Little did he know that SNOT (Studs Not On Top) is what we AFOLs call a technique where we turn LEGO bricks and plates on their sides and attach them to the faces of other bricks. “Oh, I just used SNOT.” I started saying without thinking twice, and before I had a chance to explain what I meant, the guy had moved away with a puzzled (and slightly disgusted) look on his face. Someone from the general public came up to me and asked how I had built the green roof in my model of 40 Wall Street. Isn’t that stud supposed to be on top? No, it’s SNOT!Ī funny thing happened at the first LEGO convention where I displayed my skyscraper models. One hopes to be proved wrong and that The Line will prosper and form a unique personality in a similar way that Dubai is evolving, now housing Al Quoz, its own creative bohemian district.6. It is the idiosyncrasies, the mishmash of diverse communities or the mavericks who have spawned bohemian districts, each with their own pockets of architecture, character and quirks that breathe vibrancy into a place. the richness of cities like Paris, Marrakesh or London, for example, comes not from everything being technologically brilliant, pristine and new, but from those interwoven layers of history and culture that have been knittted into their fabric over hundreds, if not thousands, of years. As one CSH researcher Daniel Kondor explains, “Cities are more than a collection of semi-isolated 15 minute neighborhoods located next to each other”. The very idea of building an entire city from scratch also has its critics. He added that the city “would create a large-scale barrier to adjacent ecosystems and migratory species”. Again, reality seems to fall short of the dream, and once we consider the cost and the question of who is footing the bill (between 200 million and a trillion USD depending upon the source) and the working conditions for those actually doing the construction, not to mention the displacement of the native Howeitat tribe in order to build upon their home, this eco-topia is looking more and more like a moral dystopia. “A line is the least efficient possible shape of a cityThere’s a reason why humanity has 50,000 cities, and all of them are somehow round”.Īpparently, The Circle would be a far better proposition.īut how comfortable will the 9 million residents be, living in a city where everything ‘runs on artificial intelligence’? According to the tech blog, Engadget, “The Line is expected to be loaded with countless sensors, cameras, and facial recognition technology that, in such a confined space, could push government surveillance to almost unthinkable levels.”Īnd what about NEOM’s carbon neutral promise ? According to Philip Oldfield of the University of New South Wales, the carbon footprint of constructing The Line, with its imposing skyscrapers, will be huge, “producing around 1.8 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent in glass, steel, and concrete”. Rafeal Prieto-Curiel, who worked on the project, has vocalised what we are all thinking: On average, the CSH estimate 60-minute journeys, three times longer than NEOM’s prediction. Their mathematicians state that for everyone to be within walking distance of a station, there would need to be at least 86 stations, and anyone who’s traveled on a local train, stopping every three minutes or so, knows how impossible it is to reach high speeds. This leads to the question of transporting all these people, by rail, along a 170km stretch, and again, the CSH says it’s not looking good. This hinders active mobility, so people will depend on public transport.” Assuming a walking distance of one kilometer, only 1.2% of the population is within walking distance from each other. In Johannesburg, which is 50 times larger in area, two random people are only 33 kilometers apart. “If we randomly pick two people in The Line, they are, on average 57 kilometers apart. They worked out that a size-population calculation “translates to a population density of 265,000 people per square kilometer – ten times denser than Manhattan”, and despite NEOM’s assurance that communities will exist within walking distance of each other and everything they could desire or need, the CSH claim otherwise: The CSH crunched numbers regarding mobility, population density and richness of culture, and found all three lacking. Quoting researchers from the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, who have been studying the logistics of the city, The Line should “definitely not be a blueprint for future cities”. According to one engineering publication, Design and Development Today, ‘What some consider an ideal ecological city, others call a promotional gimmick’.
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