Meanwhile, the world is burning and flooding. But sure, build your fucking vanity project while disrespecting every human right on the planet.
People need to live somewhere. We don't need - and shouldn't - live everywhere. Where it's burning and flooding, we should stop rebuilding. The Amazon sized forest in the eastern US should be largely regrown.
In that way, they're actually providing a good example. We need to think about future infrastructure for a post-oil, post-climate change world. That's exactly what they're doing.
This is a project championed by MBS himself, and no-one dared telling him it was nonsense. Architects and consulting companies are doing what they do best with these types of pie-in-the-sky project: play along and take the money.
The vision is a nightmare of population control and surveillance. It wants to be sustainable, but go cool nearly 150M m2 of glass walls in one of the most inhospitable hot environment for humans... and tell me this is sustainable.
There are flying pods and glow-in-the-dark sand scapes...
Nothing in that project is energy efficient or makes even little sense. It's a vanity project. The money could have financed real breakthrough in science and engineering. Instead, it's wasted moving sand around. They won't even be able to build and host the 1.5km they now target.
The walls are mirrored, not glass. Even if it were glass, would cooling it use more energy than having most of the population drive in and out everyday and sit in traffic jams on km upon km of concrete? It's even worse in areas where that concrete is placed where vegetation could be doing the job of fixing carbon.
It's sustainable because of the density, and because it's built around public transportation. We should get back to vertical, dense towns and cities that are connected by trains.
The vast majority of human experience has been tough. Arguably the vast experience of most life is pretty cruel.
Should they just donate the wealth of their country to some other one? Would you like to donate some of your personal income to the nice homeless people outside?
The leaps from people build dumb glass city => world is bad => people building dumb glass city are bad because world is bad aren’t obvious to me.