Why Linear Cities Don't Work (5 Reasons)

Neom's Line is a 170km long city that is no wider than a city block. It's extreme shape runs along transportation networks and promises an efficient and futuristic urban design and lifestyle. However, Linear cities have been around for more than a hundred years, yet they are rarely built. Why not? Why are lines not considered great shapes for cities? From poor access to public transportation to a lack of social cohesion, linear cities can suffer from a number of issues that make them less livable than more traditional, compact urban forms. This video breaks down the top reasons linear cities have either failed or not been built, despite dozens of proposals since their invention in the late 1800s.

__Membership__
Join this channel to get access to perks:

__About the Channel__
Architecture with Stewart is a YouTube journey exploring architecture’s deep and enduring stories in all their bewildering glory. Weekly videos and occasional live events breakdown a wide range of topics related to the built environment in order to increase their general understanding and advocate their importance in shaping the world we inhabit.

__About Me__
Stewart Hicks is an architectural design educator that leads studios and lecture courses as an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He also serves as an Associate Dean in the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts and is the co-founder of the practice Design With Company. His work has earned awards such as the Architecture Record Design Vanguard Award or the Young Architect’s Forum Award and has been featured in exhibitions such as the Chicago Architecture Biennial and Design Miami, as well as at the V&A Museum and Tate Modern in London. His writings can be found in the co-authored book Misguided Tactics for Propriety Calibration, published with the Graham Foundation, as well as essays in MONU magazine, the AIA Journal Manifest, Log, bracket, and the guest-edited issue of MAS Context on the topic of character architecture.

__Contact__
FOLLOW me on instagram: @stewart_hicks & @designwithco

#architecture #urbandesign

[baylenlucas]

Saudi Arabia is really playing catchup because Chile already went beyond cities and invented the linear country

[Videogamehistorian]

There's a joke that architects are failed artists who can only draw in straight lines. I think the designers of Neom took that too literally.

[KhorneBrzrkr]

I absolutely love when a "new" concept is not only discovered to be quite old, but are expressions of the exact problem the "new" idea seeks to overcome.

[yunekoVT]

imagine trying to get all the sand out of that city from all the sandstorms they get in saudi arabia or how fast a single fire could spread or how catastrophic a single explosion would be within that cramped city

[LegalEagle]

I'm sure behind the scenes Stewart was really thinking "IT WON'T WORK BECAUSE IT'S OBVIOUSLY STUPID"

[OverlySarcasticProductions]

Imagine setting out to design a linear city to maximize efficiency and then accidentally reinventing a grid plan from first principles.
-B

[sandytrimble]

What a dystopian concept - from the extreme lack of sunshine to the idea of living in a prison with massive walls and no personal transportation or ability to leave. This is madness.

[westsidewheelmen]

My grandmother told my brothers and me she was taking us to an underground city, when we were little kids, and this was about 1977. We were fascinated, and had no idea what wonders awaited us. turned out to be the Glendale Galleria.

[Chaotic_Pixie]

This makes me think of my university campus but in the opposite way. When they did massive expansion in the 1970s, they didn't put in sidewalks. They then came back in a few years later and simply paved the paths thousands of students had carved. A few are straight... two curve around ponds... many go in places that don't make sense to outsiders but if you lived and attended school there, they made perfect sense. Many criss crossing diagonal paths connecting the dorms in the middle ring of existence to the inner circle of academic buildings, libraries, and offices, as well as the outer ring of parking, local businesses, and parks. And despite a robust public transit system of busses, most students and faculty walked within the central campus because it was quicker. And it was quicker because the school decided it made sense to pave where humans naturally walked.

[randombystander]

