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Saudi Crown Prince unveils plans for $500bn structure to house 9M people
- anfilt 4y agoLet me know if it breaks ground, a lot things like this just end up being basically vapor ware.
- _the_inflator 4y agoReminds me of the movie Snowpiercer in reverse: desert instead of snow, static instead of moving. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowpiercer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowpiercer
- the_omegist 4y agoWhich was an adaptation of a French comic from 1982 : Le Transperceneige.
- baby 4y agoIs it good? Worth getting?
- WaffleIronMaker 4y agoIt'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 https://twitter.com/adara_salim/status/1551750220643307525 [2] https://twitter.com/keeganc15/status/1551678707672178697 https://twitter.com/keeganc15/status/1551678707672178697
- DemocracyFTW2 4y agoI 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?
- earthboundkid 4y agoNew Bone Saw City
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hristov 4y agoOk. This guy is unhinged. I very much doubt this goes much farther beyond CGI.
- gpderetta 4y agoVery cyberpunk.
- birdyrooster 4y agoHow else are we going to get to the future we deserve?
- walrus01 4y agoWell, cyberpunk 2077 has more than a few bone saws already.
- no_butterscotch 4y agoYikes. Never gonna happen. I mean, christ scale it back a bit no?
- t-writescode 4y agoGiven 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.
- mongol 4y agoExactly. 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-writescode 4y agoDesigned 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.
- JumpCrisscross 4y 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_Paris https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_...
- mongol 4y agoYes, but they still evolve. Looking at this concept, all of the city will be within two walls. I doubt it will be that way. It will soon start to sprawl outside.
- booboofixer 4y agoIsn't sand going to start piling up on the side that the wind usually blows from?
- ars 4y agoIf 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_horse 4y agoDoesn't matter how large the space is, it will fill up eventually.
- bayesian_horse 4y agoI 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.
- downvotetruth 4y agoWhile 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.
- JumpCrisscross 4y 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSO_Safer
- downvotetruth 4y agoLook at the winter map - over half of the coast is Saudi by week 3.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> over half of the coast is Saudi by week 3 So the proposed strategy involves taking out the main rebel-controlled ports as well as their fisheries while doing aesthetic damage to Saudi Arabia? (Yanbu won’t be disrupted by an oil spill that far away.) This is nonsense. Hell, I see more sense in Riyadh busting the tanker.
- downvotetruth 4y agoNonsense? As you state the Houthis have been inhibiting the safekeeping attempts, which amounts to sabotage; kind of dismissive to call affecting at least 3 Saudi desalination plants and Jizan "aesthetic" damage in addition to the effects on the Houthi like the blockage of shipments including food aid to Houthi controlled ports https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8682806/bin/NIHMS1758071-supplement-Supplementary_Materials.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8682806/bin/NIH... Tactically, given the odds of a more advantageous outcome now during the summer it might make sense for the Saudi's to destroy it as this winter will likely be its last one fueled and the target June 1 UN defueling start date has long past, but the assured strategic international response seems more concerning. What would be nonsense would be to try and connive VC amounts of money off of this like making a deal with the Houthis to let a group of hired "Somali" pirates siphon off the oil and blame any "slow leak" scenario on the thieves.
- inversefft 4y agoCity of the future built by a government stuck in the dark ages.
- ahamedirshad123 4y agoThat's applicable for the US too.
- d2049 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
- whitepoplar 4y agoNo.
- rutledjw 4y agoWhat "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...
- albalus 4y agoYeep back sliding into ranch flavored Afghanistan.
- UberFly 4y agoLike technology, cities of the future are slowly built. Just dig into what New York city is doing in alternate/green energy. This doesn't happen overnight, unless you're a magical Middle-Eastern YouTube video.
- Animats 4y ago> What "city of the future" has the US built? Los Angeles.
- panick21_ 4y agoNot 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.
- Retric 4y agoAt 56k per person for both living and working space plus associated infrastructure, 500bn doesn’t seem like nearly enough.
- frognumber 4y agoProbably 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.
- everforward 4y agoI 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.
