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Building a City of the Future — Part 1
Have you seen the new city in Saudi Arabia called NEOM? It is a very ambitious project that will completely rethink how people live in cities. They are planning on having the surface level completely pedestrian. Freight and transportation will be underground. The idea is to create a lot of self-sustained neighborhoods and then daisy chain them in a line across the desert.
When I first saw this rather ambitious project I was extremely excited. They are literally building a city from the ground up, taking all the lessons from the last 9,000 years of humans building cities and all the new technology that exists, and combining all of that into one city.
I did a search for cities being built. I was curious as to how popular this was, or if it was something completely new. Turns out everyone is doing it. Egypt is building a new capital city. Malaysia is building Forest City on artificial islands. Sri Lanka is building Colombo Port City. India is building Naya Raipur. Kazakhstan has Astana Expo City. China has Net City. Even New York has the Hudson Yards Smart City. And let’s not forget that Elon Musk is doing a pretty good job of building out the infrastructure to start getting people to mars so that we can start building cities there.
The one thing that I did notice is that none of these cities are taking into consideration the…
