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28th July 2022
12:51pm BST
Via NEOM[/caption]
"The city's vertically layered communities will challenge the traditional flat, horizontal cities," the Prince said. "The designs of The Line embody how urban communities will be in the future in an environment free from roads, cars and emissions."
Besides the immense promise to be completely sustainable, the city is also slated to include flying taxis, robot maids and hanging gardens. All the "daily needs" of the city's inhabitants will be reachable in a five-minute walk and people can travel the full 170km in just 20-minutes on a "high-speed rail."
However not everyone is sold, largely due to the grand scale of things. While cities worldwide are making a few landmark changes to move into the future, Neom is hoping to do them all.
"With little access to the site, and only eight years left before residents are meant to move in, it's a lot to take on trust," said one consultant for the Saudi government. "And then there's the inertia in the system. It's hard to excise that."
Echoing the above, Robert Mogielnicki from the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington told Agence France-Presse: "The concept has morphed so much from its early conception that it's sometimes hard to determine its direction: scaling down, scaling up, or making an aggressive turn sideways.
"That's the main purpose of building Neom," he added. "To raise the capacity of Saudi Arabia, get more citizens and more people in Saudi Arabia. And since we are doing it from nothing, why should we copy normal cities?"
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