- bayesian_horse 4y agoMillions 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.
- neals 4y agoMake it a circle, get rid of the mirror, fill in the center. Bam! You got yourself a city.
- ars 4y agoThey want everyone to have a view of nature, not of city.
- hristov 4y agoThey 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.
- mirekrusin 4y agoIf it works fine, they can build another one on Mars.
- bayesian_horse 4y agoA 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.
- WebbWeaver 4y agoAre 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-floating-city/ https://globetrender.com/2022/03/03/saudi-arabia-oxagon-floa...
- cgb223 4y agoIt’s all fun and games until whatever transports people through the line gets blocked Suddenly then you have “the segments”
- zizee 4y agoConcepts for linear cities have been around for a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_city https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_city https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroFuturism/comments/uh9mhp/the_linear_city_illustration_in_a_finnish/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroFuturism/comments/uh9mhp/the_l...
- lotophage 4y agoImagine the constant thwack! sounds of birds flying into the glass.
- d1n0 4y ago
- olalonde 4y ago265,000 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 4y agoMaybe housing will be on the edges, with commercial and industrial zoning in the middle.
- panick21_ 4y agoPopulation density is really the most important factor when considering building in a desert.
- olalonde 4y agoI 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.
- panick21_ 4y agoI think that is very over-rated. Really nice cities with very urban environment don't actually have to be very dense, even if they feel like that. And places that are very dense can still be worse then a US subburb in terms of feeling like a city. One concept from a city planner said basically urbanism is not about density. Connectivity and access is what makes a good city, not density. You can have a city with anywhere between 50k and 5M feel very livable and nice. And you can have a city with between 50k and 5M feel like a lonely place. Its all about the city design.
- jeffbee 4y agoThis 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.
- ars 4y agoDoesn'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_horse 4y agoOr 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.
- paulpauper 4y 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 4y agoAlready 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-saudi-arabias-bad-bosses-crown-prince-mohammed-mbs-neom-nasr-11654008823 https://www.wsj.com/articles/expatriate-executives-flee-saud...
- random314 4y agoIts 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 4y agoReminds me somewhat of a human ant colony. Surprised it isn't underground, but then ecological concerns seem not to be a priority.
- fancymcpoopoo 4y agothere'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 4y agoIt's sure shaped like a human ant farm.
- voltist 4y agolinear prison
- synu 4y agoNeo has a nice video on this, though without the new design update from the tweet. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=41sgRP0G6y4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=41sgRP0G6y4
- slg 4y agoIgnoring all the baggage that of comes along with who is planning this, this gives real strong Sim City 2000 Arcology vibes.
- unsignedchar 4y agoFrom 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/mohammed-bin-salman-saudi-arabia-palace-interview/622822/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/04/mohamme...
- BurningFrog 4y agoIt's as far from the enemy (Iran) as possible.
- scythe 4y agoThat 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 4y agoAlso: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32206301 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32206301
- lurker616 4y agoWhat 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_horse 4y agoMost 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 4y 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.
- harvey9 4y agoHot, dry air should be easy enough to get at that location. Just need some means of recovering the water as that will be more scarce.
- tanseydavid 4y agoA 175KM long clothesline? </sarc>
- lurker616 4y agoMakes sense. What about sports and entertainment - can it fit football fields or concert venues?
- gumby 4y agoThis is a relaunch of another such plan over a decade ago. Yawn.
- bayesian_horse 4y agoBoth awe inspiring and frightening, considering the source. Technological utopia meets sociological dystopia.
- ohgodplsno 4y agoDictator announces mega city, just like dozens of dictators before him. See: New Cairo City
- plantwallshoe 4y ago$500bn to house 9m would be a steal. I’d definitely buy a condo there for $55k
- colinmhayes 4y agoNot that this will actually be built, but construction costs are probably low in Saudi Arabia since they use quasi slave labor.
- eric4smith 4y ago30 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 4y agoKowloon Walled City
- RadixDLT 4y agothis is what you'll expect if you plan t live there https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc_cHzviGn4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc_cHzviGn4
- stanete 4y agoWhy so tall? First plans we saw were underground structures.
