The 170-kilometre-long linear city continues its works in the desert amid doubts about its viability
The construction of the mammoth building-city The LineIn the middle of the Saudi Arabian desert, it continues to advance, with endless machines, cranes and workers working tirelessly in the sands that will house this unprecedented project. It is, as has already been reported in this newspaper, a linear city, of 170 kilometers long and only 200 meters wide, as well as 500 meters high. The strangest thing of all is that the Saudi regime presents the initiative as an example of sustainability.
And yet, can such a pharaonic work really be considered sustainable, with all that it implies about the environment? The architect Luis Lope de Toledo, who has a Youtube channel dedicated to these matters, has dedicated a complete video to analyzing the environmental effects (and also habitability) of such a unique city. His conclusion is that it is a “utopian and unreal” project and, of course, difficult to qualify as sustainable.
To begin with, it refers to the wall of this structure, which will be completely covered with reflective mirrors. “What will happen to all of them? the birds in the area? It is not just that you are forcing them to modify their migratory routes, it is that hundreds of them can die stamped against its windows”, says Lope de Toledo, referring to the fact that this gigantic wall will be invisible to these animals.
But doubts about its sustainability go further. the crown prince Mohamed Bin Salman has claimed that this city will have a zero carbon footprint when it is operational“but the problem is that the enormous carbon cost during its construction will outweigh any environmental benefits that may occur afterwards”, explains the architect.
As much CO2 emission as all of London in 4 years
In fact, Lope de Toledo echoes what the director of the School of the Environment in Sydney (Australia), Philip Oldfield, has stated in this regard: “You cannot build a 500-meter-tall building with low-carbon materials , this would require a phenomenal amount of steel, glass and concrete.” In fact, Oldfield calculates that the construction of The Line would produce more than 1.8 billion tonnes of embodied CO2, or the equivalent of four years of total UK emissions..
One of the reasons on which the supposed sustainability of The Line is based is that there will be no cars inside. The project provides that “everything is a five-minute walk from anywhere”, according to its advertising. This would be possible thanks to the implementation of a train line that would go from end to end of the city, along 170 kilometers.
The Line assures that this route would be covered in only 20 minutes, but that implies, according to the calculations of Luis Lope de Toledo, that said train “should go more than 550 kilometers per hour”, even without making intermediate stops, when the fastest railway now in existence is in Japan “and it goes at 460 kilometers per hour”. “You’re going to have to improve the technology a lot if you want to stick to 20 minutes,” he adds.
Nor does it appear that much thought has been given to how to resolve the lightning of a city wedged between two walls 500 meters high and only 200 meters wide. In the same way, the ventilation that will be inside it’s a mystery. “Hasn’t it occurred to you to think that, instead of a facade full of mirrors, that skin should be porous, so that air can flow through it,” she wonders.
All this makes it necessary to resort to technology for air conditioning and ventilation, which, once again, calls into question the sustainability of the project.
In his video, he does not allude to the subject of drinking water, which will be needed in huge quantities to supply the population, but also to irrigate the abundant vegetation that can be seen in virtual recreations. The solution given by the promoters consists of seawater desalination plants, which would be supplied with solar energy. However, other experts have expressed doubts about the viability of this renewable energy to run a plant of such dimensions.
At the moment, the works are advancing at full speed, and hundreds of excavators, cranes and other machines are busy leveling the ground for the first section of the work. No structure of The Line is yet visible, but 45,000 pylons have already been nailedaccording to local media, with peaks of up to 60 pylons installed per day, an exceptional figure.
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