Why Neom Might Be The Future of Sustainable Cities
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ก.ค. 2021
- Why Neom Might Be The Future of Sustainable Cities. The first 1,000 people to use this link will get a 1 month free trial of Skillshare: skl.sh/undecidedwithmattferre... With an investment of $500 billion, Saudi Arabia is touting this 100-mile-long linear city ("The Line") as the most sustainable urban complex in the world. And one with some cutting edge renewable technologies ... like generating fresh water in a desert. But will it work? Let's explore if Neom is the future of sustainable cities.
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Neom is the sound the train makes when it goes by real fast
😂😂
hahahahahaahh
@@mrflower8871 yeah i think you should shut up
haha nice one
Genius
If you're considering Hyperloop as an option, you should also consider teleportation. The latter is more realistic.
and more reliable.
Nobody discounts the idea, join my wait to see what comes first!!!
Trnansrapid maglev in the meantime!!!
well hypeloop is more cheap than conventional rail.Because a experimental strait h vacuum tube with a rail track within it is more cheap than just a rail track. That is what Elon said, so it must be true!
@@blauwzakjecrack you had me in the first half ngl
NOTHING in Neom's pitch makes any attempt to justify why it's a big line instead of a grid....
It's a line because that creates the artificial problem of transportation, which can be mitigated using otherwise unnecessary technology that he wants to use.
Really like a solution because it uses cool tech but don't actually have a real use for it? Just manufacture the problem, lol.
City planning.
Grids don't work very well. They only promote Cities built for cars and as they grow, their infrastructure suffers.
Solution? Another terrible idea. A line!
Seems legit.
@@Unethical.Dodgson Why does a grid not work for biking or walking?
@@adamfellenbaum2725 Dendritic systems work better. Think blood vessels or leaf veins that have large, fast channels for large volumes and small, slower channels for pickup and drop-off. They are able to transport people way faster than a comparable grid and are also safer because the speed naturally reduces around livable spaces.
@@gljames24 very helpful, thank you!
One Question: How is this more SUSTAINABLE than regular cities we have right now?
because it's only one line. Unlike modern cities which have many lines, so harder to sustain
@@dr.z7958 1 line is worse. 1 line that the Entire city has to use. This is a logistics failure. With a larger grid system. if a line goes down you can Multiple ways to get around it. the point is optimization. Which a single LINE is horrible for.
This city even if it starts out as a line is going to quickly expand outward in circular patterns. Since Best way to maintain a city is to have everything close by. if you factory is on 1 end of the city and your store on the other. Its going to attempt to move that factory as close as possible. People are going to want to live closer to their jobs and commercial hubs are going to want to be near the people.
There is naturally going to form bubbles of mixed commercial, industrial, and residential areas growing outward randomly around the line as people arbitrarily choose there "Centers"
It really isn't but the Saudi Arabia wouldn't know sustainability if it slapped it in the face. Vanity projects on the other hand...
Hmmm for the normal citizens not so much, but it's sustainable for the ruler class. It can be transformed into a prison much easier. It is surrounded by the desert and giant walls. The cams will be everywhere, your mobility is fully tracked and completely dependent on the linear transport system. It might be also interesting for the Gaza strip, which is basically a prison and where the high population density is compressed to a line as well.
@@dr.z7958it doesn’t really make sense… “one line” simply means one huge point of failure that won’t have resilience to major system disruptions of shocks.
For a show called "Undecided", Matt sure tends to put a positive spin on the topics covered. There are a lot of pie-in-the-sky stuff involved here. Those green zones are particularly problematic for a renewable based infrastructure. Go to a city like Palm Springs and investigate the cost (money and carbon footprint) of keeping that patch of the desert nice and green. Now expand it by a hundred fold and you'll start to see how suspect some of these projections really are.
I agree that most of Neom is crazy pie in the sky stuff, but I focused on the handful of things I think have legs for broader applications around the world. SCMAGLEV, desalination, and renewable energy generation.
100%. This is a really stupid idea. But he gets paid to promote this stuff.
@@scottslotterbeck3796 YEAH!!! Clearly, he should have waited until the brilliant and beautiful architect, Dami Lee, weighed in (th-cam.com/video/2b7uMJkvS0o/w-d-xo.html) and blew the little prince's maniacal ego trip out of the water. 😆
@@UndecidedMF "but I focused on the handful of things I think have legs for broader applications around the world. "
What you did is what you always do; you take a subject that is trending, you mention as many other trending subjects as you can, and then move on.
it's almost asif you make videos for the views... imagine that...
Your videos go meme-deep, you recite the commerial messages for the tech and pretend that you A) understand any of it and B) that you did actual research.
You have 1mln followers specifically because of this Musk-tactic. You present a wonderfull world and the only thing stopping it from happening is time and money, that's why you always end with "but gee, what do you think?" Asif you give a toss about what the viewer thinks, all you want is that they interact so you get a better rating on YT.
I;d ;like you to do a single honest video where you actually went into the material with any depth and gave a single critical thought to the matter.
But truth is not the agenda that you are pushing, is it.
@@UndecidedMF im sorry, but all these advantages that the techs they try to bring to achieve renewable energy is really uncomparable to the downside of this project, you have to know that from the beginning of the pitch its does not make any sense.
i'm an architect and first glance its already bad for all the causes that it will do to the environtment. watch dami lee's review from arcjitect POV. she sums up pretty much everything about it
The answer is no. A linear city is not traversable except for with an extreme high speed train. A brand new city designed for the same amount of people could use much less land, it would allow walking or biking from one end to the other, and fewer miles of track (and cheaper trains at that) for people to be more connected than in the Line.
Also if there’s any issue with the single train, it cuts people off from each other. In a circular/grid city, if one train line is down, travel is still possible.
As for utility logistics, it’s much easier to get water to and from the far reaches of the city when it’s 5 miles across instead of 100 miles across.
+ the hyperloop is one big scam, that will never work as intented in the next 50years
Although that raised the question: what about a grid of linear cities? this could in theory get the best of both worlds, as well as maximize livable space without displacing native populations. In the spaces between cities there could be solar, wind, and food farms (which I understand would likely have to improve for better production density). It would also mean that you can go to a parallel city to catch a train if you miss yours. It would, however, introduce elevated infrastructure costs; but perhaps some of that could be solved by establishing a primary parallel and a secondary (so the secondary's rail is farther underground, and the primary generally gets right of way).
other benefits could be that energy and food production are closer to the cities, as they are in a way inside them, and that navigation and aviation are simplified.
on that note, it might make flights safer as there would be a grid of road as an emergency runway. emergency lights and guards could be installed to keep people safe. it would cost a lot though.
no matter how it ends up, they'll have to put in a power infrastructure first. It would be required for all the other technologies planned for the area, and the exported excess power could make it economically possible with the decline in demand for petrol.
What's your opinion on this? I look forward to a discussion (welcoming anyone, not just this guy)
Did you watch the video genius?
@@dann6067 yes. Do you have anything of substance to say? All the technology in the world cannot solve the simple problem of geometry.
@@birdrocket you mean to say that our ass cracks are not efficient?
Leaving engineering aside, historically there was another attempt at a lineal city in spain, called "Ciudad lineal". Although it wasn't fully completed, it now is part of the city of Madrid as a district.
Thats interesting‚ I never knew that!
I appreciate that you included a balanced amount of optimism and skepticism here, instead of just focusing on what all the cool technologies could in theory do.
I wonder about all the optimism, though. Doesn't stretching out a city into a thin long line rob it of one of it's biggest potentials? Namely, having a network in 2D space that creates redundancies and the benefit of n^2 options for people/goods/services to move and interact, thus making it more resilient, efficient and productive?
@@neatwheat no one really knows, I think that's why balance in reporting is so important with this one.
