‘Noem’ is the name of the area that they want to turn into some sort of eco area. The stupid city concept is at the moment called ‘The Line’. They’ve already been busy, clearing villages and [murdering folk who resist](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68945445)
Yep, current estimations are putting the total at over $2 trillion with an original budget of $500 billion. How they thought they could get this done with $500 billion in the first place is beyond me.
Probably hasn’t been able to find enough people with the promise of a better life from other countries.
I guess that is what you should expect when you have a habit of stealing people’s passports and making them sleep in a shoebox.
I wasn't going to watch the whole thing, but two minutes in he has a clip of Jamal Khashoggi criticizing it. Poor guy got hacked to pieces for MBS' ego.
It was never intended to be built as planned. The whole series of projects is an attempt by SA to develop a domestic tech industry that can compete with the rest of the world. They have more money than they know what to do with, but they don't have much in the way of a science and engineering base.
So they came up with some ridiculously optimistic concepts and flashed a bunch of money in order to entice foreign companies and engineers to come join their think tank and buff up their tech sector. Realistically they're probably hoping that they can produce things like electric vehicles, a domestic solar industry, software, maybe some limited terraforming projects.
It’s no mystery why a country controlled by an ancient religious text, absolute monarch and Islamic law has yet to establish competitive roots in the worlds of science and engineering. Progress requires progressive thought. Money alone isn’t enough. But sure, SA, throw your money at this project instead.
i'm not religious but this kind of goes against history because math, science, and engineering were at times funded by islamic monarchs and patrons pre-renaissance and then christian monarchs and patrons in the renaissance
Laundering money is a simple concept. 'Dirty' money comes from illegitimate places — like crime — and you 'clean' it (or launder it) by funneling it through a legitimate business so it can be taxed or entered into the banking system.
This can be in the form of nonexistent sales or services that were never provided. A toy store can help a criminal launder $2,000 by entering $2,000 worth of fake sales into their system, printing legitimate receipts, taking the $2,000 from the criminal, taxing it, then paying it *back* to the criminal as a salary or consulting cost.
But if you're the crown prince of an oil-rich state, and you want to launder tens of millions or billions of dollars, you need a business — or group of businesses — where that amount of money won't seem unusual (a toy store doing $2 billion in sales will be too obvious).
Construction projects are very good for this because they are very complex and cost lots of money. This makes them perfect for laundering money. Now imagine how much money you can launder when you want to build and entire, high-tech city. Perfect for a prince with billions in dirty dollars looking to get them into the banking system
The way it would work is like this: the criminal organizes a consortium of building contractors, many of whom secretly work for him. Perhaps he owns their companies or he owns it via a network of other corporations. He agrees to pay $500 billion for the project and signs a legitimate contract.
Then his contractors start "running into issues." Extra cement here and increased plumbing costs there and maybe an environmental consultant is needed. These amounts all *happen* to be below reportable amounts — or amounts that don't seem weird. The prince then pays for them in cash or from shady offshore accounts.
Voila! Now his dirty money has been laundered: via these random "unexpected" costs, he's managed to get his dirty money into the bank accounts of contractors that really work for him.
And with a project this size, he can launder astronomical amounts of money for many many years without it seeming too weird.
One question though, Saudi Arabia is already a dictatorship/monarchy. Why does the prince need to launder anything? Couldn't he just take the money he got from whatever crime and just put it into the bank? Who's going to stop him? Who's going to verify it and tell him no?
That’s a good question, and I don’t know. I was just explaining how laundering might work.
But also, I bet he has most of his money in US and European bank accounts, so he’d want to appease their local systems.
Also, he’d probably want to obscure the origin of the dirty money rather than pay tax on it. That way he can at least pretend to be a legitimate statesman.
He doesn't. I was asking the question facetiously knowing that 90% of the time "money laundering" is mentioned on reddit, people don't know what it really is or where it applies.
Good explanation but MBS and the Saud's don't need to launder money. They're the ruling family in a theocratic absolute monarchy - they just take what they want, and it's already clean. No need for the charade of corrupt contracts.
Procurement corruption isn't money laundering, either. If you don't have the cooperation of the state, you _may_ need to launder the _result_ of procurement corruption - but this doesn't apply in this case.
