Saudi Arabia’s wildly ambitious plan to build 500m tall, mirrored, 170km long parallel skyscrapers, forming a 1.5M population desert city has been curtailed to 2.4km long.

The news was broken by the financial news publication Bloomberg, which said that Saudi Arabia’s government had “scaled back its medium-term ambitions” for Neom, of which The Line is the most significant sub-project.

The Saudi government had hoped to have 1.5M residents living in The Line by 2030, but this has been scaled back to fewer than 300,000, according to the report. It is unclear how it intends to house a higher concentration of people considering the proposed length (and therefore area) has been massively slashed.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      That’s not a big problem since this is in a desert. Getting any water there in the first place is the problem. And, based on the mockups I saw, there’s supposed to be a lot of greenery.

      • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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        5 months ago

        water policies of saudi arabia are straight up insane. riyadh takes half of water from seashore desalination plants (that burn massive amounts of oil, so big that it cuts into their oil revenue very significantly). for the other half, they have somehow found non-renewable water, literal fossil water, and it’ll run out in decade (might have misremembered). at the same time there are no water meters in the city at all