Cities today are mostly rooms in (home/office/store) units in buildings separated by roads. Besides roads, cities provide city services like power, water, sewage, and telecom. Buildings channel these services to units and add more like lights, air/heat, security, and elevators. Units are managed by particular orgs, who may add further local services like receptionists and IT, while people and small groups have their own rooms, over which they have some discretion.
Is the shape chosen deliberately to block out the sun for most of the day? That would make sense, since the sun is so brutal in Saudi Arabia. Being exposed to direct sun there is deadly. especially for those of us evolved to more northern climates.
A bit dubious. Saudi Arabia is in the desert, so their bird population must be pretty low. Then you have to compare the bird strike risk of "the line" with the bird strike risk of an equivalent amount of ordinary urban development, which is also typically covered in glass. I don't see the argument that "the line" would be worse. It could be better if there is less glass surface area per housing unit, and if more of it is up so high that birds don't fly there.
A bigger ecological problem could be that it's 500m tall, 170km long. That creates a complete ecological barrier for all animals and probably most birds. Somewhat mitigated by being in the desert, but still.
I agree with the second paragraph, but regarding the first, seabirds can nest in completely inhospitable places as long as a sea with fish is nearby. Penguins don't live in Antarctica for the lush food-covered land.
A few months ago I talked with a slightly well connected Saudi at one of the crypto/network states conferences about this Line. Confirmed my impression it was a scam.
t’s not a scam, the plans are serious. Problems are:
* Some of the features are specific guidance from the crown prince, deemed by those working on it as unpractical / impossible.
* Saudi / PIF has nowhere near enough money to realize all the megaprojects, some things have to go or be made less ambitious
* Internal financial assumptions are ridiculous and/or aspirational- so financial projections of the great projects, while being not great, are still way too optimistic.
* There are sincere recruiting challenges getting it all done.
* There is nowhere near enough construction companies / materials to realize it all. Foreign companies are hesitant to invest.
* Root cause of it all, the information ecosystem is dysfunctional. People are afraid to contradict superiors, there is overreliance on external companies without skin in the game. It’s basically one castle of lies, in which no one is incentivized to tell painful truths.
I could go into great detail, which I will not, out of professional integrity / concerns for physical security. Lets just say that actually working for a monarchy quickly rids you of Yarvinesque illusions on how they are more likely to act upon reality.
One of the biggest issues with creating a desirable megastructure/arcology is, as you say, "its pretty hard to just start a new city." But *why* is this? A few months ago Scott Alexander posted arguing that massively increasing housing would actually increase housing prices (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/change-my-mind-density-increases?r=am5l&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web) - he admits he got the economics wrong, but he got the psychology right, in this critical area. Namely, people want to live where other people want to live, and the best indicator of where other people want to live is where they are already living. City population - ceteris paribus - has significant signalling value to indicate that there is something worthwhile about living somewhere. You could have the most beautiful and luxurious city on earth, but if the only inhabitants are going to be the maintenance staff, neophiles, and architecture enthusiasts, it's not going to be stable in the long term.
Now, there is a way of overcoming this: convince people that they want to live there before there are lots of other interesting people living there. One way to do this would be a massive marketing campaign, which it seems MBS has already started. You could pay celebrities and influencers to live there - even just a few months a year in order to produce content about the city could be enough to generate hype. And you could also give incentives to induce people to move there - free or cheap housing for a limited time, guaranteed employment, or perhaps Saudi Arabia can waive some of the harsher sociocultural laws for just the Line in order to induce the most liberal segment of Saudi population to move there to have a native-yet-global "base" population as a sort of bridgehead between the national government and the desired "global elite" population.
My sense is most people dislike it because it's in Saudi Arabia / the Middle East (same reasons people - wrongly imo - dislike Dubai), rather than for megastructure specific reasons. That said, I genuinely don't know how you manage the governance and convince people to live there.
I think the biggest thing people dislike with megastructures wasn't mentioned and is the sense that you will be subject to the negative externalities of all other residents in a way that wouldn't hold in a collection of smaller structures. I don't know how true this is, but it seems like an interesting (difficult) governance problem - perhaps it could only work if coupled with fairly 'authoritarian' law and order type policies which will probably kill western support.
I'm not Felix but I think he's probably thinking of things like noise pollution, air pollution, and negative small-network effects like gossip/lack of anonymity/ inability to go to a quiet corner of the local park and "get away from it all". But I don't see why most of those externalities can't be abated by proper engineering.
