High-speed rail? From where? To where? I genuinely could not think of a worse place to put a rail line than a mostly empty, mountainous, frozen rock.

Radio-France Internationale is a foreign outlet, which explains why the article can quote people critical of the project and opposition figures. It's interesting how the urban minister describes a project as "the pride of Chadians" without explaining who will build it or how much it will cost.

One wonders how a project being carried out by a foreign developer is intended to revitalise *Iraq*'s construction industry. Also, please, god, stop referring to 3D renderings as if they're real! That's not what the construction site looks like! You just zoomed in on the first image!

This project set extremely lofty goals from the start. Even in a populous country like Egypt, did planners really believe that 6.5 million people would simply move? In my experience, most Egyptians would prefer living as far as possible from a project that has become a glorified military base.

In the most optimistic scenario, the project is abandoned with only a few billion dollars down the drain. If, god forbid, they see it through, they'll be left with another nearly-empty desert city that has solved none of Tehran's problems. Cities don't depopulate just because you want them to.

All of the architects and engineers bought off to launder this project to the press should have been laughed out of the room. Instead, they got widely-covered conference speaking slots.

I would also ask to be anonymously quoted if I volunteered for this shambolic, egoistic, deadly project. I think the media shares much blame in this as well, in not calling this a farce and a fantasy from the start.

It's also unclear to me where the budget for this project (which is supposedly already in motion) is coming from. $20 billion is almost three times Botswana's entire national government expenditures, and with a population of less than 3 million, it certainly can't be made back with land speculation.

Their quoted source uses very...interesting wording. A "misunderstanding"? What, you thought it would be easy to evict these people off their land and it turned out not to be? I can't help but think the idea of finding a spot that's near enough to Antananarivo, but where nobody lives is doomed.

Judging by the fact that the project was intended to be completed in 2023, I would surmise that opening up to private investment is in reality a sign that the government has run out of money. Another example of sweeping to victory on a big expensive promise and not being able to follow through.

Note that the bizarre AI-generated image seems to be a production of the news outlet themselves. AFAIK, D66 has not released any imagery of what their "shiny new city" would look like. My hypothesis is that they believe that people's image of a new city is better than any image they could create.

These proposals highlight the dangers of electing a senile old man president. Not only are these cities based on national priorities instead of local needs, they're based on the national priorities of the last century, as if it were still 1963 and the population was still growing naturally.

NEOM has been a very interesting test of if there are any lows to which consultants, architects and the like won't sink to. Also an example of the power of social media in resisting ultra-authoritarian governments - the murder of someone simply for posting videos has greatly multiplied the blowback.

I can't imagine such a car-centric development will be anything but a congestion nightmare in the long run. Combining a city of 8,000,000 with the 200,000,000 that will commute in to fly cannot scale, even with the gargantuan 130 metre roads that they have planned.

Interesting that this new city project seems to buck the trend of increasing privatisation that we see in many places across Africa. Most of the positive aspects of this plan seem to come from its close integration with regional development priorities and governmental resources.