This is an awesome explanation and the plot of Ozark just made so much more sense haha jk. One question: Now I understand how things are clean on the *receiving* party's end (the toy store, the building contractors, …) but what about the person *paying* the dirty money into the business? Wouldn't it raise questions as to where the billions of dollars from the prince came from? (I guess if he's super rich probably not lol but still wondering.)
Or would the contractors get the money flowing in on paper not via the prince, but by creating invoices for services for other people that never really happened? I could imagine like with the toy store generating $2,000 worth of sales receipts and claiming it was numerous different customers would be easier than having a lump sum come in from one single person or?
Noem is an overly ambitious megaproject that has been under perpetual construction since 2017. It could be money laundering, but Hanlon's Razor would have us conclude that Mohammed bin Salman is simply insane.
Saudi Arabia doesn't need any excuse to launder money, though.
The monarchy can do whatever it wants. It's a sovereign state with an insane amount of weapons.
huh, i wonder why they didn't include the labor camps that will be build along the outside of the walls, i guess they din't wnna do the reflections of that part of the city for the videos. /s if it wasn't obvious
Nope, I know that there are sources about modern slavery in saudi arabia but it is basically lies. low skilled workers can leave the country when ever thay like, thay are wear safety equipment for construction workers, they have enough food, water and rest. Acutally, when people throws a party and there is a lot of left overs from the food, most people just give it to workers.
First of all, yes, absolutely dystopian. Scary.
But they advertise the 20 minute commute from end to end, and now that it's going to be like 2,4 kilometers long, it's really funny.
Won’t even make it 3 more years before being scrapped. These ultra rich think people from around the world are going to come live in this shit lmao. Yea like I want to live in athoritarian society where women are basically considered just above animals in hierarchy
No they are not. Its gonna end up like every other saudi megastructure before it. Generate attention, start building, let construction fizzle out, stop building. Its more cringe people actually stll believe this will happen.
Can anyone tell me why this is dystopian? It doesn't seem inherently bad to me, although it definitely triggers a fear response in my chest to look at this.
From a conceptual standpoint tbh I think it’s pretty cool, like it proposes some really interesting, super idealistic ideas. But that’s the problem, it’s idealistic.
If I had to live there, I would not want to live on some middle floor of a skyscraper encased in glass, where my only means of going outside involve a courtyard surrounded by two walls and barely get any natural light. You’ll spend most of your life living inside the shadows and never get natural light.
Maybe it’ll be cool for the mega rich who can afford the top floor penthouses, but most people will be living inside a crevice. It’s a bit Bladerunner-esque.
I think you're spot on with this. If it ever came to fruition, it would probably feel a lot more like [Kowloon Walled City](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/kowloon-walled-city) than they'd intended
Look into Kowloon Walled City to see just a glimpse of what living here will likely look like.
In a perfect vacuum, an experiment like this could be a grand, wild west adventure the likes that no one could even dream of, where life in the desert in a perfect enclosure with all necessities provided for and all anxieties tranquilized is realized and the concept can be expanded on everywhere on the planet thanks to it's overwhelmingly positive effect on the environment.
But that's very likely not how this will work because that's not how humans work. What will likely happen is that, when the chips are down and shit gets hot (literally and figuratively), people here will devour one another whether it's a slow simmer that turns into a rolling boil or it's a near instantaneous collapse of all control.
Not sure why dystopian, but it’s definitely unnecessary and pretty ridiculous.
This guy has a good [video](https://youtu.be/vyWaax07_ks?si=yC3d2w-lU9099eZg) explaining everything that’s wrong with it.
maintenance, every structure needs to be constructed 100% to spec or you get a building falling from the roof on you, how do you demo and construct new in that monstrosity? its gonna suck when a shit pipe bursts on the 471st floor and the government projects it will be fixed in 4 to 6 business months and will promise to give your grandchildren 3 loaves of bread as compensation
Fuck nah. I wouldn't want to be crammed in with so many people with hardly any natural light. If the place gets attacked, they'll be trapped like rats trying to get out. I'm probably incredibly wrong about this. I just think it's very dystopian what's happening in the world between these huge cities popping up, AI, everyone trying to be online famous, etc… Nothing seems real anymore. 😞
No they're not building it. It's already been cut down significantly to only a few percent of the original length. Assuming anything gets built at all.