I do see the lack of access to "real" nature being the biggest drawback of megastructure/arcology living. There's a lot of research on the necessity of nature to mental health (lots of studies cited on this page https://www.apa.org/monitor/2020/04/nurtured-nature), but I would like to see more information on how "deep" into nature you need to be to get the benefits. The Line is depicted in all the stock images as having lots of plants and nature inside, but what % of the benefit does that have compared to being in a forest surrounded by trees and streams for kilometers in every direction?
I may have been unclear and was more thinking of anti-social behaviour and damage to common areas + shared / common ownership problems. When buying a unit in a shared project, people often worry about poor behaviour from neighbours causing others to leave / not contribute to shared resources. This can lead to a spiral of poor maintenance, declining property value etc. This seems to happen not infrequently in small estates / compounds. In a megastructure, this kind of pattern could feasibly spread much further, and so in that sense you are exposed to the (downstream impacts) of bad behaviour from a much larger group of people.
Not insurmountable with districting, exclusivity, and smart leasehold type arrangements (+ strict enforcement), but you need to both solve the problem and convince people you've solved it + I expect many of the measures will not be popular with Western observers (maybe not important). Basically, to work I expect it needs to run like a significantly stricter version of Singapore.
I talk in my post about the hardest problem being designing the modularity structure. But I worry much less about crime given the wealth requirements here and it being run by Saudi Arabia.
There probably won't be much demand for super-population-dense megastructures. Maybe if the third world starts demanding a higher standard of living, megastructures would be the only way to supply it, as the cost and environmental impact of a megastructure apartment could be small compared to conventional modern housing. Fairly speculative at this point, though.
Even this one without a constitution or the need to tax his citizens? Both the English & French kinds have been overthrown when they got into a dispute with the elites they needed to summon when it was time to raise taxes. Saudi Arabia recently dismembered a citizen & prominent critic of theirs (one who was previously well connected to the elite) in an embassy, and as far as I can tell faced no internal backlash as a result.
I think you'd have to dismember an inordinate number of people to get 9 million to unwillingly move there - if you could move that many the vibes would likely be so bad that high productivity people you might hope to attract worldwide would then not come
They will not move capitals. You should not forget that a large part of KSA population still live in relatively underdeveloped Northern / Southern countryside. They are aiming for significant urbanization, their plans for Riyadh and to a lesser degree Jeddah are also ambitious. However, NEOM is also aiming to attract a significant amount of foreign workers - they aim for a Dubai-style model.
I'm not claiming SA will move capitals. I'm saying other countries have gotten people to move to entirely new cities so it doesn't sound like such a high bar for SA to get people to move.
Funnily enough, if you ask KSA citizens what they are angry about, many mention the 15% VAT they pay (was raised 2 years ago). People are used to zero to low taxes, transitioning to a "normal" tax regime as outcome of the economic diversification will prove difficult. KSA will be a 40M population country, it cannot be run like Dubai / Singapore. I think you are right that KSA leadership is relatively unconstrained, but they are currently living in the "dream time". If Vision 2030 will fail, and the economy stagnates as result from lower profit margin on oil sales / extraction (which is the internal expectation), popular unrest will become a serious issue.
I think you're right about the dreamtime. As Greg Cochran has written*, they could try investing their (relatively) temporary oil windfall into moonshots like Colombus' expedition, but they aren't going to do that and instead will likely blow their money in conventional ways.
They are actually doing that. There is a very ambitious space program, NEOM is supposed to be the most advanced urban project ever, they are accelerating investment in AI / tech and for longevity, you should check Hevolution Foundation, which is about to become the biggest funder in the field.
All these programs have their problems, which are the ones I outline in my reaction to Anatoly's post. I would actually for *less* moonshots, they should start with getting basic governance and economic performance right, learning how to actually *do* things in the real world and growing their human capital. Once they have done this, they can try the moonshots.
One of my main conclusions is that "a lot of money" is not enough to manage moonshots, especially when you don't want to completely outsource control to foreigners, or cannot for political reasons.
Predicting what people would choose, especially when the product is of a novel kind, is very risky. Incremental trial-and-error is often the best approach, but that is cannot be used here since the product is an entire city of such radical design. The project involves a leap of faith (in the prescience of the designers) that is very likely unjustified.
Is the shape chosen deliberately to block out the sun for most of the day? That would make sense, since the sun is so brutal in Saudi Arabia. Being exposed to direct sun there is deadly. especially for those of us evolved to more northern climates.
That vast reflective surface is an ecological disaster to begin with.
How so? Higher albedo reduces global warming and I'm skeptical the desert hosts more biomass than the greenery the city will allow to exist.
Vast reflective surfaces have nothing to do with albedo and everything to do with ecological disasters as far as birds are involved.
