Saudi Arabia To Scale Back Neom Megaproject (ft.com) 56
Saudi Arabia is preparing to significantly scale back Neom, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's flagship development that sprawls across a Belgium-sized stretch of Red Sea coastline and was once billed as the world's largest construction site. Financial Times is reporting that Prince Mohammed, who chairs the project, now envisions something "far smaller" as a year-long review nears completion. The Line, a futuristic 170-kilometer linear city that served as Neom's centerpiece, will be radically reimagined as a result, the report added.
Architects are already working on a more modest design that would repurpose infrastructure built over the past few years. Neom could pivot toward becoming a data center hub, taking advantage of seawater cooling from its coastal location as Saudi Arabia pushes to become a leading AI player. The Trojena ski resort is also being downsized and will no longer host the 2029 Asian Winter Games as originally planned. Construction largely stalled after longtime CEO Nadhmi al-Nasr abruptly departed in November 2024.
Architects are already working on a more modest design that would repurpose infrastructure built over the past few years. Neom could pivot toward becoming a data center hub, taking advantage of seawater cooling from its coastal location as Saudi Arabia pushes to become a leading AI player. The Trojena ski resort is also being downsized and will no longer host the 2029 Asian Winter Games as originally planned. Construction largely stalled after longtime CEO Nadhmi al-Nasr abruptly departed in November 2024.
Scaling back again? (Score:4, Insightful)
Feel like over the past 3 years we've had multiple stories about this project scaling back, 3 or 4 more times and this will just be a regular office building.
In other news my personal Dyson sphere has been scaled back yet again! How could anyone have seen that such a thing is an unfeasible fantasy.
Re: Scaling back again? (Score:2)
Is it usb-pd or did you go down to 5v yet?
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In other news my personal Dyson sphere has been scaled back yet again!
Oh, no! It's a Dyson [wikipedia.org] Sphero [wikipedia.org] now, isn't it?
What (Score:2)
This is somehow news? This has been "scaled back" half an hour after the original presentation, what are you talking about?
It did what it was meant to do - plaster saudi allover internet - did it well, now it's time to finish all the beach resorts and get some cash flowing in.
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Re: What (Score:2)
Well that's ok, plenty of solar estate and hoping to employ local fatsos to do some work for their chicken nuggets and coke instead of just siphoning off social security
Scaled back to what, exactly? (Score:2)
It seems like the Neom project has been scaled back a few times at this point.
I'm wondering what's left at this point? A modest sized building and a port?
Re: Scaled back to what, exactly? (Score:2)
Neom hasn't been scaled back, just line. Plenty of REALLY nice beach resorts
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It takes a big thinker to think big (Score:2)
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Yep. Big egos think big but never deliver in the long term. They can create spectacular straw-fires though.
Any resemblance to a certain ballroom or to efforts to annex some countries are obviously pure coincidence. Incidentally, have they acquitted Maduro yet?
Belgium-sized (Score:4, Funny)
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's flagship development that sprawls across a Belgium-sized stretch of Red Sea coastline and was once billed as the world's largest construction site.
That is about 4.3 million football fields.
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Hmm, that comes out to me as 108,343 Libraries of Congress, and there are about 53 football fields to a Library of Congress. So that would work out to about 5.75 million football fields. That could just be a bit of drift from multiple conversions, but I don't think it should be by that much. We might be differing in our standard for football field size though. My definition includes both end zones, but could yours be including areas beyond that.
From Belgium size... (Score:3)
Re:From Belgium size... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:From Belgium size... (Score:4, Funny)
Ironic if it ends up Vatican-sized.
Bummer! (Score:2)
Reality strikes again! It always does in the end.
Claustrophobia (Score:2)
The Line was the worst idea ever. 200 meters is way too thin, it needed to be at least 400 meters wide. 200 meters is the distance you walk in about 2 minutes. A mediocre golfer can whack the ball farther than that. Speaking of sports you can't fit a stadium in there.
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It stuck me as someone watched Snowpiercer and saw the class-divide among the length of the train and thought, "that's a good idea, we should build a city like that!"
And in some ways for social control it makes sense, basically if no one is allowed outside without express permission and oversight and subject to summary execution if caught out there, then any attempt at revolution from the unwashed masses at the bottom of society would be very difficult to bring to bear. The city itself makes it difficult t
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Re:Claustrophobia (Score:5, Insightful)
What I do wonder is how many Saudis have the skills needed to provide the services needed by this project?
