The Government of Saudi Arabia is building the world’s first linear city, an architectural work worthy of a science fiction work. Is about The Linea metropolis in a straight line that will extend along 170 kilometersfrom Tabuk province to the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea.
The megastructure, whose dimensions will be 200 meters wide and 500 meters high, will be covered in exterior mirrors and will be able to house up to 9 million people inside. To have an approximate idea of this capacity, it is enough to imagine that about 10 million people live in Lima, the capital of Peru, and Seoul, the capital of South Korea.
Images from October of this year captured by drones from the company OT Sky Drone have revealed that different excavators have begun their operations on the ground.
A ‘giant mirror’ in the Saudi desert
The Line’s guiding philosophy, valued in 725,000 million dollarsis simple: build a city in which its inhabitants are always located a short time from their destinations, whether they are their homes, work and educational centers or places of recreation.
To move through it, it will not be necessary to have private cars, but only use elevators, ride bicycles and travel by public transport, such as a high-speed train that will connect points 20 minutes apart.
When the Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman announced the ambitious futuristic city in January 2021, he argued: “Why should we sacrifice nature for the sake of development? Why should 7 million people die each year from pollution? Why should we lose a million people every year to traffic accidents? And why should we agree to waste years of our lives commuting to work?
Thus, each inhabitant of The Line, in theory, will be able to enjoy 1,000 cubic meters of urban volume (A much more generous space than is available in most dense urban environments, Andres Palla and Subha Parida, two Australian experts in urban management, point out in an article in The Conversation.
In the videos and conceptual images of the project, you can see trees, gardens and people moving between the walls of a city that resembles a science fiction movie.
“The designs unveiled today for the city’s vertically layered communities will challenge traditional flat and horizontal cities and create a model for nature preservation and better human habitability,” the Saudi prince said in a recent statement.
Criticism of the ecological city model
Although one of the main characteristics of The Line is that it promises to be completely ecological (it will depend on renewable energy sources and will not emit polluting gas emissions), some experts point out that any project of this magnitude has a great environmental price.
They also wonder how a large wall of mirrors that reflects sunlight could affect the local biodiversity of the region.
The Line is part of NOSan ambitious smart city project that the Government of that Middle Eastern country plans to complete by 2030 with the aim of competing in the tourism field with its neighbors in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
The utopian linear city
The dream of a linear city is generally attributed to the Spanish Arturo Soria y Matawho first proposed such an urban concept in 1882, writes Oliver Wainwright in a column in The Guardian.
From the perspective of Soria and Mata, a city could be more functional with an extremely long street: in the center there would be a boulevard and a tram and, at the ends, each family would have its own house with an orchard and a garden. Beyond the houses, the entire city would be surrounded by forests.
One of the first people to try to apply the concept of a linear city in real life was the American businessman Edgar Chambless, who in 1910 had the plan to build Road Town. This was a continuous street of two-story houses that would stretch for several kilometers, from the coast of the Atlantic Ocean to the coast of the Pacific Ocean in the North American country.
The ambitious NEOM project
Aside from The Line, NEOM has two other ambitious projects in the works.
The first of them is Trojena, a tourist destination built in the Saudi mountains that will have more than 3,6000 hotel rooms to accommodate 7,000 residents. Inside Trojena, there will be a vertical city known as The Vault. The place will begin to receive tourists in 2026.
The second is oxagonan octagonal-shaped floating city that will serve as “a center of clean and advanced industries with zero emissions”.
Other sustainable cities of the future
Like the Saudi government, the top bosses of other countries and a handful of private companies are also intent on building sustainable cities similar to The Line. Some of them are already being built at a slow pace, while others are still a sketch on paper.
- Masdar in United Arab Emirates: Located in Abu Dhabi, Masdar is an ecological city destined to house 50,000 people and that will use 100% clean energy. However, 14 years after its construction began, barely 2,000 people live in its first residential areas, while its ecological objectives have been relaxed, reports the newspaper El País.
- Oceanix City in South Korea: The world’s first floating city will house 10,000 people and will be designed to withstand the most aggressive hurricanes, floods and tsunamis. In it, the energy will come from solar panels and the inhabitants will be able to grow their own food and will have drinking water.
Source-larepublica.pe