A bit dubious. Saudi Arabia is in the desert, so their bird population must be pretty low. Then you have to compare the bird strike risk of "the line" with the bird strike risk of an equivalent amount of ordinary urban development, which is also typically covered in glass. I don't see the argument that "the line" would be worse. It could be better if there is less glass surface area per housing unit, and if more of it is up so high that birds don't fly there.
A bigger ecological problem could be that it's 500m tall, 170km long. That creates a complete ecological barrier for all animals and probably most birds. Somewhat mitigated by being in the desert, but still.
I agree with the second paragraph, but regarding the first, seabirds can nest in completely inhospitable places as long as a sea with fish is nearby. Penguins don't live in Antarctica for the lush food-covered land.
A few months ago I talked with a slightly well connected Saudi at one of the crypto/network states conferences about this Line. Confirmed my impression it was a scam.
Can you offer any more details?
t’s not a scam, the plans are serious. Problems are:
* Some of the features are specific guidance from the crown prince, deemed by those working on it as unpractical / impossible.
* Saudi / PIF has nowhere near enough money to realize all the megaprojects, some things have to go or be made less ambitious
* Internal financial assumptions are ridiculous and/or aspirational- so financial projections of the great projects, while being not great, are still way too optimistic.
* There are sincere recruiting challenges getting it all done.
* There is nowhere near enough construction companies / materials to realize it all. Foreign companies are hesitant to invest.
* Root cause of it all, the information ecosystem is dysfunctional. People are afraid to contradict superiors, there is overreliance on external companies without skin in the game. It’s basically one castle of lies, in which no one is incentivized to tell painful truths.
I could go into great detail, which I will not, out of professional integrity / concerns for physical security. Lets just say that actually working for a monarchy quickly rids you of Yarvinesque illusions on how they are more likely to act upon reality.
These seem plausible issues.
This essay brings to mind this city in Alaska which is a single building:
https://www.npr.org/2015/01/18/378162264/welcome-to-whittier-alaska-a-community-under-one-roof
Also these government projects that couldn't attract residents:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt-Pa5s5zZI
One of the biggest issues with creating a desirable megastructure/arcology is, as you say, "its pretty hard to just start a new city." But *why* is this? A few months ago Scott Alexander posted arguing that massively increasing housing would actually increase housing prices (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/change-my-mind-density-increases?r=am5l&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web) - he admits he got the economics wrong, but he got the psychology right, in this critical area. Namely, people want to live where other people want to live, and the best indicator of where other people want to live is where they are already living. City population - ceteris paribus - has significant signalling value to indicate that there is something worthwhile about living somewhere. You could have the most beautiful and luxurious city on earth, but if the only inhabitants are going to be the maintenance staff, neophiles, and architecture enthusiasts, it's not going to be stable in the long term.
Now, there is a way of overcoming this: convince people that they want to live there before there are lots of other interesting people living there. One way to do this would be a massive marketing campaign, which it seems MBS has already started. You could pay celebrities and influencers to live there - even just a few months a year in order to produce content about the city could be enough to generate hype. And you could also give incentives to induce people to move there - free or cheap housing for a limited time, guaranteed employment, or perhaps Saudi Arabia can waive some of the harsher sociocultural laws for just the Line in order to induce the most liberal segment of Saudi population to move there to have a native-yet-global "base" population as a sort of bridgehead between the national government and the desired "global elite" population.
Business has long known about creating buzz and expectations to drive a new fashion. Can work for cities too.
My sense is most people dislike it because it's in Saudi Arabia / the Middle East (same reasons people - wrongly imo - dislike Dubai), rather than for megastructure specific reasons. That said, I genuinely don't know how you manage the governance and convince people to live there.
I think the biggest thing people dislike with megastructures wasn't mentioned and is the sense that you will be subject to the negative externalities of all other residents in a way that wouldn't hold in a collection of smaller structures. I don't know how true this is, but it seems like an interesting (difficult) governance problem - perhaps it could only work if coupled with fairly 'authoritarian' law and order type policies which will probably kill western support.
What sort of negative externalities did you have in mind?
I'm not Felix but I think he's probably thinking of things like noise pollution, air pollution, and negative small-network effects like gossip/lack of anonymity/ inability to go to a quiet corner of the local park and "get away from it all". But I don't see why most of those externalities can't be abated by proper engineering.
I do see the lack of access to "real" nature being the biggest drawback of megastructure/arcology living. There's a lot of research on the necessity of nature to mental health (lots of studies cited on this page https://www.apa.org/monitor/2020/04/nurtured-nature), but I would like to see more information on how "deep" into nature you need to be to get the benefits. The Line is depicted in all the stock images as having lots of plants and nature inside, but what % of the benefit does that have compared to being in a forest surrounded by trees and streams for kilometers in every direction?
Thanks!
