Is anybody here following the construction of Neom aka The Line?

[thastinger]

Stupid question huh?
Saudi Arabia has a population of 32 million, 40% of which consists of foreign non-citizens who may leave at any time. Suggest you check out some expat forums to see how unenthused most of these people are to be making a living in the Kingdom. Even those expat airline pilots who are bribed with very high rates of compensation seem lukewarm about living there.
The population of citizens is around 19 million. Nearly half of these people would need to live in this monstrous project at its planned build out capacity.
I also doubt that desalination is a viable solution for a city the size of this one for more than a brief period.
White elephant anyone?
Waste of the Kingdom's resources?

That other 40% is the Manuel labor...the Pakistani folks who wash the windows of the hotels and build the skyscrapers.

 

[fdcg27]

That other 40% is the Manuel labor...the Pakistani folks who wash the windows of the hotels and build the skyscrapers.

You get it.
Not everyone does.
For a developing world worker, anything looks better than nothing.

 

[PandaBear]

The point being: it doesn't matter what we think, Saudi can afford it and they will be fine with population if they can financially support it. They are not a collapsing economy as long as they have the oil export machine. They can always afford to allow immigration into the country if they want to.

Whether The Line will fail or not is more of an urban planning problem than whether Saudi is a country about to collapse problem.

 

[fdcg27]

Nobody is predicting the collapse of Saudi as a country in the next couple of decades.
Most of us are just questioning the wisdom of this project as well as the lack of work ethic of the the typical Saudi citizen.
A massive project won't fix that and so the money put into this albatross is probably badly misplaced.
Better, maybe, to educate the citizens in something more than driving exotic cars and leaving them by the side of the road when they die of neglect.

 

[vavavroom]

To reiterate the size of the project, the 110-mile-long building will supposedly consist of 135 modules in a double row with each module 800 meters in length, 500 meters tall, and a combined width of 200 meters. They are building something.