The news was broken by the financial news publication Bloomberg, which said that Saudi Arabia’s government had “scaled back its medium-term ambitions” for
Saudi Arabia’s wildly ambitious plan to build 500m tall, mirrored, 170km long parallel skyscrapers, forming a 1.5M population desert city has been curtailed to 2.4km long.
The news was broken by the financial news publication Bloomberg, which said that Saudi Arabia’s government had “scaled back its medium-term ambitions” for Neom, of which The Line is the most significant sub-project.
The Saudi government had hoped to have 1.5M residents living in The Line by 2030, but this has been scaled back to fewer than 300,000, according to the report. It is unclear how it intends to house a higher concentration of people considering the proposed length (and therefore area) has been massively slashed.
I think it came up like this: Saudi king at his last visit at Chinese Wall. „Uw, one can see it from the space? That’s awesome.“ At home: „Servants, build something as big as the Chinese Wall that is visible from the space, so everyone sees how great I am.“
Even if they somehow had some magical way to solve the foundation issue, with the original plan... could you imagine having to go from one part of the city to another for pretty much any reason? In a linear city? You better hope that other part is really close. Especially if it's a personal medical issue or a dying loved one.
Lucky for them. The UAE is utterly incompetent at sewage and garbage. Pretty sure it's because everyone running the stuff over there is either a relative of someone important or someone imported who wants to be seen as impressive.
Drown you in paperwork
Demand the most expensive version of everything since the most expensive one is better in their mind.
More paperwork
Demand you follow some weird standards that seem to be a mixture of old UK and lord only knows what
Finally they agree to the project and they demand a discount
More paperwork
Demand to see entire system in operation remotely.
Tell you they aren't ready and are willing to pay for storage
If you're interested in the inner workings of shitty civic planning check out James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State. He's an anthropologist who took a particular interest in why top-down societies always seem to miss the mark in infrastructure, ecology, agriculture, and social services (among others). A significant portion of the book is spent critically analyzing Le Corbusier's work and his ideological contemporaries. With Brasilia as a case study for the failures of "high modernist" ideology and design philosophy. It's a great read and I think a lot of these new urban planning projects that are obviously insane and impractical owe a lot to these batshit crazy people from the past that founded this particular flavor of foolish
It is unclear how it intends to house a higher concentration of people considering the proposed length (and therefore area) has been massively slashed.
I got a brilliant idea: extend it slightly to the sides, maybe in a round shape. This allows for a more efficient way to house a high concentration of people.
Huge waste of time and money. That effort could be focused on many better and more reasonable projects. This is what happens when fucking idiots get a ton of money inherited from their parents. We should never have relied on Saudi oil, it's been a drain on humanity.
That's not a big problem since this is in a desert. Getting any water there in the first place is the problem. And, based on the mockups I saw, there's supposed to be a lot of greenery.
water policies of saudi arabia are straight up insane. riyadh takes half of water from seashore desalination plants (that burn massive amounts of oil, so big that it cuts into their oil revenue very significantly). for the other half, they have somehow found non-renewable water, literal fossil water, and it'll run out in decade (might have misremembered). at the same time there are no water meters in the city at all
How recent are you talking and by what measure of success? Because I'm not finding anything when I search and, as far as I know, the world is still a long way away from fusion as a practical energy source.
fusion won't generate anything but hype. if you want reliable power source, just build normal uranium fueled nuclear powerplants like a responsible government, not overhyped garbage like hedge fund manager that just got his shipment of good idea powder