Building mammoth building-city LineIn the middle of the Saudi Arabian desert, It continues to move forward with endless machinery, cranes and workers working tirelessly on the sands that will host this unprecedented project. It is a linear city, as mentioned earlier in the newspaper. It is 170 kilometers long, only 200 meters wide and 500 meters high. The strangest thing is that The Saudi regime presents the initiative as an example of sustainability.
But still, can such a pharaoh business be truly sustainable, with all its environmental implications? Architect Luis Lope de Toledo, who has a YouTube channel devoted to these topics, has dedicated a complete video to analyze the environmental impacts (as well as liveability) of such a unique city. His conclusion is: It is a “utopian and unrealistic” project and, of course, difficult to describe as sustainable.
To begin with, it refers to the wall of this building, which will be completely covered with reflective mirrors. “What will happen to all of them? birds in the area? You’re not just forcing them to change their migration route; hundreds may die by being stigmatized. against their windows,” says Lope de Toledo, referring to the fact that this huge wall would be invisible to these animals.
But doubts about its sustainability go even further. crown prince Mohamed Bin Salman claimed that this city will have a zero carbon footprint once it is operational“But the problem is that the enormous carbon cost during construction outweighs the environmental benefits that may come later,” the architect explains.
CO2 emissions as much as the whole of London in 4 years
In fact, Lope de Toledo echoes Philip Oldfield, director of the School for the Environment in Sydney (Australia): “You can’t build a 500-metre-high building with low-carbon materials, it requires an extraordinary amount of steel, glass and concrete.” Actually, Oldfield calculates that the construction of The Line will generate more than 1.8 billion tonnes of embedded CO2, or the equivalent of the UK’s total emissions over four years..
One of the reasons The Line’s supposed sustainability is based on is that there will be no cars inside. The project ensures that, according to its advertisement, “everything is within a five-minute walk of everything.” This will be possible with the implementation of a train line that will run from one end of the city to the other for 170 kilometers.
Line guarantees that this route will be traversed in just 20 minutes, but this means, according to Luis Lope de Toledo’s calculations: said the train “must go more than 550 kilometers per hour””, even without intermediate stops, while the fastest railway currently in existence is in Japan, “and it goes at 460 kilometers per hour”. “If it wants to catch up with the 20-minute thing, it’s going to have to develop a lot of technology,” he adds.
There doesn’t seem to be much thought on how to fix the problem either. lightening It is a city sandwiched between two walls 500 meters high and only 200 meters wide. Same way, ventilation to be inside It’s a mystery. “Didn’t it occur to you to think that instead of a facade full of mirrors, this skin would have to be porous so that air could pass through it?” she wonders.
All this necessitates the use of air conditioning and ventilation technology, which once again questions the sustainability of the project.
He doesn’t mention this in his video. drinking waterLarge quantities will be needed to feed the population, but also to irrigate the abundant vegetation that can be seen in virtual recreations. The solution offered by the project developers consists of seawater desalination plants powered by solar energy. But other experts have expressed doubts as to whether this renewable energy is suitable to run a facility of this size.
Work is currently in full swing and hundreds of excavators, cranes and other machinery are busy leveling the ground for the first part of the job. The Line’s build is not yet visible, but More than 45,000 posts are nailed downAccording to local media reports, this is an extraordinary figure with up to 60 mast installations per day.
Linear city, worst possible model
But more critical voices are emerging. An article published in the journal NPJ Urban Sustainability, openly criticizes the design of this mega-construction. According to its authors, The Line is exactly least efficient way It is possible to make a city. They actually advocate circular design versus linear design.
The authors of the paper, Rafael Prieto-Curiel and Dániel Kondor, researchers at the Center for Complexity Science in Vienna (Austria), say: “The project was born as the embodiment of the dream of starting from scratch and completely rethinking a city, but, first of all, remembering that linear a building is the worst way to design a city. Cities with circular structures have been created for thousands of years. There’s a reason humanity has 50,000 cities and they’re all round in some way.”
According to the architects, Mobility is The Line’s biggest challenge. And its own planning makes it impossible to move from one place to another on foot in the most sustainable way there is. Two people living in this city will be 57 kilometers apart on average. This is taking as an example the walking distance of one kilometer, Only 1.2% of the population is within walking distance of each other.
To solve this problem, The Line offers a suggestion: high speed rail system. But for the report’s authors, that’s not a good idea either. “So everyone will be within walking distance of a station, Must have at least 86 stations”, explains Daniel Kondor. As a result, trains will spend a lot of time at stations and will not be able to reach high travel speeds between the two stations. According to the researchers’ calculations, a journey on The Line will take an average of 60 minutes, with at least 47% of the population taking an even longer journey.
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