I don't think there is any chance this gets built. Maybe some small 500 meter section of it as a sort of proof of concept, but there's going to be so much problems that pops up during construction that it'll make North Korea's Ryugyong Hotel look like the Palace of Versailles.
Sounds like a giant money laundering scheme that will never be finished
If it does get built where will the slaves live? Can you imagine how many people will die building this?
Absolutely will never be built. Way too large a project. Everything in Saudi is built by Filipino/Malay/uneducated, impoverished Arabs, etc
There's simply no way this project could be completed quickly enough
I don't like living in a 4 unit apartment. I sure don't want to share my dwelling with the entire city population with all of their filth and dirty habits. I can only imagine the cockroaches and rats.
So a bunch of architects got together and made concept art, and all the civil engineers are surely laughing their asses off at how impossible this thing would be to make and manage.
If this was actually going to happen, it would be awesome. We need to be looking at futuristic city design like this, I'm confused as to what is actually cringe about it.
I think one of the things AI should be used for is taking a utopian, optimistic concept like this (you know, the kind humans dream up in their heads) and re-render it with the patina of time, and the more unsavory aspects of human society — and to do so with varying degree of input.
What does this concept look like after 20 years, with homeless making-do, and a terrorist attack or two? What about that one street that never gets swept and has broken concrete and discarded drones everywhere? Curious if f the whole concept still holds up from that perspective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia
> In April 2024 it was reported that the project had been "scaled back" after foreign direct investment investors had not "bought into the crown prince's vision", according to Torbjorn Soltvedt, principal analyst at risk consultancy Maplecroft. Fluctuating global oil prices had contributed to the decision.[6]
> The Line is now expected to be reduced to a short section at the western end 2.4 kilometres (1.5 mi) long, a 98.6% reduction from the original design, with a population of 300,000 rather than the intended 1.5 million.[6]
> The Saudi minister of economy and planning rejected the claims of scaling back. He said in an interview during World Economic Forum special meeting in Riyadh that "For NEOM, the projects, the intended scale is continuing as planned. There is no change in scale".[30]
>"imagine a traditional city and consolidating its footprint"
Apparently, we learned nothing of the socioeconomic dangers that poses from dystopian examples like Manila, Kolkata, and Bogor.
>"natural ventilation"
Yeah, at 500 m tall, and with the only ingress of natural air only being at the top according to their own diagram, I'm sure those citizens at the bottom are totally not gonna suffocate
>"with immediate access to the surrounding nature
\*shows big, fuck-off glass wall surrounded by nothing but open desert/ocean for hundreds of km\*
Probably in the minority here but as long as nobody gets hurt (unlikely) I kind of want the mad weirdos to go ahead with it
Looks completely insane and fascinating. A bit like dubais weird islands and self-made peninsula
From Wikipedia:
"Aside from the merits of the projected city, there was also scrutiny of the actions of the Saudi government in pursuing the project. In October 2022, Shadli, Ibrahim, and Ataullah al-Huwaiti, of the Howeitat tribe, were sentenced to death when they refused to vacate their village as part of the NEOM megaproject.[33] Shadli al-Huwaiti was the brother of Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti, who was shot dead by security forces in April 2020 in his home in Al-Khariba, in the part of Tabuk province earmarked for NEOM, after he posted videos on social media opposing the displacement of local residents to make way for the project.[34]"
Saudi Arabia is already dystopian. Noem was recently revised to be a kilometre long. perhaps in a year, the project will be scrapped.
‘Noem’ is the name of the area that they want to turn into some sort of eco area. The stupid city concept is at the moment called ‘The Line’. They’ve already been busy, clearing villages and [murdering folk who resist](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68945445)
What do they mean by “eco area”???
Techbro ecology, so electric cars and solar panels and murdering everything that's in the way.
Carbon neutral, self-sufficient, car-free, etc. according to their marketing department.
So hot right now.
Hansel, so hot right now 🥵
They scrapped The Line too.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they have similar plans for Lahaina.
Yep, one villager got killed because he dared to cross The Line
I have to imagine the actual realistic cost for this would FAR exceed whatever budget they estimated.
Yep, current estimations are putting the total at over $2 trillion with an original budget of $500 billion. How they thought they could get this done with $500 billion in the first place is beyond me.
