A 105-mile-long city will snake through the Saudi desert

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A tall and narrow stripe of a city more than 105 miles long, teeming with 9 million residents and running entirely on renewable energy — that's the vision Saudi Arabia's leaders have for The Line, part of a "giga-project" that will reshape the kingdom's northwest.Get more news about Saudi Arabia Projected Window,you can vist our website!

Newly revealed design concepts show a futuristic walled city — its open interior is enclosed on both sides by a mirrored façade — stretching from the Red Sea eastward across the desert and into a mountain range.Construction has already begun, and Saudi projections call for 1.5 million people to live in The Line by 2030. The unconventional megacity is part of the government's ambitious Neom development project, which released conceptual videos showing the city's high walls enclosing trees, gardens and other plant life, nestling communities among work and recreational structures.

The designs revealed today for the city's vertically layered communities will challenge the traditional flat, horizontal cities and create a model for nature preservation and enhanced human livability," Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said on Monday, as he unveiled the new designs.

The designers say the structure will maintain an ideal climate year-round, thanks to its mix of shade, sunlight and ventilation. But not everyone was as keen on the concept of living between gigantic walls in the Saudi desert.

"I never seen something more dystopian," one commenter wrote in reply to a video of The Line posted by the Saudi Press Agency.
It's like wanting to live on Mars, an expert says
The idea of solving urban problems by creating a city from scratch isn't new. It's been tried before, from Brasília and India's Chandigarh to Malaysia's Putrajaya and Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, as Carlos Felipe Pardo, a senior adviser to the New Urban Mobility Alliance, notes.

"This solution is a little bit like wanting to live on Mars because things on Earth are very messy," Pardo, who's based in Colombia, tells NPR via email.

Despite starting with a clean slate, such elaborate urban plans have generally "created new urban settings where problems have also arisen," Pardo says.While he grants that the approach can take on some typical city challenges head-on, Pardo says that it doesn't help people already living with problems elsewhere.

Looking at designs for The Line, Pardo worries that its high-tech approach seems to ignore people's desire to simply go outside, to experience something in a city that isn't man-made.

Posted 14 Jan 2023

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