Since I was born and raised in Santa Cruz I found this article interesting and posted it to a Santa Cruz local site. The old timers in Santa Cruz like my parents don't like the influence that UCSC brought to the town, but I love it:
MBS’s $500 Billion Desert Dream Just Keeps Getting Weirder
Neom, the Saudi crown prince’s urban megaproject, is supposed to have a ski resort, swim lanes for commuters, and “smart” everything. It’s going great—for the consultants.
"One day last September, a curious email arrived in Chris Hables Gray’s inbox. An author and self-described anarchist, feminist, and revolutionary, Gray fits right into Santa Cruz, Calif., where he lives. He’s written extensively about genetic engineering and the inevitable rise of cyborgs, attending protests in between for causes such as Black Lives Matter. While Gray had taken some consulting gigs over the years, he’d never received an offer like this one. The first shock was the money: significantly more than he’d earned from all but one of his books. The second was the task: researching the aesthetics of seminal works of science fiction such as Blade Runner. The biggest surprise, however, was the ultimate client: Mohammed bin Salman, the 36-year-old crown prince of Saudi Arabia."
This article is fascinating, and it has a great quote about the 75-mile "landscraper":
The concept carried echoes of an idea originated in the 1960s by Superstudio, an Italian architectural collective, for a structure so enormous it would wrap around the entire planet. This “Continuous Monument” was never a real building proposal; it was intended as a critique of excessive urbanization and of the modernist megaprojects then in vogue. One of Superstudio’s last surviving members, when asked about the Line by the New York Times, dryly noted that “seeing the dystopias of your own imagination being created is not the best thing you could wish for.”
It's not just the Saudis doing crazy stuff like this. From the Wikipedia article On Neom, I found this:
> Belmont is a proposed planned city in the Phoenix metropolitan area of Arizona, United States. The development, a partnership between billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates and local real estate investors, will be a "smart city" designed around emerging technologies.[1] It will be located in the West Valley area, along Interstate 10 near Tonopah.
That's some of the driest, hottest land anywhere in the US and an extremely fragile ecosystem. The ongoing Colorado River crisis just makes this more of a head-scratcher. Maybe not at the same scale, but definitely a similar sense of leading with technology rather than the problem.
Yet another impractical vaporware passion project with no use-case/demand.
One is left with a feeling, however, that they are missing out on a free money party if this is an example of the level of thinking that is being encouraged. Maybe we should be spitballing ideas to Saudi royalty too.
> Yet another impractical vaporware passion project with no use-case/demand.
The use case is services professionals extracting cash from extremely credulous members of the KSA royal family (this is part of the new city project, another insane waste of resources).
Softbank raised $50bn in a ten minute meeting with MBS. They then turned around, set the whole thing on fire...this has been going on for almost half a century (the very first financial crisis caused by the Saudis was the boom in EM debt in the 70s, this bankrupted Citi and wasn't resolved fully until the early 90s...they on the same tier as German bankers when it comes to losing massive amounts of money very quickly).
To be fair (to be fairrrrrr), extracting huge wodges of a
cash from the KSA royal family for "services" and putting it pretty much anywhere else is probably not the worst thing you could do.
It leads to a massive overproduction of people with no skills.
If you take Softbank, some of the stories out of there are insane. People in senior leadership positions doing things that are very weird (one of them was forced out of Softbank, his first move...raising a $5bn+ VC fund from ME investors).
As I said too, it actually has a real impact on the economy. When 2008 happened, everyone pointed to the investment banks..."how could you do this to us?"...no-one asked why investment banks had clients who specifically required investments that were so toxic...I will tell you: Japanese saving institutions, German/French banks, some non-Japanese East Asian saving institutions, and Middle East SWFs (they have been behind almost every financial crisis in the last ten years: MBS, Eurocrisis, Turkey, EM debt, tech...every single time, going back decades).
People ask why financial markets produce things that are pointless...this is why, because the distribution of assets globally is not guided by the market in any way.
> People ask why financial markets produce things that are pointless...this is why, because the distribution of assets globally is not guided by the market in any way.
What do you mean? Wasn't "the distribution of assets globally" in this way guided by the market? The market wanted oil, so it sent vast quantities of money to the Saudis, who are the most effective producers.
I think this is more an illustration of how the market, left to its own logic, often does pointless or dysfunctional things.
The most effective producers because of non-economic reasons (i.e. geological properties). So they end up being one of the largest investors in the world because of geology.
The market does often not do pointless or dysfunctional things because markets tend to give most capital to the most efficient users of that capital. But those rules do not apply to things like oil where there are significant non-economic returns (to an extent, the Saudis will always lose all their money, I have named other reasons who repeatedly do the same thing...but it is not terribly efficient spending resources to prise capital from them).
