[jshorty]

Especially sad given that, in my opinion, this project is doomed to fail anyway— a 21st century Tower of Babel. The plans for a year-round ski resort seem especially ridiculous given the relatively mild climate in the Sarawat mountains.

[hinkley]

The tricky thing about calling something a Tower of Babel is that it’s one thing to build the first one, it’s quite something else to build a second knowing about the first. This linear city idea is worse than the planned city they built in, Brazil? That was more 2 dimensional at least.

So this one goes up instead of out, but you’ll notice for instance the gap for the stadium. Stadiums are a bottleneck in regular cities. All traffic in the whole city has to drive past the stadium if they want to get somewhere on the other side, and with the gaps it’s a double choke point.

The Architect’s Sketch, Monty Python:

“Are you proposing to slaughter our tenants?” “… does that not fit in with your plan?” “[…] no it’s just that we wanted a block of flats, and not an abattoir” “Yes, well of course, that’s just the sort of blinkered, philistine pig-ignorance I’ve come to expect from you lot of non-creative garbage.”

The other candidate’s scale model breaks twice, and catches fire and then explodes. They decide that thin, sedentary tenants should avoid those problems.

[h4n1]

It wouldn't be the first linear city. The idea was popular in the early 20th century for industrial settlements. Magnitogorsk was orginally planned as such. None of the planned linear cities have stayed linear, to my knowledge. It only makes sense for when the whole point of living there is to operate a massive production line.