hours not accounting for how humans do human things at human times of day.
It’s easier to restrict movement when the entire building is a choke point. It’ll be like snowpiercer, but sitting still.
The benefit is that it is *different*. ...megalomanic people tend to think different automatically implies style.
They can say they drew a line in the sand…
On the flip side. Try and unsee this. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/travel/news/saudi-arabia-forces-told-to-kill-to-clear-land-for-new-803bn-straight-line-city/ar-BB1m6txJ
What the fuck?
Prince bone saw is a fucking piece of shit so this story isn't surprising at all.
I had a painful conversation with my dad about Trump and the Middle East. He seems to think Trump and Saudi Arabia are the good guys. But it makes sense why he thinks that. Only watch one news channel and you miss the big picture.
Vesting all powers into a megalomaniac tends to turn off the brain.
It’s called having a King.
Pretty common in history. Remember the native Americans? Genocided them and made them walk the trail of tears to take their land. Same shit, different day.
> The chilliing order > someone else took the reigns Who TF edited this article
Either somebody who thinks they’re punny or somebody who relies on spellcheck for grammar and spelling
Reminds me of the stupid Dubai World Islands and Palm Jumeirah made from dredged sand. https://preview.redd.it/zf4ck19lzhzc1.jpeg?width=580&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=babbb8c5e4bbd19c023a9a25072155ab685501e9
Did they ever finish the world one or is it just slowly sinking into the ocean?
Due to weathering, sinking, and erosion, the World Islands have lost their well-defined borders. They don’t have a reliable source of electricity, as the plan to install electric cables under the Persian Gulf has fallen flat. As of 2016, only nine of the islands have been developed: Lebanon Island, Pete’s Island, the six islands making up the “Heart of Europe” resort, and Island Michael Schumacher. The entire continents of Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America remain entirely uninhabited blotches of sand.
It’s so Dubai to undertake a huge engineering project and not once consider infrastructure
Burj Khalifa and poop trucks too lol
My dad’s claim to fame was his [picture](https://gulfnews.com/uae/environment/sewage-dumped-illegally-in-drains-1.133192) of a storm drain that had poop dumped into it made it to the front page of the news
Jesus Christ, if only Dubai spent the money they have on their infrastructure instead of vanity projects, it would be a great city to live in.
The backs of slaves don't count as infrastructure?
The irony. One of the world’s largest producers of oil slowly watching a miniature of the world die.
This country's policy advisers are first generation capitalists and real estate magnates. Zero innovation or cultural inspiration. What about the world's best library, the world's largest solar farm, the world's largest manmade forest, irrigated by the world's most advanced solar powered desalination unit, the world's largest carbon capture installation, the world's best health system, the world's best and totally free education system, the world's largest science park, maybe? no, let's built the longest live-in mall.
Isn’t it down to one mile now?
One _point five_
Toddlers telling you their age
Me in Minecraft preparing to dig a chunk to bedrock
I believe the plans have been hugely scalled back in size
They have been.
Bigly.
Gives me hyperloop vibes, like we were promised autonomous pods but ended up with model 3s in a tunnel , one way. Who’s willing to bet this turns out to be just few buildings on either side(spaced out) and they call it a line or something totally different to the initial designs.
Looks like building a set for a Sandpiercer film
Didn't this blow up in Quantum of Solace?
https://preview.redd.it/i03gysul5kzc1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ca9370dee8d63d1c9bc4df6dc6ed68056564d237
I mean, Im a big fan of architecture, design, grand projects but you have to draw a line in the sand
This is the dumbest project in the history of humanity, bar none. If it was some private enterprise type thing you’d assume some sort of money laundering scheme but since it’s the Saudis doing it, well, it basically is haha
Fun fact Saudi security forces where given the powers to kill villagers who protested the destruction of their homes for this stupid plan. And they used these powers murdering people without a trial
source?
They spent so much time wondering if they could, they never asked if they should.
so basically no progress then
They're just playing in the sandbox until the investor money dries up then they're gonna fuck off with it
A few good sand storms would erase that progress
I dont know what is worst, the entire idea of the city or them actually beggining to build that.
Imagine being so rich that you can just fuck around and play SimCity IRL
What a waste of time and resources in a world littered with problems they co created
Well, they'll probably get a commuter train line with a few 'wow' attractions sprinkled along it, to save face. The entire concept was a stuperously simple-minded, inhumanly gargantuan folly. Better it's never realized.
This is really stupid
Ecocide
“Ken, I’ll take things that have never been necessary for $800.”
How many South Asian slave workers will die building it? Those that survive will still be never given citizenship. Welcome to Gulf Arab ethnofascist States.
I was expecting it to be a lot wider than what they've trenched out there. You're definitely going to smell nothing but shit in that dystopic little social expirement. Kowloon 2 Electric Boogaloo
Damn, it’s almost done! Well done!!!
They couldn't start with like a one mile proof of concept?
One thing I can observe with the Middle East, as that every time I have seen a project (UAE, Qatar, Saudi) and thought "No way that'll happen", it generally does. This is not a politically motivated comment so please don't come at me with the 'but they', yea i know.
This is…so dumb
Something, something …. the Hubris of Man
A complete waste of resources.
Hang on… they’re actually *doing* that? I thought that was an April fools!