Expanding the global B-ark personnel manifest is still not the worst thing a trillion dollars in the hands of that theocratic royal family could achieve.
Far, far from the best, but not the worst.
Also the "free market"[1] gave KSA all that money willingly in exchange for oil (as opposed to, say, sorting out alternating energy technologies 30 years ago).
[1]: Well, maybe with a generous geopolitical subsidy delivered by Raytheon and US Marines.
Again, it caused two decades of political upheaval in South America, multiple military dictatorships, hyper-inflation, economic chaos, etc. (this was all mediated by US banks btw, who were the ones doing the lending...but the reason they were in that position is because ME countries insisted on depositing all their money with US banks).
Right, but the reason the "free market" gave that money was because of the geological properties of KSA, not their ability to invest capital wisely. The failure to realise that this is a path to nowhere is the fault of our politicians however.
For comparison, if I am raising capital for a hedge fund and I start talking about the geological properties of the earth under my house then I will carted out. But that logic is how KSA are one of the largest investors in the world...it is going about as well as you might imagine (the same is true for Taiwan, Japan, Germany in more subtle ways...they have created systems that expropriate wealth from consumers for investors, and those investors essentially spend a huge amount of time setting that money on fire...the only country that has got out of this is Sweden, which decided to give substantially all their material wealth to one family, the Wallenbergs, who turned out to be the some of the best investors globally...but that is a rare example of arbitrary wealth allocation ending well).
This is also a large part of why the US is as powerful as it is. Through a quirk of history and geography, it found itself with enormous amounts of highly productive land, crammed with resources and thousands of miles and oceans away from conflicts which decimated others.
For all the high-minded aspirations of the early Americans, their grand experiment would not have worked so well if they'd annexed Greenland.
> raising capital for a hedge fund and I start talking about the geological properties of the earth under my house then I will carted out.
Certainly they'd be wondering why you're faffing about with a hedge fund when you could be mining that.
Less credulous and more desperate.
Saudi Arabia needs something that can sustain the current lifestyle of Saudis when oil and gas revenue start to go down.
You're right about that. I personally know 2 people about to leave the UK to work on Neom (one of 3 new cities they're building) and you wouldn't poach them without a mind blowing offer.
I got a lot of adverts for Oxagon when I posted a CV online.
I probably could make bank going there to help shovel cash into a pit in the desert but...eh. I also feel like the managers of such a project will be complete nutters.
It's basically that they want to build city made of Gigafactories in the desert (what they produce is apparently not yet defined). Also it's octagonal for some reason and half of it floats.
There are lots of flashy renders and a slick video but that's about the measure of it.
In my impression, such endeavors (when they actually happen) seem to be a confluence of western engineers and architects and near slave labor sourced from a variety of very poor countries, complete with stories of indenture, passport witholding, etc. I hope that's not the case in Saudi Arabia but I wouldn't put money on it.
The prince is clearly a man and as such there is no need for the use of the plural "their". The prince made his money conveys more information and does not violate rules of grammar and as such is readable to anyone who understands English, this in contrast to the hypercorrect use of "their" which turns an already irregular language into an even more convoluted puzzle.
If Saudi Arabia wants to launder its reputation, they should be working harder to solve climate change.
This project is estimated at 1trillion. With that sort of investment they could become the de facto energy brokers of the world. Selling both the poison and the cure as we wean off of oil.
One gets the impression that they don't particularly know what they want and seem to just halfheartedly leap at whatever latest vision that is pitched to them.
Saudi Arabia has the money, land, and climate to be the world leader in solar energy. And with that desalination tech, desert/vertical farming, etc. There are so many things they could do in they were interested in them.
Not sure that's enough to move the needle on Saudi's reputation but maybe if they continue investing in EV projects and get some wins they can talk those up.
Is it just me or is no one addressing the most obvious disadvantage of this plan? Building a city along a "line" is simply a terrible idea. As far as I can tell, every major city in the world is based around a downtown "core" with less dense areas radiating outward from it, except where geographical barriers prohibit this. The advantages of this model are so manifold that I can't even begin to enumerate them—everything from (relatively) short commute times to equidistant access to central services from every direction. I cannot think of a single advantage of having a city that is a straight line.
Major cities in the world were built before linear mass transport like trains were invented, often around a single building of importance like a castle, church, or factory.
I guess it simplifies transport a great deal? You can just stack everything up and send it back and forth at high speeds, sort of like a conveyor belt. I suppose the natural equivalent is shipping and settlement along rivers like the Nile in Egypt?
One of their claims is that you can travel end-to-end in 20 minutes. If that actually worked and was easy to use I think most of your advantages would not be super relevant.