- missedthecue 4y agoHumans 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 4y agoIf 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.
- missedthecue 4y agoI don't think there is enough extractable riversand on planet earth for that amount of glass.
- dmurray 4y agoGlass is made from melted sand, so taking the raw materials from the desert is just fine.
- missedthecue 4y agoDesert sand doesn't contain enough silica. It's mostly gypsum.
- Ekaros 4y agoYes, that is easy. Now the concrete inside this thing on other hand...
- chemmail 4y agoThis is the city imagined in the dystopian books we read as children warning us to never reach.
- ilaksh 4y agoTotally 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.
- mirekrusin 4y agoI don't think they need to build 170km at once.
- MisterBastahrd 4y agoSo 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.
- asimpletune 4y agoI wonder how this would compare to paying a similar amount to reverse desertification?
- apexalpha 4y agoBloomberg 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-arabia/ 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 4y 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 4y agoThe 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.
- bambax 4y agoUntrue. Most of Musk's "dreams" are ridiculed everywhere, and rightly so. Dystopia is dystopia, no matter where it comes from. (Although, to make matters worse, MBS is a criminal and a despot.)
- 4y ago
- Panzer04 4y agoWhy 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 4y ago176 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 4y agoThat’s too scary, what if the product doesn’t find market fit? Let’s just build the complete product first with VC money.
- ddalex 4y agoIf 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.
- IIAOPSW 4y agoOh, so the purpose of this thing is political.
- ddalex 4y agoI would argue against that, because I don't see any way that this projects supports either the internal or external policies of the kingdom - in order to support that, it would need to be realistic and credible, and its neither.
- panick21_ 4y agoIts basically just like tradition. Each no person who want to be a big player in Saudi must announce a new future cities. They have many already, all of them unfinished and unpractical. And then the money moves on the a new city of the future. I think is basically just a status competition 'my city is gone be a revolutionary design'. The guy after MBS will likely try a city in a spiral or something.
- alexonaci 4y agoOf course, we should live in overpriced, crowded, “sustainable” matchboxes while Their Highnesses will continue to live in x000 sq foot mansions.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- langsoul-com 4y agoI 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 4y agoPresumably 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.
- seydor 4y agoAccessible nature = scorching-heat desert. Great for cycling i guess This whole project - Why? Whoever sold this to the Saudis, bit prankster
- fmajid 4y agoGood. All the money wasted on this boondoggle won’t be spent on bombing Yemenis or funding ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
- bambax 4y agoOr assassinations.
- Dan42 4y agoI 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.
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoThe 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.
- hammyhavoc 4y agoBecause 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.
- olalonde 4y agoThere 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs-10eEGEe0
- Dan42 4y agoHmm, 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.
- baby 4y agoI’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.
- Ekaros 4y agoTo 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.
- jjeaff 4y agoIt'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 4y agoI 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 4y agoI'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 4y agoI 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 4y agoAccording 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/ https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Kleinfeld#Projekt_Neom/
- panick21_ 4y agoAs 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.
- Kukumber 4y agoA 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
- avgDev 4y agoI just like Saudi Arabia for their treatment of migrant workers and the Kafala system. The treatment of women doesn't help either.
- 627467 4y agoMaybe 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?
- Kukumber 4y agoWe 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
- pontifier 4y agoI 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 4y agoGood 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
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- helloworld11 4y agoHas 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.
- hansword 4y agoYou 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.
- helloworld11 4y agoYou'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.
- ouid 4y agoi have been on a street adjacent to a zero curvature mirrored building and it almost turned me into a terrorist
- mihaic 4y agoTo 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 4y agoSaudi 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-city-women-workers 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-prophet-muhammads-first-wife-was-a-successful-businesswoman-who-paid-to-free-slaves-3497774.html 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.
- erenyeager 4y agoSaudi 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 4y agoIn 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 4y ago"...like nothing on earth seen before..." was this video made by an AI?
- eatbitseveryday 4y agoMaybe 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.