@@neatwheat also if the whole line is inhabited, why does a train need to go 300-700mph if you're going to have to stop every km or so. It would really only be useful for extreme long distance trips, like the length of the whole line.
There is no optimism to be had about this plan though. Its completely fucking stupid thru and thru. Literally 0 positive things about it and it wil be a huge disaster if its ever attempted.
@@proppergentleman8690 are you proposing a very long conveyor belt? or to have side-branches, that slow to allow people on and off.
We will see if this actually happens down the line.
MBS had really put it all on the Line
@@CorePathway lul he was right so many puns....
You cheeky bastard 🤣
it's not so..... straight forward
It already has started.
I hope they build "the line" in 100 % functional chunks so they can learn from the previous parts' mistakes and best practices as they go.
Call it the chimichunka system xD
Yeah, I don't get why it has to be 170km from the get go. Why not try and realize it on a much smaller, say 10km, scale and see what works? You can always scale it up after that...
@@dee-jay45 no one's seriously thinking about building this dogshit.
It's just not going to work, it's fundamentally flawed. There's a reason why the majority of cities are (almost) circular in shape, this vanity project goes against that.
All the money in Middle East world wasted its time for all homes now go solars not going to power grids forever wasted time sun with all the gas air burns daily
This is not a new idea: we learnt about linear cities in geography at school in the 1960's. We learnt how in the nineteenth century there were hopes by some for a linear city from Paris France to Birmingham England. The Metropolitan railways in London and Paris were a tentative start to this: the pipedream being to eventually join them through a channel tunnel.
It is no coincidence that the Metropolitan Railway in England reached out from London in the direction of Birmingham. Some of its backers wanted it to get there: a 100mile+ long city that was walking distance across so everyone could walk to the countryside. And to the train. It only got about a fifth of the way and got cut back to Amersham after developers found that not enough ppl wanted to live that far out to make further extensions viable and the trains were very underused beyond Amersham and Chesham.
Nothing wrong with the tech -- even steampunk tech could achieve it.
Problem was that people wanted to be near to the centres of London Birmingham and Paris. Competitors found it proftable to turn those three cities into roughly circular sprawls like almost every other city. That seems inevitable unless you have a centrally controlled political system.
Could be communist, could be a capitalist nondemocratic monarchy the The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but whatever the theory of power you need a draconian political structure to enforce much stricter planning (zoning) rules than would be possible in elective democracies like UK France at the time or like the US UK and EU countries today.
So nice tech, but even supposing it all works first time it relies on the Saudis remaining autocratic and undemocratic. Is that a lovable tradeoff?
When we discussing this project with my friends (a group of civil engineers)
first thing that came to our minds was, why they don't make it a circle?
instead of 170 km linear city, they could have easily achieve same effect with 50 km diameter circle
and that would we so much better in terms logistics and infrastructure
plus they could have 50 km diameter man made tropical forest
i'm no civil engineer but that's the first thought i had in mind as well. i have no idea though whether hyperloop works if it isn't in a straight line, and i have the feeling the whole point of this project is to give an opportunity to be a sandbox for a whole bunch of cutting-edge technologies. (sounds like someone's compensating... X'D)
It will continue to circle the world.
Think BIG
the hyperloop always reminds me of the monorail episode on the simpsons
Yeah its snakeoil in my opinion. The biggest vacuum chambers on earth are only 10 by 15 meters. The amount of atomospeherifpressure on those is astronomicall. I don't see how they are going to build kilometer long vacuum tubes and keep them under vacuum.
In my opinion we can better focus our efforts on making maglevs cheaper and more accesable. Then we can always try the vacuum route after that.
Reminds me of the cash transport systems in giant cash and carrys like Costco.
@@daandupau8013 They are not going for a hard vacuum with hyperloop projects so your example and reasoning is flawed.
@SoMuchFacepalm You should look at some reaction videos to thunderf00ts debunking videos.
@@Barskor1 The issue is no one is disclosing that information (at least what I've found) so it is fair to assume they are trying to accomplish the 0.01 or whatever it is in the whitepaper, and yes that is as close to a prefect vacuum we can really get on earth. Once they start announcing their vacuum status and projected one is when we can finally figure out how practical it is.
That said Tf has made mistakes, like his math on the Tesla Semi where there have been actual test units from other companies like Freightliner that go against his own claims and technically preform worst than the T Semi. So all we have is what we are given to make guesses or claims, the fact they are hiding these numbers raises the issues. A good chunk of those "comments" are from Elon fanboys who got butthurt from a TH-camr hating on their overlord.
When the city inevitably fails all the inhabitants will migrate towards two circular cities near the coast, fulfilling the more ambitious project of making the biggest dong in Earth history.
😁😁
170 cocKilometers long.
@@hwgusn stfu indecent person with no manners.
@@dann6067 Name does not check out.
Best post if the day.👏
Thoroughly, why not try micro grid sustainability green belts, house per house block per block, rather than mega infrastructure or collaboration of both be flexible on the solutions to sustainability?
That's because they don't actually care for any of it. Another vanity project. And they have enough cash for now to keep up the whole theatre.
Me watching the video: Hmm, maybe this will be something actually good and not some dumb billionaire daydream venture
Matt: *Hyperloop*
Me: Ah, shit, here we go again...
To be fair‚ The hyperloop part is a "leak" from an NYT article.
The article itself claims it was essentially "tipped by a source claiming to have obtained leaked documents"
The article also mistranslates "Satellite" into "Artificial Moon".
A linear city seems really inefficient. That just makes all commutes unnecessaryly longer.
Actually the opposite. With well designed transport, anything or anyone can be placed anywhere in the city in moments.
@@Greg-yu4ij the distances are longer than usual though.
The efficiency and speed of almost all modes of transportation is increased but that doesn't change the fact that you will have to travel further.
Having the city closer the the corner wouldve been better
just think if your plumber live at one end and your stuck toilet is on the other.
Fast and carbon neutralize transportation will make the trip within minutes as they say
Beside that people will enjoy the nature more and have free spaces
The current efficient water and energy production is impressive but projecting technologies 20+ years is unrealistic.
Agreed, say whats possible current technology. A lot happens in 20 years.
That, and saying "theyll use the brine for x y z" is stupid too, as current operations could easily do that as well, but the most economical/realistic route seems to be "dump that shit"
Although they could just make another dead sea for more of them attraction dollars!
8:00 the figure "500 million tons" is meaningless unless you compare it to something relatable. Scale is important
I thought the same. Wish he would have stated something like "which would amount to X % of current annual global emissions".
@@antred11 Exactly. Otherwise it could 20%, 1% or 0.001%, I don't know. If the purpose of naming the number is to impart its importance, gotta give it in a meaningful way.
Thank you, your channel helps me to stay positive about the future.
TLDW; "Very Unlikely"
Thanks Mayank my Indian friend, how's everything going on in India?
Edit: unlikely on time with the proposed schedule, but it will be a sustainable pathfinder.
@@oradoughball yeah Neom will encourage lot of development in the renewable tech industry
so a positive sum game!
@@dann6067 everything's pretty swell here, & getting better 👌
LMAO, agree completely!
"Are there trains who reach that speed? There are two options: MAGLEV and Hyperloop"
As far as I am aware that's not giving "options" that's mentioning a real piece of tech and a pipe dream
In this case an actual pipe dream.
hyperloop achieved nothing in all those years. so stupid.
@@mrflower8871 And if you complain, they will hack you instead of your phone.
Prince Chop-Chop has quite the reputation.
TGV can reach those speeds too.
@@Carewolf tgv is slower than maglev but financially better.
But that was not one of the "choices" given.
