The Line vs. The Circle: Saudi Arabia's Epic Urban Experiment, Future Community Standard of Living?

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia set hearts racing with the announcement of their grand plan to construct a colossal desert city known as "The Line." But as we'll discover, the math behind it might just turn this straight-line city into something more akin to "The Circle"!

Imagine this: The Line, an astounding 110-mile stretch from the Red City to Tabuk, designed for an estimated 9 million future residents, and here's the twist – no cars allowed! Instead, a high-speed rail system is set to whisk residents from one end to the other in a mere 20 minutes. It's like a scene out of a sci-fi blockbuster, isn't it?

However, not everyone is on board with this concept. Researchers from the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, Austria, crunched the numbers and uncovered an inconvenient truth. If you were to randomly pick two residents of The Line, they'd be an average of 57 kilometers (35 miles) apart! That's quite the distance for neighbors, don't you agree?

To put it in perspective, if you did the same random selection in sprawling Johannesburg, those two individuals would only be 33 kilometers (20 miles) apart, despite Johannesburg's much larger size. It's like trying to connect dots on opposite sides of a colossal canvas!

But hold on, the researchers aren't just skeptics; they propose an intriguing alternative – The Circle. Instead of the linear design, they suggest reconfiguring the same buildings into a circular layout. It sounds straightforward, but this adjustment would result in a city with a diameter of just four miles, cramming 9 million residents into a space no larger than Pisa, Italy!

Visualize it: Residents could easily walk to nearly 25 percent of the city, and with just an additional mile, they'd be within 66 percent of it. Plus, the average distance between two random residents would be approximately 1.8 miles – now that's what we call neighborly!

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