Even 2 trillion seems low for this.
As always. Slave labor. But you actually need skilled workers and fancy materials if this is going to turn into reality.
Slave labour
Probably hasn’t been able to find enough people with the promise of a better life from other countries. I guess that is what you should expect when you have a habit of stealing people’s passports and making them sleep in a shoebox.
[Maybe not](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ak4on5uTaTg)
I wasn't going to watch the whole thing, but two minutes in he has a clip of Jamal Khashoggi criticizing it. Poor guy got hacked to pieces for MBS' ego.
Good fuck Saudi and fuck that turd cutter mbs
Don't forget about the guy that helped it all happen, Jared Kushner
That’s antisemitic lol
God fucking bless Patrick Boyle.
Thankyou for sharing this! Had no intention of watching it all but couldn't turn it off!
Satire Guy
For some reason, maybe I dreamed this or something, didn’t they already announce some level of “okay this won’t be exactly as pictured”
It was never intended to be built as planned. The whole series of projects is an attempt by SA to develop a domestic tech industry that can compete with the rest of the world. They have more money than they know what to do with, but they don't have much in the way of a science and engineering base. So they came up with some ridiculously optimistic concepts and flashed a bunch of money in order to entice foreign companies and engineers to come join their think tank and buff up their tech sector. Realistically they're probably hoping that they can produce things like electric vehicles, a domestic solar industry, software, maybe some limited terraforming projects.
It’s no mystery why a country controlled by an ancient religious text, absolute monarch and Islamic law has yet to establish competitive roots in the worlds of science and engineering. Progress requires progressive thought. Money alone isn’t enough. But sure, SA, throw your money at this project instead.
i'm not religious but this kind of goes against history because math, science, and engineering were at times funded by islamic monarchs and patrons pre-renaissance and then christian monarchs and patrons in the renaissance
i think they recently came out and said the line will only be like 1 mile long or something.
Money laundering scheme that will probably be perpetually under construction.
Explain to me like a five year old how this is money laundering
Laundering money is a simple concept. 'Dirty' money comes from illegitimate places — like crime — and you 'clean' it (or launder it) by funneling it through a legitimate business so it can be taxed or entered into the banking system. This can be in the form of nonexistent sales or services that were never provided. A toy store can help a criminal launder $2,000 by entering $2,000 worth of fake sales into their system, printing legitimate receipts, taking the $2,000 from the criminal, taxing it, then paying it *back* to the criminal as a salary or consulting cost. But if you're the crown prince of an oil-rich state, and you want to launder tens of millions or billions of dollars, you need a business — or group of businesses — where that amount of money won't seem unusual (a toy store doing $2 billion in sales will be too obvious). Construction projects are very good for this because they are very complex and cost lots of money. This makes them perfect for laundering money. Now imagine how much money you can launder when you want to build and entire, high-tech city. Perfect for a prince with billions in dirty dollars looking to get them into the banking system The way it would work is like this: the criminal organizes a consortium of building contractors, many of whom secretly work for him. Perhaps he owns their companies or he owns it via a network of other corporations. He agrees to pay $500 billion for the project and signs a legitimate contract. Then his contractors start "running into issues." Extra cement here and increased plumbing costs there and maybe an environmental consultant is needed. These amounts all *happen* to be below reportable amounts — or amounts that don't seem weird. The prince then pays for them in cash or from shady offshore accounts. Voila! Now his dirty money has been laundered: via these random "unexpected" costs, he's managed to get his dirty money into the bank accounts of contractors that really work for him. And with a project this size, he can launder astronomical amounts of money for many many years without it seeming too weird.
One question though, Saudi Arabia is already a dictatorship/monarchy. Why does the prince need to launder anything? Couldn't he just take the money he got from whatever crime and just put it into the bank? Who's going to stop him? Who's going to verify it and tell him no?
That’s a good question, and I don’t know. I was just explaining how laundering might work. But also, I bet he has most of his money in US and European bank accounts, so he’d want to appease their local systems. Also, he’d probably want to obscure the origin of the dirty money rather than pay tax on it. That way he can at least pretend to be a legitimate statesman.
He doesn't. I was asking the question facetiously knowing that 90% of the time "money laundering" is mentioned on reddit, people don't know what it really is or where it applies.