The choices were maglev, which is crazy expensive and not really worth it, or hyperloop 🤢 (aka stupid project that will never ever work)
LOVE all the plays on words in this, very good
When I build my factory in Factorio, I build it in a chain-like fashion, with each new link being the next iteration of the design, improving on the previous link's model. Having a multi-lane train line running down the center makes transportation seamless, cheap, and efficient in virtually every way. With modern train controlling, AI-controlled trains could switch lanes dynamically based on pre-defined routes, with the outmost tracks carrying trains that make the most stops and those in the middle having the least. Similarly, belt lines are used to slowly transport material from production links to links that are currently under construction.
Yes, incredibly efficient in a computer game, but imagine having to live in it. What if you had to, or just wanted to travel from one section of the city to another? Linear city planning on this grand scale ensures ghettos for the poor and working classes. A capitalist dystopia.
A city is not a factory and Hyperloop is not a conveyor belt.
There is nothing wrong with a main transportation bus with large extensions branching off, effectively creating a sort of fishbone or tree structure. However the Line is only a main transportation bus. There is very limited space for branching off. All the great Factorio players use area in 2 dimensions because it is far more effective then predominantly in a single dimension.
Even real factories are more complex than this.
A city has many connections (all sorts). It seems very dubious if all this can be 'flattened' to a single dimension. Even if it is possible, the risk of catastrophic malfunctions are unnecessary high by design.
I think this is just something to flex on or something like that. The location is perfect, but I think that they should try to "square" the line and shorten it.
@@sm3675 but brother saudi arabia want people to travel long linear way so that country can sell more petrol and earn money. reply if you liked it
It's something different. I imagine plumbing/electricity/internet will be fairly.... Straight forward to install at least.
Trains, cars, water, and gas travel most efficiently in straight lines, and in a linear city you can have solar and wind power everywhere because massive downtown skyscrapers don't block as much area throughout the day. It makes sense, don't you think?
@championchap Interesting. So the scale of the city is very limited. Now that, you point this angle out, it occurs to me, that I've seen settlements of such layout. They are very small countryside hamlets, with a single street and houses on either side.
Imagine the next Saudi Arabian big magapolis they make is "The Plane", basically reinventing the concept of the city
next they invent "the cube"
i wonder if they'll use camps of stolen passport slaves like in dubai
This grand project involves a lot of promising ideas and some great tech (some of which may be able to really bring down costs by creating large-scale industrial plants), however although the underlying foundation of the project sounds sustainable and practical, it feels like the project planners are endangering perfectly feasible ideas with ridiculous timelines/costs and superfluous flashy tech that just isn’t necessary for the city to function efficiently (e.g. very high-speed transport systems). For such an ambitious project, with so many good things going for it, it seems counterproductive to try to complicate it with highly over-ambitious targets or technologies that are actually going to scare away private investors. Furthermore, they can lay the groundwork for upgrades in the future that can occur decades down the track after the city is functioning (like setting up their metro so it can be converted to a maglev easily and cheaply later on).
You have to commend any country that is willing to commit to such sustainable large-scale projects, but if endangers the entire point if it is too over-ambitious.
not really, the ideas are batshit crazy and the proposed "high tech" solutions to the problems created by said ideas are nothing but science fiction someone pulled out of their arse and made some fancy CGI of.
OMG sooo goood, Thank you Matt! Realllly appreciate all the insights and knowledge you present! 🙏🙏🙏 .... man i wish i could super-like this video!
TYPE SUPER LIKE DOWN BELOW THIS VIDEO and you did it.
don't credit elon, the concept of vacuum maglevs has been around for a while.
yeah, and if a regular maglev costs $85B imagine the price of the same thing in a vacuum tube... Hyperloop is fantasy for now.
It may have been around for a while but Elon built a prototype which I would guess is a tad more than a concept, eh? I believe he moved on to SpaceX but shared what he had done for any engineers to make it financially viable. It might work in Europe but I don't see Americans giving up their cars....
@@mrflower8871 Dozens of my friends have moved to Saudi and back, I've been there twice, never once heard of this from anyone but an islamophobe tbh. And lol @ the idea that the NSA can't crack an iPhone and had to beg Apple to do it for them (which they refused) yet suddenly Saudi are able to. Come on. Get real.
i credit elon for getting the public interested enough to actually start building them. this is basically what he's done in all the industries he dabbles in. SpaceX brought about Blue Origin, Tesla convinced every manufacturer to make electric cars, Boring company encouraged many new boring companies... this is Elons ultimate skill: charismatic encouragement of involvement in progress.
@@uncletrashero
SpaceX was founded two years after blue origin...
Planned cities are often dubious - being designed for fleeting ideals in questionable locations - but Neom is particularly problematic.
Every city in the USA is a planned city you absolute genius.
@@dann6067 Not a single city in the united states was built from the ground up, all American cities grew naturally as population increased around (normally) harbors. Needs were met as a reaction to populations settling where they did, and that's why they're not the most efficiently laid out in general and are constantly adding onto their subway systems to meet new population needs. Which isnt the same as developing a 10 million population city from nothing? Nice try though
@@dann6067 yes and our cities have deep issues from this planning (read: exclusionary and density-based zoning)
@@gp8189 "nice try though" LMAO go and read a history book kid. American cities are throughly planned. That's why you have the city blueprints with the municipal department. Cities in Europe and Asia on the other hand were organic, that's why American roads follow a grid pattern whereas European and Asian roads are a twisty mess. Educate yourself before yapping. Kid.
If you're still ignorant just google it dear child.
Cities are always planned to some degree.
I would certainly love to see the sustainable systems in this proposed city be operational, but a city requires more than simply energy and water to be sustainable and the bigger question is, will the city be able to attract enough new industry, marketable to the rest of the world, to keep it alive? I think it can, but not by 2030.
I have questions about cars driving underground. I also expect we will have to rethink roads as full self driving vehicles become a reality, and it's hard to predict right now what that will look like. I think building roads underground might be a little ambitious right now, unless they are for trains and fleet vehicles only. So much engineering to do, but frankly, I think the future of Saudi Arabia depends on them starting at least some of this now...
I appreciate that you highlight the peer reviewed studies you reference.
As for the city itself; it's obvious, to me, that it is a publicity stunt, to basically create a new Disney Land or Las Vegas. A new ninth wonder of the world.
As for the technology; It is very much worth developing them, putting them into practical use, and developing them further.
If it gets developed, then it'll become a new Las Vegas/Dubai. Which is fine. Let a playground for the uber rich subsidize the development of new green technologies.
Agreed, @@quilboy93.
It is a publicity stunt? LMAO grow up kiddie!
Here's @@dann6067 thinking they can be automatically edgy by taking what I've stated, adding a question mark, then tossing in a very weak sauce insult. While my assertion about a big part of this being for publicity is based on the plane to see aspect that the very people constructing the city have been cast in a bad light, for many years, deserved or not. Your statement, as of yet, holds no value. Care to try again?
@@dann6067 Only kiddies say "Ok, Boomer". LOL
This is insane. I’m working on a start-up I’m calling 21st Cebtury Sustainable City Development. The problem I’m seeing with this is it’s distance.. I’m a believer in circle designed cities as in The Venus Project by Jacques Fresco. Keeping things within a city so that it can easily traversed by anyone living in the city.
The Line goes against millennia of city planning practice. Problem with these planned cities is trying to optimize for today's ideals - seemingly media hype in the Line's case. However, if we cannot accurately predict future technologies or priorities, then we can't predict what's best for a city. For all we know, a century from now, we could be largely living in the matrix and physical cities demand a completely new form factor. Instead, the boring but historically more effective approach is to incrementally improve on current cities, tweaking as needed, allowing cities to evolve.
I would be curious to see how far apart these lines would need to be placed to have the same design.
Probably that's the idea behind the hyperloop, so they can avoid duplicating services, stores, etc. along the entire path.