I actually lived in a "linearish" city before, the german city of Wuppertal. It developed in a linear form because it was formed from two independent citys (Barmen and Elberfeld) along the valley of the river Wupper. The river was essential during early industrialization as a power source for watermills, while the steep hills around the city made it hard to build there.
So I speak from experience when I say, that a linear city is not efficient for transportation. While the linear form allows for some creative solutions for traffic, for example, Wuppertal is the only city I know of that successfully implemented a (suspended, hanging) monorail as the backbone for its public transportation (the Schwebebahn, since 1901, still working fine and suspended over the river, thus not taking up any valueable land), the downsides outweight the positives.
Having just one line makes the Schwebebahn very vulnerable to complete shutdowns. Any kind of issue the stops a train immediately blocks everything. On top of that, streets in Wuppertal are always full of cars, because everybody is trying to get through the same road in the middle of the city and even on good days, it takes much longer to get around the city, because everything is much further apart than it would be in comparable cities that are more roundish. Also the main train station is right in the city center, which sounds good, but normally they are slightly off the historical centers to prevent the rails from getting into the way. Not possible there, instead the multiple raillines cut right through the middle of the city on its full lenghts.
Living in the hills around the city means immediate car dependency. While there are buses, most of them run straight into the center to connect to the Schwebebahn, with the result that, to get to university, I was forced to take a 40 minute detour into one of the two city centers, even though the uni was just one hill over. A ten minute car trip but over an hour by foot.
Tl;dr: Linear citys are terrible, because everybody tries to take the same route everywhere, everytime.

[Rengo-.-]

Its nice to see another view of why linear cities dont work. I remember watching a video about a social architect saying that:
1. A city that long is going to affect the wild life, separating the animals that use to roam the dessert.
2. Making basicaly a big mirror in the dessert is not just going to make it the biggest microwave in the world, it also will cook everyting at the sides of the city
3. It can create a perfect box for sickenss. People being so compact will make it easier to spread diseases

[garyblack]

The more I think about Neom, the more it seems like a giant prison. Only the rich will be able to live near the coasts at the ends of it, and as you get further inland, hours train rides to anywhere other than the cold sterile architecture of the city, and the harsh desert outside, the more squalid conditions will become. Imagine living where you have to wait for your annual vacation just to go outside of your building? It really seems to me like a dystopian hell-scape in the making.

[Arxareon]

The funniest thing to me regarding the main focus being on fast transportation is that the city is a line.. you can immediately cut the maximal travel time between any 2 points in the city by half if you just make it a circle.. compact it further and you end up with a design of concentric circles where the inside is also filled, it takes up less space and most of the entire area might actually become walkable, but definitely cyclable which wouldn't be feasible if you had to travel from one end of the line to the other for instance. You'd also get a city center as a bonus.

[troybaxter]

Here’s one of the issues that a linear city has that is often neglected: transportation redundancy. You are confining everything to a select few transportation lines, and it doesn’t take much for it to all ultimately fail. The advantage of sprawling cities is that by and large, you can always get to your destination, you just may have to go out of your way to get there. In a line city, if all lines are broken, then you are stuck. And in the case of a city over 100 miles long, you can guarantee such a failure to occur.

[philopharynx]

When you base a city around one set of linear modes of transit, one large accident can break all connectivity. Maintenance brings similar issues. With a grid, you can route around anything.

[thsealord]

Neom is one of those ideas that looks nifty inside your head, and awesome in Power Point. You might even make this design ""work" within a city-sim game. As a dystopian setting in fiction, definite possibilities exist. As a horizontally-aligned "dungeon" in a role-playing game, it could be wild.

For anything approaching Real Life, I just aint seeing it. The main thing coming to my mind is, what happens in the event of a disaster or a major accident? Most cities have enough network interconnection that there are 'workarounds' if something bad happens in any specific locale. In general, utilities and transport will remain functioning, perhaps not as efficiently but they will still be there for the most part. For Neom, it looks like an "All Or Nothing" proposition - in a major 'event', either the entire city will remain functional, or none of it will.

[twells]

Urban planners never fail to un-impress me with their ability to not live in the world of the living.

[BeenJamin]

My main concern is the fact that 9 million plus people would be entrapped in an object, like a cage. Even if you can see out and go out of the box, you are still aware that you are surrounded by four walls at all times. I have no doubt that this would would throw off the psychological state of the residents. Essentially, it is a four sided wall blocking you off from the outside at all times.

[viforeanu]

In Romanian, NEOM literally means unhuman... so it's a fitting name.

[MightyJabroni]

The biggest flaw is that linear cities, especially if taken to the max like "the line" (a depressingly dull name, BTW), are basically one big chokepoint for all kinds of highly disruptive failures and/or catastrophes at almost every point of their design. Also, population density will be through the roof. So good, old miscalculation on that front could have compounding effects really fast, courtesy to the chokepoint design.