Col Rabih Alenezi says he was ordered to evict villagers from a tribe in the Gulf state to make way for The Line, part of the Neom eco-project.
One of them was subsequently shot and killed for protesting against eviction.
The Saudi government and Neom management refused to comment.
Neom, Saudi Arabia’s $500bn (£399bn) eco-region, is part of its Saudi Vision 2030 strategy which aims to diversify the kingdom’s economy away from oil.
Its flagship project, The Line, has been pitched as a car-free city, just 200m (656ft) wide and 170km (106 miles) long - though only 2.4km of the project is reportedly expected to be completed by 2030.
Please don‘t call it an eco-region just because these eco wrecking saudis do.
You’re saying creating a 100 mile long barrier with a mirrored surface that cooks everything around it and prevents wild life from reaching the sea isn’t creating an eco-region?
And it’s a real word. Neom is obviously not an eco-region lol
This is such a stupid project. You could fit the same size city in 6km x 6km and it’d be bigger than what they have planned. Much cheaper and easier as well, and no reason to kill anyone… Oh wait, I see the incentive.
Nobody would talk about it if it was a standard square city. Masdar city is a square design of 6km² for example, also trying to be a hub of future technologies, and most people will go “mass what city?” The Line attracts attention, and with attention often comes money. At least they have the first part right, the second part isn’t working out as they hoped it would.
Who cares if people talk about it when it‘s doomed to either become an unlivable hellscape or more likely never see completion because it‘s utterly infeasible? They destroy a huge area, waste billions and worst of all throw many lives into a meat grinder just to get some clout by the dumbest idiots on the planet. In the end of the day more people will dislike and look down on them for this moronic project that many knew would never work.
Welcome to late stage capitalism, where billionaires are the pharaohs of old, doing huge constructions sacrificing countless workers just for vanity.
I don’t think capitalism is to blame for a King’s vanity project
Everything bad is capitalism. Don’t you read the internet??
*Lemmy
Couldn’t have said it better.
I agree its stupid but the original idea was larger and had a transit system going down it. I think that was the concept. To sorta maximize transit as you did not need to branch it off to go to various places.
Whatever they end up building will still be harder to navigate than traditional city layouts. An example one lemmy user mentioned in a previous post is how unfortunate it’d be if you lived at one end and worked at the other.
yeah. I was just pointing out there was a reason. I have been thinking about it in the back of my head today. How valuable is it and is it worth it. When I look at my city metro its basically a hub and spoke and what you see is that most of the spokes are around 15-20 miles out from downtown and I know they have been extended so I think closer to 15 for the original spans. Im thinking this gets to what that other lemmy user said. Having a commute where you go from the end of one spoke downtown to the end of the other would stink. Since there are multiple spokes that are mor places to live that are sorta in that magic 15-20 mile distance. Our metra is similar but goes way farther out but also has way fewer stops. So it can be farther out without being to bad. All the same those branches tend to stop once the commute from downtown is about an hour or so. Im guessing that really the circular city type thing is the way to go and likely why most are like that barring natural barriers like oceans or whatnot.
That’s by design, I’m sure. Like this is the sort of setting you would find in a cinematic critique of capitalism’s inherent hierarchical nature.
Public transit sounds also easier as a grid or something if you are able to plan it beforehand.
Unless part of the point is to keep all the poors at one end. They will be reluctant to travel very far daily so the wealthy won’t have to look at them. Servants will have to travel, I guess. Maybe servants come from the middle section.
Well I’m not surprised to see that Neom is going wrong in both stupid and horrifying ways. This particular part will make it hard to be too smug about it with the Saudi fanboys though… This is just sad.
All this hardship and money just so they can build a giant glass box in the middle of the fucking desert. Anyone whose spent like 5 minutes in a greenhouse will tell you why that’s a bad idea for a city.
If it even gets built out. I’m expecting this to become a bioshock or escape from LA type situation. Where the city starts off normal but just goes straight to hell.
I’m thinking more “fallout vault dweller” scenario, hundreds of small isolated cities each with their own experiment.
It’s fine they’ll fill it with air-conditioning, all powered by fossils fuels.
How long before tankies start protesting the Saudi colonialism?
Oh, they won’t? Okay.
They do, every year, at career fairs across the nations schools. It’s called divesting from the military industrial complex.
You just pretend not to see it.
This issue is brought up literally every time the Saudis are mentioned. However, your take is a fresh and interesting one that makes absolutely zero sense.
What are you doing?
Oh that’s right, nothing. Okay.
It’s not even a fucking meme in the tankiest Putin apologist communities to support Saudi Arabia.
Seriously where are you even getting this from?
Liberals will never protest the murder of brown people
Both tankies and liberals would object to being conflated with each other.
Explain the difference between a liberal and a tankie.
hint; they’re the same.
Protesting in Saudi? I didn’t know such a thing existed. /s
All citizens can do it. Once.
Does for a little bit, then it doesn’t.
Wait? I thought they had killed the project or at least significantly reduced it in scope? Why still kill for it then?
This was when the stupid plan was both big and stupid, now it’s puny and stupid.
Those people are still dead tho
At least Saudi Arabia is doing something to guard against the imminent collapse of their oil economy… So that’s good, I guess.
Not sure Neom is the project I would have funded to do so, but I imagine the Saudis are getting desperate.
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Neom, Noem, so hard to tell the difference, since they’re both stupid and evil.
if you’ve ever wonder what it was like to see the pyramids being built…
It wasn’t, the pyramids ended up as planned. This won’t.
They didn’t always go as planned! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bent_Pyramid
The pyramids were built by well paid craftsmen. This will end up being built by de facto slaves from other countries.
The pyramids were built by well paid craftsmen.
Designed, certainly. But constructed by peasant corvée.
Not true. The pyramid builders lived privileged lives in exchange for what they did.
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/who-built-the-pyramids-html
If not slaves, then who were these workers? Lehner’s friend Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, who has been excavating a “workers’ cemetery” just above Lehner’s city on the plateau, sees forensic evidence in the remains of those buried there that pyramid building was hazardous business. Why would anyone choose to perform such hard labor? The answer, says Lehner, lies in understanding obligatory labor in the premodern world. “People were not atomized, separate, individuals with the political and economic freedom that we take for granted. Obligatory labor ranges from slavery all the way to, say, the Amish, where you have elders and a strong sense of community obligations, and a barn raising is a religious event and a feasting event. If you are a young man in a traditional setting like that, you may not have a choice.” Plug that into the pyramid context, says Lehner, “and you have to say, ‘This is a hell of a barn!’”
Lehner currently thinks Egyptian society was organized somewhat like a feudal system, in which almost everyone owed service to a lord. The Egyptians called this “bak.” Everybody owed bak of some kind to people above them in the social hierarchy.
That’s literally corvée.
You do know that everyone else who wasn’t a priest or a royal lived even worse lives than that, right?
Okay, great, I see our argument is “Words don’t matter, corvee isn’t corvee, unskilled labor isn’t unskilled labor; because they lived in a barracks and were fed well”.
Corvée (French: [kɔʁve] ⓘ) is a form of unpaid forced labour that is intermittent in nature, lasting for limited periods of time, typically only a certain number of days’ work each year. Statute labour is a corvée imposed by a state for the purposes of public works.[1] As such it represents a form of levy (taxation). Unlike other forms of levy, such as a tithe, a corvée does not require the population to have land, crops or cash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvée
How does that describe pyramid workers?
Pharaos probably were like “build my tomb inside a golden tower that reaches the stars” and a couple years later, “OK, a pointy 400 foot high pile of rocks will have to do I guess”.