@@davidmccarthy6061 but hyperloop (and any high speed form of transportation) only works when traveling long distances, because it needs time to accelerate and decelerate. An urban area has many stops close together, so the hyperloop will be overkill and underutilized. Besides, the theoretical top speed of hyperloop (of which I’m highly skeptical could be achieved even if it didn’t have to stop frequently) is just a solution to a problem they invented by spreading the city out into a line instead of outward growth from a central point.
Circles are confusing, what if a person keep going aroused in circles? He will never get to his destination.
love your show! Neom just unveiled the project and you had already covered it a year in advance
Ever since this video aired and I regrettably watched it, I've been getting nonstop ads on TH-cam from the Neom project. Imagine how absolutely bonkers it is to get tourism ads for a city that doesn't even exist.
When you play the " One- Street- Challenge" not in Cities Skylines but in real life :) One long road seems pretty inefficent to me, one big road fails and your city is down. Most cities today grown into their different segmenst that typically get connected by ringroads or have a grid- design...
the design is about underground roads
not really... you have few paralel lines.... one line fails and traffic just switches to another...
you only have to control one cross-section of the Street to have an uprising. Unstable governments (middle east ) will crippled by any group large enough to block one station.
The best way to build a city these days is to build them around people and not cars. The problem a lot of cities have (and this one doesn't really address it) is that you NEED a car. And when you have millions of cars on every road all at once? Instead of people walking 5-10min destinations or a really well organised intra and inter city transportion system? You inevitably end up with a city crippled by cars.
The line seems to be someone's idea to take all of the complexity out of city management by just removing all of the complex traffic routing... but it's a silly idea.
@@Unethical.Dodgson Maybe it will address it? People are going on and on about the logistical nightmare of transportation, but what if everyone goes to work down the street from where they live in this city? If this really is a future city then they'll have to embrace robotics and AI technology, which means most of the population will be out of jobs or holding much less vital positions,. They'll be doing jobs that can be done locally, or even from home.
"No". Yet another video that follows Betteridge's law of headlines.
The beauty of this project is that even though we don’t have all the technology to solve the problems at the moment, it creates problems that people get inspired to solve which brings the technology along quicker.
It's a government throwing money at a problem.
Saudi Arabia is screwed without high oil prices.... So they have to diversify.
What can you do in the middle of the desert? Neom.
No...just no. Not a single ACTUAL engineer will ever be trying to get this project up and running.
This is a great video dude, super valuable stuff.
'452 Fahrenheit below zero'
Wtf
Please just use Celsius or Kelvin
Excellent research and presentation Matt! I’m intrigued by many of these technologies and will continue to research. Thank you.
It will be interesting to see how flexible the planners are going to be within the overall systems of Neom.
@9:20 They should have used the incoming seawater to cool the steam instead. This also preheats the seawater before entering the evaporation dome making the whole process faster and more efficient.
👍
Sounds a lot like "The World Islands" in Dubai. Lots of fantastic imagery and fantastical claims, but in reality it's an oil prince's pet project that turns into a massive resource sink that will never be completed with enormous negative impact.
I love the location and some of the technology, but a line city will never work. Not to mention maglev technology whixh is expensive and dumb for short distances. The AI and high amount of tech also makes the project wary to foriegn investors.
The mountains, beach, sand, cooler climate, close distance to Mecca and Medina, close distance to Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, makes it a perfect place for inhabitation in Saudi Arabia.
@@sm3675 - Also, not only is a line just the least efficient shape (MBS must have failed geometry class and/or executed his teacher), but like, why would you want to build it out into the desert? If I were in his position and dead set on this kind of project, I'd build it along the coast. There's a nice gradual curve there for him to build out on, but nope, into the wastes he insists on going. I guess because sticking to the coasts wouldn't have displaced tribesmen, lol.
@@KingBobXVI i mean, 3 out of 4 biggest cities in saudi Arabia are in the desert so the city begin in the desert is not that big of a deal for them.
also from what I understand a part of the city will be in the coast.
@@nooraldeen6327 - I never said being in the desert is an inherent problem, but this is ultimately a tourist destination "city" so having so much of it away from the coast when they could just bend it to have the whole thing on the coast is silly.
@@nooraldeen6327 And those cities are funded by blood money and Burj Kalifa doesn't even have plumbing lol.
Sounds good as a headline, but its flawed on so many levels.
Vanity projects often are, but considering they’re funding renewables and climate adaptation it will still have benefits
Flawed? LOL okay.
@@dann6067 Maybe you should have watched the whole video instead of trolling the comment section DickInSon. 😉😂
In fact building an experimental modular 'beam' city might be clever, you could just sweep the plan to form any shape, it would almost be like taking an integral :)
Love creativity. Hope some of these come to fruition
Probably beyond the scope of this channel, but I'm also interested in the urban planning argument, most discussion of which I've seen seem to say 'bad'.
This one discuss more of the roots of the linear idea as well as its possible pitfalls th-cam.com/video/41sgRP0G6y4/w-d-xo.html
I've explained in other comments why, but basically, there is a reason every single city in the world naturally forms as a rough circle.
The short of it is that you want people to be able to get from place to place as efficiently as possible. A line is, geometrically speaking, the least efficient way to pack things closely. So, a city in a line is just a bad idea.
For a hypothetical, let's design a city with 1000 buildings, scattered at random for our purposes. If you place them in a line, that's effectively a 1x1000 grid of buildings. The longest distance one may have to travel in this layout is 999 blocks. The average travel distance for residents is going to be about 500 blocks. This is... not great. But how does it compare to a circle?
A circle with an area of 1000 if you plug it into A = pi*r^2 gives us a diameter of 36. So 36 blocks is the maximum distance you can possibly travel along one road, from one end of the city to the opposite. I shouldn't have to explain how 36 is a shorter distance than 999.
Someone did point out that blocks don't necessary allow you to always travel straight from point to point - you can't walk diagonally through buildings (this is often called "Manhattan distance". So the actual absolute worst case is if you're on one edge of the city and you want to travel to the opposite, but you're travelling diagonally to the road grid. In this case, to convert the diameter to Manhattan distance you can multiply by the square root of 2, which gives us about 51. So the absolute worst possible case ever in this circular city with 1000 buildings is that you'd have to travel 51 blocks, whereas the average case for travelling in a line would be 500. This is why it's bad.
A line is just geometrically the least optimal way to pack buildings together. At best, you can mitigate this issue with ridiculous technology, but in doing so you're using it as a crutch, not as an improvement. It would be much better to use similar technology in a city that already has good planning because that would make a city _better_ rather than barely bringing it up to par.
@@KingBobXVI I guess the idea is that the sacrifice is to maximise efficiency of the spine. But even then, if you arranged the line in a circle with no centre, you could at least go both directions and halve the average travel distance. Disadvantage is you cannot expand any more, unless you add more rings and that defeats the purpose of a single spine. I guess the idea is also that each module should be self-sustaining, more like a mini-city than a neighbourhood, but I also don't see how you could get around leaving it for work or university/high school every day.
@@ThomasNing - the issue with that is that the "efficiency of the spine" only matters if you predicate the statement on the assumption that a spine is something that makes sense, but it isn't. Again, it's an attempt to maximize the efficiency of a layout that is inherently inefficient. It doesn't really matter how efficient you make it, you can't undo the fundamental flaw inherent in the design. The best case scenario is that the network reaches a similar level of efficiency as the baseline of a normal city.
And no, while the mini-city thing sounds less stupid, that's not actually what they're doing. One node is MBS's new palace (which will conveniently be finished before the project is shuttered, presumably), one node is going to have a hospital and other essential services, there will be a shopping district for luxury items and restaurants, and one other node is accounted for by another rich despot.
I think it's also misleading to call this a city, because it's really going to be anything but. It's not being designed for regular people, so schools and the like aren't really being considered. It's a playground for rich people and authoritarians, and the only others who will live there will essentially be their wait staff.
