The Line

The Line or Neom

The Line or Neom is a building project in Saudi Arabia. It is a 110 mile or 170 kilometre long building. It will be 200 metres wide and 500 metres or 1,600 feet tall. Inside the structure will be a city to house 9 million people, amenities like school and leisure, their work and public transportation.

The Line will be run on renewable energy and involve some sort of smart grid to optimise the living experience. They’ve apparently already started the earth works on construction and expect to have it completed by 2030.

Dystopian

The Line has been criticised in western media as dystopian. The mind immediately turns to science fiction visions like Judge Dredd’s Mega City One or William Gibson’s cityscapes in his sprawl trilogy books: Neuromancer, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. They would likely consider ‘ideal’ to look more like the Bosco Verticale in Milan, or the STH BNK in Melbourne, Australia, both of which look very nice. However, isn’t necessarily a panacea as one forestry expert noted.

″I think it’s very important that trees are given space,” Cecil Konijnendijk, from the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Forestry, told CNBC.”We know that soil — what we call soil volume — is really important, so the trees have to have space underground, maybe even more so than over ground,” he…