None. The vast majority of work done in Saudi is done by immigrant slave labour. I say slave labour because they take their passports from them when they enter the country so they can't leave. They're also forced to live in poor conditions and work horrific hours. The rate of work injuries and deaths is shocking.
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Belgium (Score:2)
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Do you mean the big island, or the state?
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Not gonna lie . . . I thought Hawaii was bigger than Maryland.
Line was always silly for geometry and economics (Score:3)
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The Line was always a deeply silly idea. Cities work due to density and having easy access to many things, while getting a lot of use of the same infrastructure. A city's efficiency and degree of flexible access scales at a better than linear rate with population because of the geometry. If I'm in a given location then if I can access any location within radius R of me, that means the number of locations available goes up as roughly R^2. If one has a giant line, it only goes up like R. The entire idea of The Line read like the sort of thing that a 10 year old had and thought was really cool, and then somehow got to do it. Which given how absolutely spoiled the Saudi princes are, it wouldn't surprise me if it was the case that Mohammed bin Salman had this idea when he was a kid, and no one since then has pushed back on it because they are afraid of being Khashoggied.
Except "R" really depends on your ability to travel. Which means what really matters is your proximity to transit and major roads.
I think the Line is probably a bad idea, but I don't think that's the reason why. I think the bigger issue is that cities are ultimately organic creations, shops, industry, and residences show up where they're needed. I'm not sure a planned city will be economically successful.
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We have not had any attempts at competently "planned cities" so far. It was always somebody trying to set themselves a monument to be remembered by. That cannot go well.
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Except "R" really depends on your ability to travel. Which means what really matters is your proximity to transit and major roads.
That is only half of the ability to travel. The second one is the capacity and speed of transit and roads. That does not work for a line-shape either.
The bottom line is that a "line" shape does not work for a connected society. The only way a line shape works if you have it as a major transport way with small settlements alongside that serve the transit, i.e. the transport way is the main focus. And that requires slow transport that needs to stop and refuel, rest, eat, etc. frequently along the way. For a t
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But this was going to be LOTS of stories tall, so you'd still get quadratic scaling.
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If I'm in a given location then if I can access any location within radius R of me, that means the number of locations available goes up as roughly R^2.
Assuming a mathematically idealized city. Meanwhile, in the real world, connectivity trumps distance. The original The Line concept had this linear transport system that might have worked, for two reasons: One, a dedicated high-speed transport is very efficient - compare subways to busses. Two, if everything is along the same axis, there are no missed connections or need to switch to a different line three times. If executed right, the amount of stuff you can access in a given time (instead of distance) cou
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One, a dedicated high-speed transport is very efficient - compare subways to busses. Two, if everything is along the same axis, there are no missed connections or need to switch to a different line three times. If executed right, the amount of stuff you can access in a given time (instead of distance) could be higher in this concept than in a traditional city.
How many stops are you anticipating along the 170 km length? Sure, you can add more trains with some being express ones and set up a system of transfers from one train to another to reach a given destination. Either that or you can accept that getting from one end to another takes half a day. From my perspective, the travel situation in this "city" would be completely bonkers too.
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Neom is meant to be futuristic, right?
So here's a concept: Combine trains and pods. There's a high-speed train going every 10 minutes. It consists of carriages going to different destinations. At each destination, the relevant carriage detaches and is diverted to the station, while the rest of the train continues without stopping. The carriage decelerates, stops, people get off and on, and in 10 minutes it will attach itself to the next train passing by, after accelerating on the sidetrack.
Other than that,
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So here's a concept: Combine trains and pods. There's a high-speed train going every 10 minutes. It consists of carriages going to different destinations. At each destination, the relevant carriage detaches and is diverted to the station, while the rest of the train continues without stopping. The carriage decelerates, stops, people get off and on, and in 10 minutes it will attach itself to the next train passing by, after accelerating on the sidetrack.
That was one solution to the problem I had in mind myself, so you do have a solution (if a fairly complex one) there. However, if we ignore for the moment the height of the structure and only look at it two dimensionally from above, it's what, 200 meters thick. So it's 850 times longer than it is wide. It's ridiculous. If you made that into a circle (not looped it around, I mean just made a circular structure covering the same ground area, it would be about 6.6 kilometers across. Inside a structure like tha
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We agree that The Line is silly, so not reason to argue that. And one of the reasons it is not just silly but idiotic is the "200m wide" part. There are tons of buildings in pretty much every major city on the planet that are longer than that. So I think we agree that for The Line to be even borderline reasonable, we should at least double that. Let's say 500m. That means if our transport (whatever form it has) runs roughly in the center nobody is further than 250m away from it. Which means with enough stat
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Let's say 500m. That means if our transport (whatever form it has) runs roughly in the center nobody is further than 250m away from it.