You should check out Taurus' comment on this video‚ its the second highest I believe?
The first vacuum 'Atmospheric' train began service in 1844 on a day tripper route between Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire) and the summit of Dalkey Hill in Ireland. It's operating speed was 40mph but reached 75mph - at a time when some scholars believed the human body would disintegrate at such speed.
so those scolars did not believe in Heliocentrism, what else did they believe? that the earth is flat?
Love your videos brother!
This is simply Amazing! I hope they make it happen.
As someone who grew up in KSA would love to see it work although it looks ambitious
👍
Great video again! Undecided on this one! It is great to think out of the box and try things. It may not play exactly as advertised" but breaking inertia in the right direction will be worth it (thUp)
Except this very obviously isn't in the right direction. and anyone with a junior high school level of education or higher can see that.
wanna clear one thing "the moon" thing is just a rough translation of the word "أقمار صناعية" in Arabic which translate roughly to "Artificial Moons"
but in reality and in our language it means "Satellites" so the plan is to build Satellites not fake grounded moons just for looks I hope this clears up any confusion due to a rough translation.
I am stunned, fantastic research!
Here is my issue. We are very good at creating a decent city. We are absolutely horrible about maintaining said city. Not only that, but corruption will also set it up to fail, inevitably. Every where I look, these old cities need completely redone and only minor patchwork gets done. I believe we need to figure out how to maintain our own houses before we make new ones. I don't think this project will succeed.
excellent point
Everything must be maintained. The question is whether that maintenance is efficient and green or as you propose, a magnet for endless corruption.
It's being built by one of the most corrupt nations and leader in the World. That will work out.
we are talking about Saudi Arabia... its very different in the west where bureaucracy prevents innovation.... in SA everything is done on the spot if Crown Prince says so.... also you dont really have corruption unless you wish for a death sentence... so if anyone is able to do it, its SA
Not Just Bikes, Road Guy Rob, and Strong Towns are all good channels for anyone interested in this kind of thing. Suburban sprawl demands a huge amount of infrastructure but lacks the economic density to pay for itself. The old way of building towns with mixed zoning, multi purpose housing, and small shops dotted everywhere is much more sustainable economically, even when it looks run down by comparison. "Detroit isn't unique, they were just early." Ideally you do of course want to allow cars and other transport, but have enough people walking around and buying a few things here and there.
Neom seems to be, at least in concept, the horizontal version of Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti. A product of Archology. The blending of architecture and ecology over 50 some years ago. Soleri did see himself as a theoretical architect. Neom, when all is said and done, will probably be remembered as theory rather than practice.
Soleri himself developed a linear city design or Arterial Arcology made up of urban modules connected by pedestrian and bike trails, shuttles, trains, and maglevs.
@@ayoutubechannelname I wasn't aware of that. Thanks.
Well there sure are some quite disconcerning examples for this kind of selfsustaining planed city projects/social experiments in high SciFi.
@@ayoutubechannelname But why? What's the benefits of a linear layout?
@@lonestarr1490 It makes it easier to adopt public transport because commutes are one dimensional instead of two dimensional, so everybody's commute will be similar. It also enourages upward development. Linear cities would technically be three dimensional, with a different mode of transport on each axis, including trains for most parallel travel, elevators for most vertical travel, and pedestrian for most perpendicular travel. In order for travel times to be the same along each direction, the city should be stretched in proportion the speed along each axis. The faster the train, the more linear the city should be (or the longer the arc should be).
Regardless if some of the technologies are not as simple as imagined or if they face many difficulties that may jeopardize the project, the worst thing that could happen is a money loss. However, if even one of the technologies in the project proves to be succesful, that alone could benefit the world immensely. We hear about many of the ideas to help make the world green, but we never see someone take the first step because of the risks. I belive no matter what, when we see a company or a country that is actually willing to take the risk we should commend and praise it for the benefit it could make.
Utter drivel. Exactly which of these technologies will benefit anyone.
As for the people whose land was taken, all of them were compensated with very excellent sums and to provide them with another life in any city they want.
Sure they were, none were forced or happened to have "accidents" if they didn't want to, and probably excellent sums to live lives in one of the many almost out of the middle ages cities across the middle east that might have running water and electricity.
Remember when we used to build ambitious projects in the USA? Good times.
there is a difference, there is "ambitious" and there's "illogical", this is the latter.
@@EthanolTailor Some people think vanity projects are good. Prestige matters more than basic human needs sometimes 🤷♂️
@@crazydragy4233 tbh im not even explicitly against them, they bring jobs and tourism which can be pretty good money, and eventually profit. I just see this as a futile fight against a desert, and when it comes to things like this nature pretty much always wins.
ESPECIALLY when you try to make it a thin strip of forest with oppressive sun all day and desert to the north and south, its just so so so much harder to do even than if they tried this with the same area in a square or circle. It makes the logistics of it all so much harder than it needs to be and will waste so much money compared to if this was a more compact shape.
@@EthanolTailor Well of course, but the fact that this is being spearheaded in all its redundancy makes it nothing but a vanity project that really won't be built on anything good and probably won't even bring any good either.
USA does still build ambitious projects. There's e.g. the high-speed rail under construction in California. You might point to it as a failure but even it is a resounding success compared to this monstrosity if the Saudis really go for it (which I doubt).
This will never happen. But what will happen is a land grab from vulnerable people under the pretence of doing this and lots of concrete being mixed because somehow that always seems to get laid years in advance.
And concrete is so ridiculously climate damaging. It’s often overlooked how carbon intense concrete production is.
@@dann6067 Are you for real ?
@@BraceletGrolf He's a moron, ignore him.
Ah… classic. Is this China 2.0?
@@dann6067 wow. I gave you the benefit of the doubt when others were calling you out, but you are so woefully ignorant of science and to bring race into it is just not worth my time. Cancel yourself.
love your videos
Great Vido,
Thanks for putting it together.
Anything is possible it we’re willing to spend the time and resources.
Investors should invest in this city. The technology development as a result could be used in others places.
Remind us all about where we get Helium, and of it's increasing scarcity.
Alpha radiation from nuclear decay inside the earth's interior mostly, same reason the core is hot. The Earth will keep producing helium for a long time.
Dunno if the project will work or not but it will help in development of a lot of renewable tech!! cheers to that
Dafa ho ja yaha se Mayank
There are some great videos regarding the urban planning problems of neom that will also be important
update..we love your show & spacex. We traveled to Boca Chica to the the starshing get built. & we got the S dual motor fsd last Christmas 🎄 😎 still have the cybertruck tri motor or 4 motor fsd on order, i got lots of solar & backup battery system to charge them both.
With enough money (or oil money) pumped in, any large project can be successful. The real questions are always what was the opportunity cost and what are the unintended consequences?
Believe me, this won't. You're wrong because to call a project of this type sucessful, you need it to profit, and this one won't
Its an other sealed of City project for the rich ones to buy in...so as always the prize pays the rest of the world.
@@joaquimbarbosa896 don’t be a cheeky peaky just be cool man
@@ArabianQuirkSA I am just saying facts my friend
I mean I'd agree but their other projects haven't really done that before so eh? I suppose it's how we define success
"OUR brine won't just be pushed out into the ocean ..." - Why don't they just use the current brine emitting systems for the same purposes?
@SoMuchFacepalm the issue is that if you have a big batch of water with a specific salinity IE the ocean at 3.5% and a big batch of brine say 20% because you have by definition of ocean water 3.5% of it already in there you cant just add it to the brine to dilute it to the same level its a never ending task, to get the 20% brine down to 3.5% you need to mix it with an infinite amount of 3.5% salinity water, or you can introduce some fresh water... but that would be cutting directly into your product.
take 2 equal sized volumes of brine and seawater and add them together 1m^3 of each (20% and 3.5%) you get 2m^3 of water of 11.75% salinity then if you do it again (2m^3, 3.5% salinity + 2m^3 11.75% salinity) you get 4m^3 of 7.375%.
