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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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