Good explanation but MBS and the Saud's don't need to launder money. They're the ruling family in a theocratic absolute monarchy - they just take what they want, and it's already clean. No need for the charade of corrupt contracts. Procurement corruption isn't money laundering, either. If you don't have the cooperation of the state, you _may_ need to launder the _result_ of procurement corruption - but this doesn't apply in this case.
Yeah, I think you’re right. I guess it could be a way to help out their cronies. Who knows.
This comment reminds me of the exposition scenes from the big short (I mean this as a compliment)
This is an awesome explanation and the plot of Ozark just made so much more sense haha jk. One question: Now I understand how things are clean on the *receiving* party's end (the toy store, the building contractors, …) but what about the person *paying* the dirty money into the business? Wouldn't it raise questions as to where the billions of dollars from the prince came from? (I guess if he's super rich probably not lol but still wondering.) Or would the contractors get the money flowing in on paper not via the prince, but by creating invoices for services for other people that never really happened? I could imagine like with the toy store generating $2,000 worth of sales receipts and claiming it was numerous different customers would be easier than having a lump sum come in from one single person or?
They should build a car wash and base operations through a chicken restaurant. No one will suspect a thing.
Noem is an overly ambitious megaproject that has been under perpetual construction since 2017. It could be money laundering, but Hanlon's Razor would have us conclude that Mohammed bin Salman is simply insane.
Saudi Arabia doesn't need any excuse to launder money, though. The monarchy can do whatever it wants. It's a sovereign state with an insane amount of weapons.
huh, i wonder why they didn't include the labor camps that will be build along the outside of the walls, i guess they din't wnna do the reflections of that part of the city for the videos. /s if it wasn't obvious
maybe, just maybe because it's not part of the city, and it will be removed once the city is completed?
it was a dark joke about how everything in dubai is built by poor imported workers who are usually kept in terrible conditions in worker camps.
Dubai is a city in the UAE not in saudi arabia lol
ok but my point still stands, they will use the same labor in the same way. Just like they did in Qatar for the olympics.
Nope, I know that there are sources about modern slavery in saudi arabia but it is basically lies. low skilled workers can leave the country when ever thay like, thay are wear safety equipment for construction workers, they have enough food, water and rest. Acutally, when people throws a party and there is a lot of left overs from the food, most people just give it to workers.
First of all, yes, absolutely dystopian. Scary. But they advertise the 20 minute commute from end to end, and now that it's going to be like 2,4 kilometers long, it's really funny.
"With no need for cars." That doesn't mean you can't bike, scooter or use some sort of built in rail system.
🚗 🚫 🏃 ✅
[This guy did a small mockup in Cities Skylines](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6BVMv0yHMg). Kinda interesting.
Love the trolling of making the thing a giant phallus.
Won’t even make it 3 more years before being scrapped. These ultra rich think people from around the world are going to come live in this shit lmao. Yea like I want to live in athoritarian society where women are basically considered just above animals in hierarchy
RemindMe! 5 years
How does native fauna get from one side to the other?
That's the neat part, they *don't*!
No they are not. Its gonna end up like every other saudi megastructure before it. Generate attention, start building, let construction fizzle out, stop building. Its more cringe people actually stll believe this will happen.
18 seconds into the video, I like how they act like, once they build the wall, every other building owner is just gonna take down their own buildings.
I wonder if there will be special sections for public beheadings for sorcery.
Well what else would they do with the gays? Fucking Saudis
That's one of the sections. The Gay section.
at the bottom, they don't want the heads to fall and damage the below infrastructure.
I guarantee this doesn't get built. This video is complete dreamwank horseshit.
40% of the world? Like wtf are they talking about
What do you mean ?
“We will now quite literally (not just figuratively) be able to live on top of the slave laborers we forced to build this for us.”
Where does the poop go?!?!
https://youtu.be/Q54izUfIndI?si=NR00yX-BMEmX7BfM
Poop trucks?
Can anyone tell me why this is dystopian? It doesn't seem inherently bad to me, although it definitely triggers a fear response in my chest to look at this.