Every time you repeat the process you only get slightly closer to normal salinity without ever being able to reach it. and each time you do it you have to deal with double the volume you had before.
to perform this process just 3 times you have used 7m^3 of sea water for just 1m^3 of brine, you can see why this spirals out of feasibility quite fast, and because you can only approach the base line salinity and never reach it you will always have a product that doesn't mix properly when reintroduced. We can mix it because we have powered mixers (more energy involved in the process) but the bottom of the ocean is extremely still and brine naturally sinks, the only boundary is the one flat surface of the brine pool so remixing with the sea water takes quite some time.
@@EthanolTailor What about pouting it into the desert? Would't it help to increase the overall albedo?
@@eduardpertinez4767 not a good idea, there's a reason for the phrase "salt the earth" having negative connotations, It kills pretty much everything and isn't easily removed, at least in the ocean it will eventually diffuse properly.
@SoMuchFacepalm why so adversarial? I absolutely read your comment and was simply trying to play devils advocate and get you to understand the challenges and real maths of doing this.
Im not sure of the timeframe exactly id have to have the exact salinity of the brine at hand, but salt diffusion in water is quite a slow process going vertically, the closer the concentrations are the faster it will be but I was pointing out in my last comment how hard it can be to reduce that salinity before reintroducing it.
I think they should scale the line down to like 25%.
Make 1/4th of the line first, or maybe even 1/8th of the line, see if the technology is even viable.
If it is, just expand slowly. No need to try and build it all at once, without even testing out if it works.
The thermal desalinization dome with renewable energy is feasible but you have to allow a Greenbelt to establish itself with deep rooted system keeping the water localized and a sustainable ecosystem align might not be feasible but circular patterns might be better suited
The more I learn about futuristic cities and megalopolises, the more motivation I have to finish learning Blender. Scifi and futurism has been a passion of mine, and these kinds of videos have me conceptualizing future megacities. Considering making some renders because why the hell not.
All hail the sacred Donut. Ahoy fellow Blender user
The problem is, this city is actually really inefficient.
@@dieabsolutegluckskuche5174 Yes, incredibly efficient in a computer game, but imagine having to live in it. What if you had to, or just wanted to travel from one section of the city to another? Linear city planning on this grand scale ensures ghettos for the poor and working classes. A capitalist dystopia.
Please don't. People are not meant to live in some dystopian hell hole created in the mind of delusional architects. This is %100 a bad idea, and if you don't understand why then you should never design even a gas station.
Interesting video Matt. However, this sounds like a real "Pipe Dream" to me!
Thank you Matt, yet another brilliant, thoughtful, considered, yet light and entertaining presentation of technological and construction projects and developments. Fascinating.
Well, sound futuristic ,,, finger cross n look forward to its completion 💪💪💪💪
Fascinating idea but skeptical about the feasibility of it all especially the transportation systems. Maglev technology seems to be high on promise and low on results. Another great and intriguing video Matt. One questions, are there any successful maglev train systems in operation?
When you live at one end and work at the other....
Then you take the train, duh. That's how it works in so many areas already. I grew up in Hayward, CA and I went to school in San Francisco and Oakland, and had a job in San Jose. I WISH they were all in a straight line, I'd have saved hours a day.
@@nathanchildress5596 going from one end of a circle to another is way less of a hassle than needing to commute a hundred kilometers only to get stranded if the train ever breaks down. I...don't see how having multiple necessary stops in a commute in a straight line instead of multiple lines would be that significant an improvement?
idk why some people are angry, its really investing in teach which will benefit the world either it failed or successfully done
But it really isn't. If they cared to actually develop anything good it would look nothing like this.
Solar dome/tank desalination: Each "window" in the dome could have a built-in lens effect, which eliminates the need for reflecting mirrors to take up space around the tank.
The Neom water desalination using CSP sounds interesting, but its one thing to see fancy computer graphics and see an actual plant in production.
Plus the fact that the maglev and hyperloop (which is basically a maglev in a vacuum tube) are expensive as shit, so no wonder you only see dictators doing these projects because otherwise there would be some critical thinking involved. The Shanghai maglev loses about a $100 million per year and it is line between the airport and the Shanghai metro (essentially just to show off ) The hyperloop is unlikely to happen despite all the hype - it is super difficult to build a large vacuum (and then you need to have an airlock and 20 mins to depressurize the pods) After years of hype nothing of any consequence has been built. High speed rail is a much better and already existing technology.
first off, why are you depressurising the pods? people in them need to breathe.
secondly, it litereally doesnt matter if the train line itself loses money because its so good for the economy that it pays for itself.
@@jonathanodude6660 depressurize the tube, the pods need to be pressurized and this takes time. Also have a look at imploding tankers if you take the pressure out - do you want to be propelled in this system at 700mph where a loose nut can be a catastrophic failure. It's not a problem with planes as they are not flying in a tube.
The second point - sure it doesn't matter to the CCP if it loses money, but take a guess why they haven't been building maglevs anywhere else.
@@peterkratoska3681 loses money in Japan too and still gets built. High speed rail loses money and is getting built in Europe. Australia unfortunately doesn’t see the benefit in connecting up the extremely separated hubs so we don’t have even standard rail between states afaik, but every transport network I’ve been on in Australia (transperth, ACTION, PTV, the one in Sydney) seem like they barely make money if at all. They all need government funding which is a bit odd if you consider that they charge users, then on top services falter if funding is cut, making them seem unsustainable.
Btw, not sure if you mean that as a limitation of current plans, but it wouldn’t be super difficult to instead of doing all that, simply form an airlock between the platform and the pod, therefore no pressurisation or depressurisation is required. Just do checks that the airlock is closed and the passengers can breathe (no leaks) before setting off. Would take like 20 seconds I think. Probs be a good idea to have extra air onboard in case, but you wouldn’t have a loose screw because those would be covered up completely with smooth plastic/metal to reduce chances of getting them caught on something.
@@jonathanodude6660 Well talking about Australia, - The O-Bahn bus system is actually an interesting and not expensive design and the buses can use the special track for speed and still drive on the regular roads. th-cam.com/video/PLbhhdoCdl0/w-d-xo.html But there are really serious concerns about the hyperloop - if maglevs are expensive a maglev in a vacuum tube will be even more expensive.
Nothing wrong with investing in high speed rail when it makes sense. But in China the Maglev cost 4x as much as high speed rail to build and still it is Airport to station track that bleeds a $100 mill yearly. Hyperloop will be a maglev in a vacuum tube so even more expensive. But if you take a look at the published info on the Mumbai Pune proposed hyperloop the speed is 200km/hr even slower than hi-speed rail.
There is a lot of cost and difficulty in building and maintaniing vacuum tunnels. You will need expensive vacuum seals, from the look of it the tube sections are a continuous spiral weld with 10metre sections joined together. A tiny failure say the size of a bullet hole will be a catastrophic failure for the whole system. But it is unlikely that in America anyone would want to shoot a gun at a hyperloop system /s.
Sure there will be no lo0se nuts along a 1000km that could cause devastating failure. In the event of failure how do you actually rescue people? There is way too much of the tech-bro high tech magic solution that many people uncritically accept.
Phil Mason does a better job at it th-cam.com/video/ZHjrFKfyZrw/w-d-xo.html
As does this guy th-cam.com/video/CQJgFh_e01g/w-d-xo.html
Dude, Maglev and high speed rail operate in Japan, Germany, France, and there's been an approved high speed line from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Which of those are dictatorships?
"If they are able to prove out some of this technologies in large scale that would be beneficial for the whole world" ❤️
Yeah so?