I may have been unclear and was more thinking of anti-social behaviour and damage to common areas + shared / common ownership problems. When buying a unit in a shared project, people often worry about poor behaviour from neighbours causing others to leave / not contribute to shared resources. This can lead to a spiral of poor maintenance, declining property value etc. This seems to happen not infrequently in small estates / compounds. In a megastructure, this kind of pattern could feasibly spread much further, and so in that sense you are exposed to the (downstream impacts) of bad behaviour from a much larger group of people.
Not insurmountable with districting, exclusivity, and smart leasehold type arrangements (+ strict enforcement), but you need to both solve the problem and convince people you've solved it + I expect many of the measures will not be popular with Western observers (maybe not important). Basically, to work I expect it needs to run like a significantly stricter version of Singapore.
I talk in my post about the hardest problem being designing the modularity structure. But I worry much less about crime given the wealth requirements here and it being run by Saudi Arabia.
There probably won't be much demand for super-population-dense megastructures. Maybe if the third world starts demanding a higher standard of living, megastructures would be the only way to supply it, as the cost and environmental impact of a megastructure apartment could be small compared to conventional modern housing. Fairly speculative at this point, though.
Saudi Arabia is a monarchy. Why would they be constrained by such "vibes"? Who is the Jane Jacobs of SA more powerful than their Robert Moses?
Monarchs are very much constrained by the opinions of their citizens.
All governments require the consent of the governed - in some systems explicitly, in others tacitly.
Even this one without a constitution or the need to tax his citizens? Both the English & French kinds have been overthrown when they got into a dispute with the elites they needed to summon when it was time to raise taxes. Saudi Arabia recently dismembered a citizen & prominent critic of theirs (one who was previously well connected to the elite) in an embassy, and as far as I can tell faced no internal backlash as a result.
I think you'd have to dismember an inordinate number of people to get 9 million to unwillingly move there - if you could move that many the vibes would likely be so bad that high productivity people you might hope to attract worldwide would then not come
Countries have moved capitals before and gotten people to move to entirely new cities as part of that.
They will not move capitals. You should not forget that a large part of KSA population still live in relatively underdeveloped Northern / Southern countryside. They are aiming for significant urbanization, their plans for Riyadh and to a lesser degree Jeddah are also ambitious. However, NEOM is also aiming to attract a significant amount of foreign workers - they aim for a Dubai-style model.
I'm not claiming SA will move capitals. I'm saying other countries have gotten people to move to entirely new cities so it doesn't sound like such a high bar for SA to get people to move.
Funnily enough, if you ask KSA citizens what they are angry about, many mention the 15% VAT they pay (was raised 2 years ago). People are used to zero to low taxes, transitioning to a "normal" tax regime as outcome of the economic diversification will prove difficult. KSA will be a 40M population country, it cannot be run like Dubai / Singapore. I think you are right that KSA leadership is relatively unconstrained, but they are currently living in the "dream time". If Vision 2030 will fail, and the economy stagnates as result from lower profit margin on oil sales / extraction (which is the internal expectation), popular unrest will become a serious issue.
I think you're right about the dreamtime. As Greg Cochran has written*, they could try investing their (relatively) temporary oil windfall into moonshots like Colombus' expedition, but they aren't going to do that and instead will likely blow their money in conventional ways.
* https://twitter.com/gcochran99/status/1547989875734941697
They are actually doing that. There is a very ambitious space program, NEOM is supposed to be the most advanced urban project ever, they are accelerating investment in AI / tech and for longevity, you should check Hevolution Foundation, which is about to become the biggest funder in the field.
All these programs have their problems, which are the ones I outline in my reaction to Anatoly's post. I would actually for *less* moonshots, they should start with getting basic governance and economic performance right, learning how to actually *do* things in the real world and growing their human capital. Once they have done this, they can try the moonshots.
One of my main conclusions is that "a lot of money" is not enough to manage moonshots, especially when you don't want to completely outsource control to foreigners, or cannot for political reasons.
I used the term "moonshot", but the US didn't make money from going to the moon (unlike Spain's colonizing of the Americas).
Predicting what people would choose, especially when the product is of a novel kind, is very risky. Incremental trial-and-error is often the best approach, but that is cannot be used here since the product is an entire city of such radical design. The project involves a leap of faith (in the prescience of the designers) that is very likely unjustified.
Surely the same considerations would have applied to the very same design but arranged in a circular (unfilled) shape
Yes, that design shares many features with the one they chose.
Well, I suppose they wouldn't have been able to adopt the double line as they have now, as that in a circular fashion would make people feel trapped.
While curved buildings aren't quite as easy to build.
They make up for it in coolness. Apple HQ?