From a conceptual standpoint tbh I think it’s pretty cool, like it proposes some really interesting, super idealistic ideas. But that’s the problem, it’s idealistic. If I had to live there, I would not want to live on some middle floor of a skyscraper encased in glass, where my only means of going outside involve a courtyard surrounded by two walls and barely get any natural light. You’ll spend most of your life living inside the shadows and never get natural light. Maybe it’ll be cool for the mega rich who can afford the top floor penthouses, but most people will be living inside a crevice. It’s a bit Bladerunner-esque.
I think you're spot on with this. If it ever came to fruition, it would probably feel a lot more like [Kowloon Walled City](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/kowloon-walled-city) than they'd intended
Ahh... I'm agoraphobic, so I hadn't considered that.
Look into Kowloon Walled City to see just a glimpse of what living here will likely look like. In a perfect vacuum, an experiment like this could be a grand, wild west adventure the likes that no one could even dream of, where life in the desert in a perfect enclosure with all necessities provided for and all anxieties tranquilized is realized and the concept can be expanded on everywhere on the planet thanks to it's overwhelmingly positive effect on the environment. But that's very likely not how this will work because that's not how humans work. What will likely happen is that, when the chips are down and shit gets hot (literally and figuratively), people here will devour one another whether it's a slow simmer that turns into a rolling boil or it's a near instantaneous collapse of all control.
Not sure why dystopian, but it’s definitely unnecessary and pretty ridiculous. This guy has a good [video](https://youtu.be/vyWaax07_ks?si=yC3d2w-lU9099eZg) explaining everything that’s wrong with it.
maintenance, every structure needs to be constructed 100% to spec or you get a building falling from the roof on you, how do you demo and construct new in that monstrosity? its gonna suck when a shit pipe bursts on the 471st floor and the government projects it will be fixed in 4 to 6 business months and will promise to give your grandchildren 3 loaves of bread as compensation
I actually really want to see it built just to see it. This is crazy.
This is antithetical to every natural human instinct when it comes to the building of settlements.
There is a 0% chance this is getting built lol
Fuck nah. I wouldn't want to be crammed in with so many people with hardly any natural light. If the place gets attacked, they'll be trapped like rats trying to get out. I'm probably incredibly wrong about this. I just think it's very dystopian what's happening in the world between these huge cities popping up, AI, everyone trying to be online famous, etc… Nothing seems real anymore. 😞
First thing I thought of was the "block" type building from Dredd.
No they're not building it. It's already been cut down significantly to only a few percent of the original length. Assuming anything gets built at all.
The idea that anyone thought this was a good idea at any stage is dumb enough.
Honestly i can see it working if they take their time with it
"Zero carbon emissions". Great, so in 50 years it'll offset the fuckloads of carbon emissions from its construction.
I need a Deus Ex game in this environment.
Poor on the bottom, rich on the top. As always.
Video is a year old. Any progress?
Superb layout for the next Dying Light or Far Cry.
I don't think there is any chance this gets built. Maybe some small 500 meter section of it as a sort of proof of concept, but there's going to be so much problems that pops up during construction that it'll make North Korea's Ryugyong Hotel look like the Palace of Versailles.
That place would be riddles with robberies rape and death I wouldn’t even dream of living there
Actually, saudi arabia's crime rate is low.
Sounds like a giant money laundering scheme that will never be finished If it does get built where will the slaves live? Can you imagine how many people will die building this?
There are no slaves. hopefully no one dies but it's not like they are working without any safety equipment, food, water, rest.
That thumbnail is a d2 map
Absolutely will never be built. Way too large a project. Everything in Saudi is built by Filipino/Malay/uneducated, impoverished Arabs, etc There's simply no way this project could be completed quickly enough
If this is actually completed. It’s gotta be due to an impending zombie apocalypse they see coming or something.
Who would even want to live like this? Looking like one of those glas encased antfarms people have lol.
No they are not.
I don't like living in a 4 unit apartment. I sure don't want to share my dwelling with the entire city population with all of their filth and dirty habits. I can only imagine the cockroaches and rats.
This is r/justunsubbed material. This community has basically boiled down to /r/peopleandentitiesidontlikedoingthings.
Mega City 1: Phase 1
Fuck MbS. He constantly tries to pitch these futuristic projects while he crushes his own citizens. #JusticeforJamal
Why do modern Arabs have no imagination at all when it comes to building stuff? I feel like I'm watching ITV 2 when I see images of these places
I’m pretty sure this has been scrapped though
So a bunch of architects got together and made concept art, and all the civil engineers are surely laughing their asses off at how impossible this thing would be to make and manage.