LOL. I have bridge to sell you
Its worth a try. There is always doubters in every project.
I need to get coffee, let me just travel 50 km by train since everything in this city is so far apart. Seems sustainable to me.
Seems like a linear version of Walt Disneys City Concept, with the multiple levels and so on.
Even if all these technological hurdles are overcome, why should people move there? It's hotter than hell, so why not live in somewhere with a better climate (i.e. where you live today). With more people working remotely, there's less impetus to move a whole organisation to one location. This seems to be Saudi Arabia's pipe dream about solving the problem of the end of oil revenues.
Not to mention Saudi Arabia is a religious theocracy. Women don't have equal rights, and blasphemy is punishable by death. Who the hell would want to even visit, let alone live in such a backwards society?
@@Tych333not to mention the fact that building in a line is bloody pointless and logistically detrimental showboating and nothing more. Why not just build new districts in already established cities? Why not build a square? why not just build to the geography you have? oh the line goes through a bloody mountain range? doesn't matter itll just have a "lower population" like a city district with a low population in the hardest location to build isn't just a waste of time and money when you have another 3/4 to build?
This has so many problems that to list them all would take all day. I would bet my life savings on this failing miserably.
The Saudi crowned pri.... KING decrees that you move to this city.
And live there.. FOREVER!
@@Tych333 have you ever been to Saudi Arabia? Or heard from someone who did?
Because you should not relay only on media as a source of information
@@Tych333 just look at Dubai... it is similar to Saudi Arabia but still people flock there.... its already proven that women rights or horrible climate is not deal breaker
This is awesome stuff! Thanks for breaking it down for us! Hopefully we at least make progress in these areas because how cool would it be to live in a place like that?
Instead of line, they could at least use circle- so the travel time to the furthest point will be halved, with possibility for direct routes to decrease times even more.
easier to control people in a line, not a circle, remember its government at work, its not about being efficient at all
"We are all creators."
Thanks Matt, I needed to hear that right now.
Thanks for this video. I think Neom has some good ideas within it, like the Solar Dome and the self sufficient city sectors (kind of like Barcelona's "superblocks"), but the idea as a whole suffers from too much ambition. There's a long history of grand designers building pre-planned cities, and then individuals in the city being forced to adapt to them. In the case of a new city like Neom, people might just move out if they find the line concept too awkward.
More reason to keep vision and application separate. OTOH, it's necessary to "think ahead", knowing that you'll be wrong, but hoping not to be fundamentally wrong; and then in the here-and-now, you need a focus on a part of the project that can make sense within the constrictions of our current world (not least of which are the expectations people have - and for just about all of us, the principal requirement of the future is that it be like the present. We tend to demand familiarity. It's probably something like an instinct.)
Grand "Visions" one thing (laid out with the intention of adjusting the details as the future begins to unfold - especially given that it's probably not possible to create a properly "living" city on that scale in its entirety in just a few years). Steps along the way are another.
A different kind of thinking is required for planning out the present day details (pilot project?). It's stupid to attack Grand Visions that are not proposed as Grand Plans, because the thinking behind is different. In your vision you're trying to answer the question "Why?", maybe? (And your plans to carry out parts of this mainly focus on "How?").
For instance should be become an Intergallactic Civilization? That's a vision issue. It's a bit of a straw man to attack, qua "plan", but ... I've already said it: people attacking the failings of this as a "plan" (a program - an algorithm with lumps of matters as inputs, and bigger lumps of matter as outputs - and various humans as robots in service of that) are attacking not just a paper tiger, but a straw man, often. (And I forget why now).
We could make intergallactically envisionated plans, though. Put an antenna on the Moon, and see if you can hear the Vogons or something?
All I'm saying is that pre-planning cities often leads to an undemocratic situation where people are forced to adapt to the city's design instead of adapting the city to their own needs. When the people are poor and have nowhere to go they adapt as best they can, but the well-heeled inhabitants of Neom wouldn't have to put up with inconvenience, they could just leave. I'm not making any statement about "grand designs" in general, just cities.
@@Kevin_Street You've given me a lot to think about there. In my own mind I see a linear (and tallish) city as something that could be adapted to the needs of the needy. But then it would be better for people to do the adapting themselves...
And after a while the general thought I'm beginning to develop on this (for now, anyway) is that maybe any settlement has an element of "the tyranny of the masses" (to misuse the expression hopefully without losing the plot). As soon as someone builds himself a house, he builds you a wall. More houses, more confinement, till the only places you can move through are the little streets between the walled spaces. And it's hard to see that as anything other than inevitable.
Bring planning to the unplanned walling-in that is a settlement in the raw, and I don't know if you're adding that much more to the confinement than there already was just by the natural process of all the little kings there building their castles next to each other.
I need to let this stew some more, I think.
Let me rather tell you a more extreme "vision" (not a plan - lots of the details I don't know to be possible) of the linear city.
Imagine a robotic cooking machine (these are on the way, soon, I think). Imagine some kind of industrial-like conveyor distribution system with dedicated built passage. (Sort of like a "road system" for local deliveries).
OK your cooking machine could make most meals consumed by any household, to be delivered. Have an ethic of eating "enough". Don't "clean up your plate" like Grandpa did because it was hard in The Depression, and it's Godly. Leave something on the plate and in the serving dishes. Put them back on the conveyor immediately after your repast.
And now they go to the "homeless" dining facility. (I reckon if you keep things basic enough, everyone could have shelter from the elements when needed). There, whoever is hungry can choose to eat or refuse your still edible leftovers (might be some tasty food if you love good food, even). Humans first.
Food that the hungry humans don't want, send to the animal shelters (if your city is still failing badly enough to need those). And then finally it could be sold as livestock feed? (Or composted if it gets ripe, waiting).
(So somewhere at the other side of the city, your dinner plates and the food robot company's containers get washed, and then dispatched back to wherever it makes sense to store them.)
Well it's not completely wild SciFi, you have to agree?
Thing is this would only be possible if we had relatively small housing units reasonably close together, making this kind of automated "postal and delivery system" workable. And I find it hard to imagine it working better than in long (miles long), tall buildings, specifically designed for the purpose.
And finally back to your point. This would not be people adapting the city to themselves, but it would remove at least some of the need for that?
And sometimes the adapting-the-city involves some kind of crime at the extremes, too? So at least without some constraints on it, it also has its problems?
Thank you for this discussion. I really appreciate your enthusiasm and the clarity of your thought. It's been a very interesting conversation.
There's a lot of value that civic planning can add to a community. Most western cities sort of coalesced from individual elements in the middle ages. (Or rather they re-coalesced, since they tended to be destroyed by disasters like fires on a regular basis.) There was no particular planning. It was a dictatorship of the masses, like you said. Buildings were stuffed wherever there was room. Streets wound in curves and frequently dead-ended unpredictably. Civic services were practically non-existent. Most of the inhabitants lived shorter, more brutal lives than people in the countryside.
Then in the 19th century urban planning became a thing, and all of the great cities were rebuilt along grid systems and straight lines. This made it possible to install the really important infrastructure of sewers, water systems, and later electric, phone and data lines. And it also made it possible to find your way around most cities without getting hopelessly lost. Populations boomed and life improved for everyone. So planning can help a lot.
But it can also be overdone. Modern cities are a sort of blank grid, like a circuit board, where individual buildings can be put anywhere that zoning allows. On a circuit board you can plug the electronic parts and wires anywhere you want, and the same thing is true of a modern city. So cities grow and change over time in response to the needs of their inhabitants. They tend to look like shapeless blobs because that's the most efficient way to minimize travel time between any points within them.