That also raises the question of how big the "tunnel" for the train needs to be. If it has transport modules that detach and connect to it with passengers, then it doesn't need a platform, but it does need at least one parallel track and then at least double that for both directions Probably more than double it to service more actual stops and to have trains with offset schedules since the train takes so long to get from one end to the other. Of course, if there are modules that sync up to and join the trai
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That also raises the question of how big the "tunnel" for the train needs to be.
Two tracks for redundancy and to go both directions. Additional tracks for local trains or freight can go above or below, since we're building vertical anyways.
Then there's little point in having the train in the first place
Disagree. If you have on- and off-ramps, the engines don't have to be in the pods, they can be in the ramp. The main problem with any and all "pod travel" concepts is that instead of one huge engine in front of a train, you now have a hundred little engines. Which is not only less efficient, it's also a maintenance nightmare.
Of course it could be done, but it is not clear what the benefit of building it like that would be.
Along the outside wall yo
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Disagree. If you have on- and off-ramps, the engines don't have to be in the pods, they can be in the ramp. The main problem with any and all "pod travel" concepts is that instead of one huge engine in front of a train, you now have a hundred little engines. Which is not only less efficient, it's also a maintenance nightmare.
As I understand it, the Line plans for a maglev train. The quoted speeds for end to end travel, for example (20 minutes) would be slightly faster than the faster passenger trains on record, which are maglevs. That was what I was envisioning for both the trains and the modules above. Sorry I wasn't more explicit. In that case, the "engine" would mostly be in the track itself. Even without maglev, neither the train or modules would use internal combustion engines. Electric motors, whether rotary or linear - i
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Yep. Cities work because of positive distance effects and positive infrastructure effects from small distances. Up to a certain size, but still. This requires something very roughly circle-shapes. A "line" is the very antithesis of all the advantages a city has and can only work using an extreme amount of money and goods pumped in from the outside. And even then it works very badly.
All quite obvious. But when the "architects" of such a "vision" have tons of money and power but no sense, projects like this g
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Joey from Friends said it best (Score:2)
The Line, a futuristic 170-kilometer linear city that served as Neom's centerpiece, will be radically reimagined as a result, the report added.
"The line is a dot to you"
They noticed something? (Score:2)
Naaa, probably not. These people are primitive in their minds and (still) drunk on power and money. My guess is things just failed to materialize (some of the architecture was not even possible) and the money pumped in did not make a difference. Well, as soon as the world can do without their oil, they are done. They had a pretty nice chance to make something of themselves. Instead they opted for Theocracy and appearances over substance. A complete and impressive fail.
Abruptly left? (Score:2)
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Speaking of which, the most recent episodes from the podcast Behind the bastards [behindthebastards.com] is about this bastards:
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Fourth episode just released:
Part four: Prince Mohammed Bin Salman: The tyrant of Saudi Arabia [iheart.com]
in a suitcase (Score:1)
even the richest, most self-absorbed people in the world cannot just do what they want, see? that means they're poor and it's your fault so you will pay
What a waste (Score:2)
The whole project was a mega-joke that had ZERO chance of completion (or anything even close to it). You might as well try to chrome-plate the equator. It was beyond ambitious and kind of a stupid idea to begin with.
Cities tend to have centers, and this "city" was just a long, stretched-out line of pseudo-suburbs baking in the desert. No water, no nearby attractions, and did I mention that it's isolated in the middle of a wasteland? This was never going to succeed and was never intended to- it was just anot
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You might as well try to chrome-plate the equator.
Shh.... I know a guy who might well rustle up funding if you wanted to gold-plate the equator...
More than just bricks and mortar (Score:2)
Unlike the "I told you so" who have been dismissive of this grand project, I'm genuinely sad that even with the considerable resources that KSA has, they are not going ahead with the NEOM vision.
This youtuber [youtu.be]made some interesting and very watchable TV about how the failure of the projects still helped push ahead with some progressive thinking. The central claim is that the influence of traditional voices and clergy was diminished as more and more people got involved in this vision.
Nobody will become poor b
Scale Back? (Score:1)
This is a bullshit project. It's not gonna happen.
Better get it done before midterms! (Score:2)