Not to mention some weird climate change that may associate with having a 1,300’ wall separating the coastal area from the inland.
Anyone remember the crazy Russian Scientist whose Soviet government almost started to fund that Bering Strait dam just so USSR can increase usable landmass that the warmer climate of Siberia can bring, anyone?
That project surely would have gotten started if US hadn’t committed a Seward’s Folly (having bought Alaska from Tsar Russia).
That's a lot of people to have no sewer system for, but I'm sure they'll remember to factor it in this time. Maybe they'll build a ring-road around it so the honey-wagons have somewhere to queue up.
I did skim the article, but it seems not to mention where from they will take water and sewers are also not mentioned. I think it could be a good idea to connect Burj Khalifa you sewers first nevertheless.
Meanwhile, in China, there are manufactured cities inhabited by ghosts. The people never showed.
This Saudi proposal isn't a skyscraper, but an elongated and enclosed earth station. Great for controlling the inner environment, as well as those who inhabit it.
Love a good China bash but the people did show. Pudong was a ghost city once upon a time and now it's the financial capital of China. There aren't ever any follow up articles on these ghost cities five years later because they tend to be fully occupied by that point.
Wasn't China bashing. Just bashing the idea of predicting the future from some isolated vantage point. The Saudi prince isn't a visionary...he's out of touch, as most megalomaniacs are.
P.s. Evidently, asof 2021, there are still ghost cities
What's more, it's almost certainly not the last word on that subject when you just compare empty homes to population as it's also about the sheer, absolute scale of China's literally cities—not scattered homes or towns—that are near 100% unoccupied. Also the figure for SF might be a bit out of proportion b/c the city limits are just a slice of the Bay Area (1 out of 9 counties); from https://www.trendstatistics.com/real-estate/bay-area-vacant-...:
1. San Francisco had 38,651 empty homes in 2018
2. The Bay Area has over 46,000 vacant homes
Now the Bay Area has a population of ~7.75 million people (Wikipedia), so San Francisco has only ~10% of the BA population, but the percentage of BA vacant homes located in SF is a staggering ~84%. None of these figures is terribly precise, but 46e3/7750e3 is like ~0.6% (~half a vacant property per 100 people) for the entire Bay Area. Not sure what you calculated or whether it's just too late over here for me to do maths, but I'm getting 38651/860000 * 100 == 4.49 for San Francisco (4 and half vacant homes per 100 people), while for China I get 65e6/1400e6 so ~4.64% (~5 vacant properties per 100 people), which is nearly the same when you compare the small-ish city to the huge country, and China having ten times as many vacant properties when compared to the Bay Area.
Lastly, the proper interpretation of the figures plays a role, too as discussed in https://socketsite.com/archives/2022/02/there-are-not-40000-... which article points out that e.g. homes only used during the week but not on the week ends are listed as vacant. In China you're looking not at single apartments but entire city wards with high rise next to high rise that are not. occupied. at. all.
Regardless of the specifics of which is worse with housing in terms of vacant housing. It is not the only housing issue with the Bay Area, SV, and SF. That entire area is an awful neoliberal NIMBY dystopia.
Overall, China’s ghost towns and the entire Bay Area are bad in terms of housing.
I don’t know enough about housing, but from the outside, the housing issues of the Bay Area seem arguably worse. The NIMBY behavior and the leeching of the well off from others and the house or cards that is the way things are financed in the Bay Area and other major parts of the US with many cities and towns being close to Ponzi schemes because they are made for cars aka sprawl which is unsustainable. And then the NIMBY in suburbia sprawl and in the urban cities isn’t good either.
Again without knowing a lot, I think I’d take ghost towns over how the Bay Area and much of the US is
MBS’s $500 Billion Desert Dream Just Keeps Getting Weirder
Neom, the Saudi crown prince’s urban megaproject, is supposed to have a ski resort, swim lanes for commuters, and “smart” everything. It’s going great—for the consultants.
"One day last September, a curious email arrived in Chris Hables Gray’s inbox. An author and self-described anarchist, feminist, and revolutionary, Gray fits right into Santa Cruz, Calif., where he lives. He’s written extensively about genetic engineering and the inevitable rise of cyborgs, attending protests in between for causes such as Black Lives Matter. While Gray had taken some consulting gigs over the years, he’d never received an offer like this one. The first shock was the money: significantly more than he’d earned from all but one of his books. The second was the task: researching the aesthetics of seminal works of science fiction such as Blade Runner. The biggest surprise, however, was the ultimate client: Mohammed bin Salman, the 36-year-old crown prince of Saudi Arabia."
https://archive.ph/65uZx (Bloomberg)