Why Saudi Arabia Is Building a Floating City

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Video Description:
Saudi Arabia is building an octagonal City. It's called Oxagon and it consists of two parts, an area on land and a floating structure in the ocean. But why are they building this?

Images via Getty
Map source by MapTiler / OpenStreetMap Contributors via Geolayers 3

[-ragingpotato-]

Bravo for calling out the bad sides of the project and not just fawning over the octagonal shape. Respect.

[hugodesrosiers-plaisance]

Being a Saudi Prince is like playing Sim City on a blank map with the infinite money cheat.

[eringanley]

The 3d work is really out of this world, and the visuals always help a lot with understanding complex topics. I'm not sure I would've been able to follow the section with the Saudi king and prince without the visual part as well, so that was super helpful. Great video as always!

[InfoRanker]

I'm no shipping expert but it seems like these container ships are going to be forced to make some extremely tight turns in order to dock. Seems like a poor design.

[aliticx]

Not a civil engineer, but from what I learned from your videos of Kuwait and Dubai, the quality of water in this design will be pretty bad. Also I don’t see the point of only having one opening for this city, wouldn’t it be better for ships to enter from one end and exit from the other as opposed to doing a U-turn? They seem to prefer form over function to get attention.

[kimi]

Polymatter, Kurzgesagt, OBF, Wendover, and Neo all uploaded a new video in a space less than a week! What a week!

[TheWizardGamez]

Engineer: so how often do you want this to flood?
Prince: yes!

[swaggery]

Looks like a good idea for a VR world. Stupid for the real world. They should build a floating community proof-of-concept community first in an existing city to work out the engineering challenges at least. Even then there's going to be so much maintenance to do for the islands, how will it ever be profitable. Companies will move to the cheapest location once government money dries up, and workers will certainly not be paid enough to live there.

[pauloakwood]

Anyone who has ever owned a boat knows what happens when you 'park' the boat in the water for even a moderate length of time. In the first place, the different metals interact with flowing salt water and begin to dissolve. The second is that marine growth (everything from barnacles to seaweed) begin to attach and grow like crazy. They add considerable weight and alter water flow.
This is nuts.

[carlramirez]

As I've previously said, if Neom succeeds in all its goals, I'd eat my hat.

[darthutah]

A big problem that I have with projects like this and The Line is that they're based on the assumption that we need to preserve land in a desert. If there's more demand for real estate, the simple answer is to build more housing in Riyadh and Jeddah which are already established cities.

[antekpaztek]

How are you so good at making the sponsored parts to your videos? Like seriously! In all of your vids its so well in-tuned with the topic! Well done keep it up

[FinancialShinanigan]

Why stop at octagon, should add infinite sides and make a circle city

[yonatanefrem]

Discovered this channel few days ago one of my s tier Youtube Video Essay and research analysis Channel I watch right now, Insane Geo Layers animations, awesome storytelling. I hope some day I will do this type of infographics for my channel

[rangeG]

having a noise polluting harbor in the middle of a city sounds a bit- inconvenient to say the least

[lavalamp]

Whenever I see some big vanity projects announced or in the works I think of the basics, especially on the floating section for this project, what are they doing about Fresh drinking water, what are they doing about Sewerage, what are they doing about solid waste disposal, what are they doing about supplying electricity to the individual homes on the floating section, what are they doing about the transportation needs of the people. Last, what steps are being taken to protect the environment, the land and the underwater parts of this. These are the basics I know, but they are the most important parts I think. Get them wrong or have them unworkable then this project is a failure.

[joudAlo]

والله يا البعض ذابحهم الحسد ، الله يديم علينا نعمه ومن مجد لمجد يا بلادي 💚💚

[enternalinferno]

I'm happy the video is somewhat critical of the project, but really that doesn't even scratch the surface. The practical challenges this poses including the money and toll on the environment this will definitely entail is crazy. Why can't they just for the love of god invest heavy heavy into solar

[PoolGyall]

This is like the 4th mega project I’ve seen from Saudi Arabia. If they wanted to make a non oil dependent economy they could just massively improved their current cities or make new modern cities that look like their other existing cities but make them more efficient…

[calebamore]

Seems to make a lot more sense to just build a big trench or maybe a few trenches around already standing land.