If you look long enough at cities like Paris, Rome, Moscow, or New Delhi, you might eventually
recognize a very simple feature that is common to them all. These cities are all *roughly* laid out
in a circle. You may think that's excruciatingly obvious, but it's actually quite important.
Most cities in the world have gradually taken the shape of a circle. Of course this isn't always the
case. Sometimes features like mountains or large bodies of water prevent cities
from being circular even if they wanted to be. Good examples of this are Toronto and Chicago,
two cities which are perched on the edges of Lake Ontario and Lake Michigan, respectively.
Even in this case however, cities tend towards growing as circularly as possible.
These cities have grown out from their precious industrial waterfronts in a
sort of semi-circle-ellipsoid manner - as close to a circle as they could get.
This natural form of growth is in stark contrast to a particular planned city which has recently
been unveiled by Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman. This newly-proposed city,
called "The Line", will start at the northern end of the Red Sea coast, and stretch 170km inland in,
well, a straight line. According to the city's dedicated website, The Line will be free of any
cars, and powered "100% by renewable energy". Furthermore, it will be vertically divided into
multiple layers. The ground-level layer seems like it will be devoted to parks
and residential buildings. Subterranean layers will serve as commercial and service levels,
where trains and autonomous vehicles can operate without any concern for swerving and curving
around pesky people and trees. The press-release actually claims that everything you could
need - medical services, schools, and ... "leisure facilities"... will be within a 5 minute walk.
A lot of this sounds awesome. Honestly,
its great to see that huge effort is being put into walkability and low-carbon development.
However... there's something odd here. People have been building cities for millennia and no one has
ever really made *this*. Why not? To answer that, we're gonna go back to talking about circles.
A circle is a special shape for many reasons but
for now I want you to think of a circle in the following way:
A circle is the shape that encloses the greatest area for a given amount of perimeter.
By the way, this rule extends into other dimensions too - a sphere is the 3-dimensional
shape that encloses the greatest volume for a given surface area. This is part of the reason
that Coke cans are cylindrical, and that oil droplets form sphere-like shapes in water.
For the purpose of city planning, there is perhaps an even better way to think of circularity.
If I gave you a bunch of ping pong balls, and asked you to arrange them on a table
such that the average distance from each ball to every other ball is minimized, you'd probably just
shove them together into a sort of circular group - and you'd be right to do so. A circle
is the shape for which each infinitesimal element of enclosed area is, on average,
closest to all other infinitesimal elements of area. The circle is the *most efficient shape*.
If you want to save on your heating bill in the winter, take note.
So what's the least efficient shape? You guessed it: a line. Well I guess
a line is one-dimensional, but lets take a two-dimensional rectangle and make it
thinner and thinner. Continuing to do so, we eventually get what is basically just a line.
In the limiting case of this operation, the length, or "perimeter",
of the shape approaches a constant value, but the *area it encloses approaches 0.*
The infinitesimal elements of area which compose a thin rectangle are, on average,
as far apart from one another as possible, assuming they must ultimately be connected.
So Saudi Arabia is essentially proposing to develop a city
in a shape which is the least efficient at connecting people within that metropolis.
Now if you've read up on The Line, or are even a bit familiar with how trains work,
you might protest, claiming that this inefficiency would be balanced by the
immense advantage granted to trains when they only have to travel in a straight, flat line.
I get that, and there is something appealing about the simplicity of it.
But its important to realize that this approach causes us to design
something fundamentally flawed which can only work if we implement expensive, flashy
infrastructure to keep it from going belly-up. This has been done before, especially with cars.
Just because we *can* build fancy infrastructure, doesn't mean we *should*.
Building The Line is like needlessly inventing a massive problem,
and then claiming "aha! We have the technology to fix it!". This kind of stuff makes headlines,
and the newness of it can be captivating. But as can be seen with car-centric suburban development,
its all sunshine and rainbows until the astronomically-scaled infrastructure
requires complicated and expensive repairs later on. Detroit is a modern example of how
disregarding the basics of planning results in an over-reliance on infrastructure (in this case,
reliance on car infrastructure.) The *plan* to use a brand-spankin' new technology
slowly becomes a desperate need to rely on that technology for anything to function.
No resilience, no adaptability. Compare that to, say, New York City, where one of the world's most
impressive subway systems compliments what is otherwise an efficient, walkable city.
If a subway line gets closed in NYC, much of the city can work around it.
Now I believe that The Line may eventually manifest as a series of connected nodes or hubs,
and those hubs will hopefully indeed be very walkable and multi-use. But you could still ask:
why can't those nodes just be clustered in a more circular or square fashion near the coast?
Multiple lines could be placed right next to each other, making a grid of sorts.
That way, people and goods could ultimately move between them without having to cover nearly as
much distance, and with less reliance on whatever transit system is eventually put in place.
Saudi Arabia is basically going to put massive amounts of labour and money into fixing a problem
which they will have created themselves. We shouldn't allow our desire for fancy new things
to make us forget the basics which have worked perfectly fine for thousands of years.
New tech should be used to enhance the things we already do well,
not give us an excuse for being silly with design.