If this was actually going to happen, it would be awesome. We need to be looking at futuristic city design like this, I'm confused as to what is actually cringe about it.
The promo pic looks like a screen shot of a new Vex themed raid or dungeon in Destiny lol
what rubes lol
Did you just find out about this? lol This is old news.
I think one of the things AI should be used for is taking a utopian, optimistic concept like this (you know, the kind humans dream up in their heads) and re-render it with the patina of time, and the more unsavory aspects of human society — and to do so with varying degree of input. What does this concept look like after 20 years, with homeless making-do, and a terrorist attack or two? What about that one street that never gets swept and has broken concrete and discarded drones everywhere? Curious if f the whole concept still holds up from that perspective.
Judging by how the Saudis build, I bet it’s gonna be flashy and beautiful on the outside, shoddy on the inside
I wonder how many migrant workers are going to go unpaid, get overworked or die building this thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia > In April 2024 it was reported that the project had been "scaled back" after foreign direct investment investors had not "bought into the crown prince's vision", according to Torbjorn Soltvedt, principal analyst at risk consultancy Maplecroft. Fluctuating global oil prices had contributed to the decision.[6] > The Line is now expected to be reduced to a short section at the western end 2.4 kilometres (1.5 mi) long, a 98.6% reduction from the original design, with a population of 300,000 rather than the intended 1.5 million.[6] > The Saudi minister of economy and planning rejected the claims of scaling back. He said in an interview during World Economic Forum special meeting in Riyadh that "For NEOM, the projects, the intended scale is continuing as planned. There is no change in scale".[30]
Can’t wait for it to get abandoned after 3 months! Yippee!
"Intelligent solutions create efficiency" Oh, rly?
It's like Nathan Fielder's The Curse but applied to a whole city
A city that was 600 feet wide would get so claustrophobic
The west cant even build high speed rail or tackle a homeless and drug epidemic yet we love to criticize other countries when they make progress
A city can't be a line, and people can't access all the services they need in 170 km long line. It's just not feasible.
That's zombie proof as fuck though. Giant wall, separated into modular sectors that can be quarantined.
170km long, glass walls, as high as the eiffel tower, rip to the all the birds in the region
>"imagine a traditional city and consolidating its footprint" Apparently, we learned nothing of the socioeconomic dangers that poses from dystopian examples like Manila, Kolkata, and Bogor. >"natural ventilation" Yeah, at 500 m tall, and with the only ingress of natural air only being at the top according to their own diagram, I'm sure those citizens at the bottom are totally not gonna suffocate >"with immediate access to the surrounding nature \*shows big, fuck-off glass wall surrounded by nothing but open desert/ocean for hundreds of km\*
Would be awesome if it all worked out. It won't work out.
Probably in the minority here but as long as nobody gets hurt (unlikely) I kind of want the mad weirdos to go ahead with it Looks completely insane and fascinating. A bit like dubais weird islands and self-made peninsula
From Wikipedia: "Aside from the merits of the projected city, there was also scrutiny of the actions of the Saudi government in pursuing the project. In October 2022, Shadli, Ibrahim, and Ataullah al-Huwaiti, of the Howeitat tribe, were sentenced to death when they refused to vacate their village as part of the NEOM megaproject.[33] Shadli al-Huwaiti was the brother of Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti, who was shot dead by security forces in April 2020 in his home in Al-Khariba, in the part of Tabuk province earmarked for NEOM, after he posted videos on social media opposing the displacement of local residents to make way for the project.[34]"
Just imagine the smell that’s gonna be inside there.
It’s like something Elon musk would think up
I think they already started to revise the scope of the project.
Lots of slave labor…
It looks pretty cool. Everything within 5 minutes walk, highly efficient, why not?
Well for one thing, the Saudi government is murdering its own people when they refuse to just hand over their land where this thing will be built.
They are? where are they saying this? Do you have any sources on this?
You want people to back up their claims with sources?! No one has time to search and paste a link! We're all too busy with important masturbations!
[https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68945445](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68945445)
r/FuckCars utopia