Hello and welcome to Overthink.

The podcast where your two favorite city dwellers talk about ideas and our everyday life.

I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson.

And I'm Dr. David Pena-Gusman.

David, I was hanging out with some friends recently, just chilling, watching some YouTube videos,

and got completely mesmerized by a video showing the plan for a new city called The Line in Saudi Arabia.

Oh my gosh. Yes. The Line. How could we not talk about this at the very beginning?

Yeah. So the Line is a city currently under construction that is shaped, well, like a line.

And it's 110 miles long. It's anticipated to house nine million people. So

Saudi Arabia is experiencing this population explosion and they need a new city in order to

accommodate all of, you know, the people who are moving there. And what's interesting about it is

that it's designed to have no cars or carbon emissions.

It would be run entirely on renewable energy.

And one purpose of building it in a line is that it has less of an impact on the surrounding area.

It's going to have like these glass mirrored sides to this long wall.

And it's more or less the size of the Empire State Building. So it's like or less the size of the Empire State Building.

So it's like this big line, size of the Empire State Building.

It would have extraordinarily high population density.

I mentioned that 9 million people are meant to live there.

And this would mean that its population density is almost six times that of Manila,

which is currently the world's most densely populated city. Oh, wow. Yeah. So it's going to be like, I guess pretty packed, although they don't see a lot of people in this like propaganda video that I just like totally ate up. No, no, it's just like glass horizontally organized with a background of the desert. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it looks stunning.

This is why I was like really, really, was my... Yeah, but not a sold to be seen. Yeah. No, they had like a few people shopping in the video. But, you know, the line doesn't even have streets as well. Instead, it's going to have three layers, a ground layer for pedestrians. That's like presumably where the shopping was happening. An underground layer for infrastructure and a further layer.

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