To make a city in a fixed shape is an attempt to freeze it in time and solidify any inequities within the population. In your example of the cooking machine the rich people would always live on one end of the line and the poorest people on the other end. No rich person would ever move to the poor end, because he couldn't get proper meals there, and no poor person would ever move to the rich end, because they couldn't afford to eat in that neighborhood. There would be no gentrification, no change at all, because the city wouldn't permit it. So the people in that city would be forced to live stratified lives, forced to conform to the patterns encoded in the architecture around them.
@@Kevin_Street OK, so what if that plan was implemented in a way that took whatever was best in the old Soviet block implementations of a few districts that have some of these qualities. (I've seen a photo of a housing complex in Moscow that is so long that there are four public transport stations along its length, for instance; and there was one in Budapest I heard someone somewhere mentioning as being a nice place to live.)
The plans don't cover enough of the details I consider to be essential, to be worth copying, but at least there are "prototypes" in existence.
The "soviet" aspect I'm thinking about would be approximate equal per-person size. (And also something of an "each according to need" - only as an individual right, rather than as a mandate imposed by some "Leveller" - who probably lived in a palace. ) So if the plan only gave enough "nest space" to house all members of a household (and anyone with the luxury of a big family would have to pay for its upkeep herself - buy more rooms if need be, as far as living space goes), this would make clustering around the better parts less "effective" in generating perfect exclusivity. If units are small, facilities are always going to be relatively close by ... just because the units are small.
And anyway, inner city rich folk can't put gardens around them to keep more private space for their own lives, even today.
I think people who are financially free to make choices are going to move to where they feel comfortable? (And forcing them to live somewhere else is just another kind of oppression? It's certainly not freedom.)
Anyway, if you had a fixed unit size (but compensated for that by doing things like making "block level" guest rooms something anyone owning or renting such a place has some sensible right to. (Maybe some big maximum twenty-yearly - to cater for things like wedding guests, and then a ten yearly "quite-big" allowance for times when lots of guests arrive for some other unusual event, and maybe a few "room weeks" every year for the more usual visits people receive. And make it possible to buy bigger allocations, too.)
Again I stray. The simple point is that a small footprint makes physical separation from any facility reasonably small in absolute terms, and for the relative distances there might need to be some kind of declared active plan to ensure everyone is within walking distance of x, y, and z.
The way I imagine gardens being provided for in such a plan is firstly in zoning at least a mile on either side "green". And then in that mile you need some kind of adaptive process (to be able to either grow or shrink it) for allocating garden plots that are part of the property rights. (The idea being that it's not a specific plot that's yours, and that such rights can be latent - so someone might have a garden, get bored of it, "hand it back", and then a few years later decide to have a garden again - and get a different garden that time.)
If you did gardens by "each according to need" (but measured by voluntarily activity, and owned as private wealth, since property is the way most people accumulate some capital) the scheme I think would work best is "growth by activity". Let every potential gardener start with no more than a cabbage patch. Look after your cabbage patch (or pay someone to look after it) for say a year, and if you feel like you want more, then the next year you can move to a bigger cabbage patch (and if it wasn't really your thing, you can make your rights latent and go try some other hobby). Keep iterating over that. Take proper care of your garden (by whatever means, and in time you could be the one with a "garden empire" on the edges of the green belt. (Although for gardeners obsessive enough to gain themselves acres of garden, you'd probably have to require them to allow public access).
And then when you die, your garden - large or small - goes back in the garden pool. If your kids want gardens they have to look after these themselves (but then there's also no reason why a ten year old can't own such a garden if they comply with the upkeep requirements.)
In access distance terms, if you keep the "cabbage patches" (or "rose beds") smaller near the building, and larger further out, nobody would be able to plot to lock out everyone else from the near access area. (And far out, privacy is just a luxury that doesn't hurt anyone else, surely?)
Thanks to Saudi Arabia for testing out all these crazy dystopian ideas with all their money. Hope one day one of these ideas really works and bring real solution for better future. Until then I am just going to enjoy watching them try.
Thank you! Finally someone else who is as excited as me just to see if it'll work. I wanna see the looks on people's faces on the off chance all of this comes together and goes well. Forces like Saudi Arabia and Elon Musk who are driving innovation are the beacons of hope we need right now.
At this point it looks like solutions looking for problems, but hey it makes for a great reference for future case study.
mhhh didn't think the hyperloop was actually worth mentioning. fits this pseudo city crap well
"sudo"
I think you mean pseudo-city
thanks for the check
@@matc87 ok boomer
You don't think that the hyped loop is a thing? Don't you know that Elon Musk is a super genius? Lol
I have seen The Line pop up in a variety of sources, I have read/watched what I have come across, and your video is by far the best at diving into the key technologies that the concept is based on; thank you!
Hey Matt, whenever you speak about renewable or wind energy try to give pictures of VAWTs so that people get to know and think about it more.
Neom and the solar dome sound exciting, I hope they can make the economic factors work.
Matt, you mentioned the dirty old Haber-Bosch process. Have you checked out the new Hazer process being prototyped in Perth, Western Australia, by Hazer corporation? This converts methane into H2 and graphite with no CO2 emissions. The key is a fluidised bed reaction chamber with iron ore granules as a catalyst. It promises to produce hydrogen much more cheaply than by electrolysis. It could also provide the mechanism for converting fugitive CH4 emissions into two marketable products, graphite and hydrogen.
Simple answer to the question in this video:
NO.
WHY BUILD A CITY IN THE WORST POSSIBLE SHAPE POSSIBLE. WHY
Nope, the best shape is the hexagon.
@George Mann question: what shape has the most area for least perimeter and makes every point in it's area as close to it's neighbor as possible? If it's a cricle you're correct, then we can apply those question to a line, exept à line is a the worst in both cases. Plus relying on infrastructure without having a backup plan like diverting a road etc... Isn't a good idea.
SOLVING A PROBLEM WICH COULD HAVE BEEN AVOIDED IN THE FIRST PLACE DOESN'T MAKE THE PROBLEM A GENIUS IDEA
@George Mann we'll see, that when there is something that shuts off one of the vital infrastructure that this city NEEDS to survive, exemple, due to attack, cyber attacks, suicide etc... Then how are you gonna pass THE WHOLE CITY TRANSIT IN AN EVEN SMALLER TRANSIT SYSTEM
@George Mann no it wouldn't be easy, because there wouldn't be less than a dozen, there is thousands. So no it 's not easy to close all of them yet in a line, cut I off at any point and a large portion of the rest of the city is cut off, so how do you do tunnel maintenance? How do you upgrade? A city is easy because they can close a street easily to upgrade then pass on to the next, making gradual progress...
And WHERE DAFUC DO YOU PLACE A FARM IN A DESERT? ARE YOU A GENIUS OR WHAT, WHY PUT A FARM FAR FROM ANY SOURCE OF WATER, ALREADY PRECIOUS TO THE CITY, PUT IT NEAR A WATER SOURCE, YOU CAN ALREADY BRING FOOD EASILY WITH TRUCKS CENTRALIZED TO TRAINS
@George Mann okay, but do you realise that with the pipeline argument you pointed what I've been trying to tell you all along
Yep, this definitely gets my Bullshit of the Day Award!
I agree, won't work. Goods and Services still need to be local and system adaptable to future changes.
@@mrflower8871 I have no intention to go to any of those countries. I had too many scary interactions with Middle Eastern people. There is something in the water over there that seems to make everybody mental. Or maybe it is the lack of water, who knows. Now, I don't go to the Bible Belt in the US, either... same phenomenon.
@@schmetterling4477 this comment is the dumbest shit I read in a while, so do u think that the water makes them mentally different and bc of geographic and religious influences ppl form the bible belt offer scary interactions? r u fucking kidding me? Dude you need help asap, enjoy your life filled with resentment and pain, trust me, I feel sorry for you
Chinese brat being racist
Ling go find ur mom
Nice job
How about improving your existing cities rather then create empty ones ?