Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/09/saudi-forces-permitted-to-kill-anyone-who-resists-eviction-to-make-way-for-futuristic-line-city-and-have-already-started.html
…
11 Likes
And all for one of the most stupid and impractical urban design concepts ever conceived.
30 Likes
Every body you bury in a foundation is that much less CO2-intensive concrete needed; and the planning documents call for this to be an ‘eco-city’.
18 Likes
Every time the Line City is mentioned as eco friendly— the stupidity of the concept needs to be also reported.
No eco friendly urban planner ever said Line City! — that is the key! 
22 Likes
If it weren’t for Saudi Arabia’s deep devotion to misogyny, it wouldn’t shock me to learn that this was an attempt at nominative determinism.
18 Likes
From a planning and design perspective, it’s phenomenally stupid.
From an ecological perspective, equally stupid.
From an economic perspective? Looks stupid, but economic is weird. Stupid for regular people though.
14 Likes
Forget that crazy 15-minutes City idea; in the Line, no where is more than a 35-hour walk away (provided that you do not stop to eat, drink or sleep).
16 Likes
Well, if it’s any consolation, they are scaling the project back:
eta a more interesting piece on the matter:
8 Likes
Nah, it’s pretty stupid from an economic perspective, too.
Cities need an economic reason to exist. There has to be something there for the residents beyond service jobs for other residents.
Will there be something that will bring in money from outside the city? Manufacturing / creative / tourism / etc? It doesn’t matter what, but there has to be something. Without that, it’s doomed.
This applies to just about every utopian dream city that people keep proposing, including that recent one in California and the defunct and seemingly forgotten Paulville (look it up).
And this is on top of being located in one of the most repressive countries on the planet.
18 Likes
And one of the hottest, by the time the project is completed nobody would want to live there knowing how effing hot it’s going to get:
11 Likes
It seems to me that the stupidity of the project is the point.
“How ecologically unsound you can be” is the new measure by which the wealthy compete in their conspicuous consumption.
13 Likes
Yes it’s an incredibly bad idea on every possible level. Adam Something did a pretty thorough breakdown a while back. It’s almost like someone was dreaming up a challenge for the least efficient possible design for a city.
One analogy: imagine building a giant mansion in such a way that all the rooms are arranged in a line instead of a more conventional configuration. Now getting from the guest bedroom to the entrance foyer becomes a half-mile journey that takes you through dozens of other rooms. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
19 Likes
10 Likes
Also:
I’ve known people who lived in them. Everyone bloody hated it.
As @brainspore says, this is that rotten design concept writ large. I’m sure it was conceived by yet another fan of Heinlein who didn’t realise how horrible most of his ideas were when put into practise in the real world.
12 Likes
From the Conversation article posted above:
Many plans for ideal cities have been impractical fantasies. But NEOM also typifies a massive and persistent failure of the imagination driven by a capitalism — blinded by fossil-fuel ideology — and unable to come to terms with the necessity of confronting the climate crisis, growing global inequality and the persistence of war and genocide.
Killing natives who get in the way just doesn’t raise an eyebrow in SA.
9 Likes
Yep, they’re building a giant slum in which they’re going to forcibly move all the less-well-off, essentially a kilometers-long housing project. While the plans call for the rich to buy the penthouses and larger, nicer apartments, those are just going to be investment properties, as one thing the wealthy and powerful always insist on is that the hoi-poi be kept safely far, far away. I predict the wealthy, other than those looking to curry favor with the House of Saud by buying into their crazy, will avoid this after the new investment property smell wears off, and that with no way to escape the inevitable gangs, roving pick-up teams of thieves and bullies harassing everyone who doesn’t have a bodyguard, and the general squalor such forced housing always seems to be tarnished with it will be basically a no-man’s-land disaster within a decade of “completion.” Unless its just a China-style tofu-dreg real-estate investment scam, in which case it will be mostly uninhabitable and start falling down before it is finished, with the investors being taking for every halala before it mysteriously burns down, gets scrapped, and fades into an abandoned ghost town.
11 Likes
I think that there’s a reason why the Idea Guys love to talk about “vision 2030” rather than “implementation 2030”.
9 Likes
-
The Line City sounds like a really stupid idea. It is surprisingly post modern in such a conservative region. It really feels like some sci-fi concept art from the 60s-70s that looks neat in a painting, but terrible if you think about it.
-
What I do appreciate is the government taking on grand design and building projects. I wish we did that here more. There are some really damn cool building made during the depression as part of the various work programs. The gov. rarely makes anything grand or cool, something to look at and go, “This is nice.” 50 years later. Not just the gov, but private building too. They used to want to show off design and ornamentation and one up each other on how opulent something looked. Now they just want to recoup building costs in as short of time possible, and make their design and construction as economical as possible. That’s why in China right now they are making some cool buildings and structures that really make our cities look like shit. (There are exceptions to this, I think the Kaufmann Performing Arts Center looks nice - inside and out!)
8 Likes
Just in case anyone had missed this bit.
10 Likes
With the 105 mile long line being reduced to… 1.5 miles, I wonder how many corpses per mile it’ll end up being. (Because a number of people have also been arrested and facing the death penalty for protesting it.) It’s being framed as a starting point, but the reality is that given the scale of the megastructures being built (height as well as length), there simply isn’t remotely enough money in the country to build it as planned. Also, people around the prince are now seriously looking at it and thinking that’s not where they want the entire sovereign wealth fund to go. I’d be very surprised if they actually build 1.5 miles.
Just in general it feels like Saudi Arabia is joining UAE in looking at, well, everything we’ve learned about urban planning and saying, “Let’s do the opposite of that!” (The reality is that this is what happens when rich assholes with big egos and no knowledge of urban planning get to dictate city-scale projects.)
Extremely stupid. Absolutely none of the numbers make any sense at all - either the economics of building it, nor of how it’ll work as a city. It’s layers of (weirdly childish) fantasy stacked on top of each other.
@blackanvil I think that’s an optimistic prediction of how this’ll all go down…
7 Likes
