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Half of my family is from Flint, so I'm unfortunately familiar with the flight it, and many nearby towns.

One of the problem with them is that the town itself wasn't compelling enough for people to stay when the primary industry dried up. I think any from-scratch city will need to be very well designed and balanced with features that actually make people want to live there, not just need to because of jobs.

This is where walkable streets, great mass transit, parks, and room for the types of businesses that people actively love (the smaller cafes, shops, venues, etc.) matter most.

At least one major university is critical too, and those can be ramped up rather quickly. UC Merced is only 15 years old with a student population of over 8000.

At its origin, a settlement at Flint made absolute sense because it was at an ideal halfway point[1] between Detroit and Saginaw on the Saginaw Trail[2] in an era where traveling between the two port cities took multiple days. It also had the added bonus of being on the Flint river which made it an ideal focal point for the burgeoning logging industry. The eventual industrialization made it a good location for an automotive plant later on. However, once cars became commonplace and travel between Saginaw and Detroit only took a couple hours, Flint was no longer needed as a stopping location, and ended up primarily existing as a company town for the auto plants, which made it too dependent on the welfare of the auto industry. So once the plants shut down, so did any kind of economic draw to the city.

The lesson being that any city needs a healthy economic ecosystem representing multiple industries in order to sustainably survive, or else it will share Flint's fate.

On a more human side, I worked briefly with some of the people in Flint's startup community and was massively impressed with the optimism and attitude of the people there in the face of their economic situation. It was very inspiring, and I sincerely hope that the state of Michigan is able to manage that city better and leverage what strengths it has and will have in the future.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint,_Michigan 2: https://thumbwind.com/2018/12/07/saginaw-trail/

> You can't just plop down a fully-furnished city on some unpopulated plot of land and expect anyone to move there. China as you say is trying this, but some of these are basically ghost towns on arrival, despite the massive top-down planning and investment. [1]

They are ghost towns on arrival for two reasons.

1. The employer base (say, government ministries) have not yet moved out of their current locations into the newly built cities. They are planned to in the future - and many former ghost cities are now bustling.

2. China has hundreds of millions of people who are trying to stop being subsistence farmers, and urbanize. It's an absolutely unprecedented demographic shift, anywhere in the world. This is a proactive solution for dealing with what would otherwise be the world's biggest housing crunch.

I disagree with China Authoritarianism and it's heavy handed social approach and they surely get a lot of things wrong in engineering and suburban planning too.

But the scale China works at is mind boggling and I couldn't hope to say I could "build a city" better.

> I couldn't hope to say I could "build a city" better.

Because you would probably never make the same trade-offs they do. In the USA we are a little cavalier about eminent domain. In China, the practices go beyond brutal and straight to the inhumane. They will happily displace entire villages to get the job done, and they don’t worry too much about the details of where people end up or how they get compensated.

They also make choices that would be baffling here in the west. For example, they frequently do absolutely nothing to maintain new developments, and often those developments are of unbelievably low quality. With in a year or two, many of them look like they have been crumbling for decades.

Source: Asian family, real estate investments in China.

Yeah, the authoritarian method is brutal beyond compare. But it does let them "get shit done."

Building the pyramids and the great wall and many other "wonders" took literally slave labor for multiple lifetimes and yet somehow people still admire these "achievements". (They have lasted however!)

They need a city, or ten. Not an outhouse. There is no way to build a city and make everyone happy. Do I think they do it best? No, obviously not.

But the Western world would be bogged down in NIMBYism while the chinese engineered cities are built and done.

As for quality... I saw a few things on my holiday trip to China many years ago so I don't doubt poor quality is a thing.

But here in Australia any high rise apartment building built in the past ten years in Sydney or Melbourne is now suspect due to dodgy building practices too. Maybe the building is fine. Maybe it isn't. But they are all tainted with suspicion.

So while I think the Western world still has the edge on China in quality, it is a slippery slope when "homes" are in a market to "make money" rather than "house people".

>You can't just plop down a fully-furnished city on some unpopulated plot of land and expect anyone to move there. China as you say is trying this, but some of these are basically ghost towns on arrival, despite the massive top-down planning and investment. [1]

The planned cities in China are basically big buildings. Would you move into a building that is still in construction? No, you would not. Once it's finished you still need people to move in. That's not something that happens immediately. You have to wait a decade and then you'll see that those ghost towns are not ghost towns at all. It's a common misconception.

The real difference between China and the USA is that there are lots of rural migrants within China looking for an urban place to settle down.

However, access to good transportation geography no longer assures continued importance for a city. Consider Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo...

Campus cities can be resistant or even immune to resouce depletion/indusrty moving on (universities+big tech+a startup ghetto:)). But how do you attract them?

I was really excited for Shenzen but it sadly got demoted from up and coming international center to... whatever it is in todays political climate.

What about creating cities near energy resources, like remote hydropower dams?

Thats definitely one-half of the equation - Las Vegas couldn't easily exist without the Hoover Dam. But you also need to have an economic draw, whether that be some large employer or industry, or proximity to a trade route of some kind.

Here's the thing, most infrastructures will be built in cities, even if those cities are not the most cost-effective or efficient location for such infrastructures, but that's how to secure fund and traffic. However, there are calculable locations where building infrastructures in those locations will create more efficient network of traffic, but rare anyone would do so because the huge cost and for the fear of their returns on investment, which hinders the growth and creation of new cities.

What's the reason for Las Vegas?

Las Vegas was a water stop for steam powered trains going between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City.

When Boulder Dam was built, the government built Boulder City to house the workers. Being a government city, gambling wasn't allowed. But Vegas was just over the hill and filled that desire for the workers.

When the railroads switched to diesel and didn't need the water stop anymore, Vegas was already established as a gambling destination.

The spring still flows, and is part of a tiny state park in downtown Las Vegas.

And Boulder City is still the only place in Nevada where gambling is illegal.

From wikipedia, it was a waypoint between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, then the railroad came and used it as a stop and the city built up around it. Then they legalized casinos and the mob took over.

a bunch of water and power right down the road in one direction, and a lot of population to attract to their gambling in the other?

Just a guess.

Aquifers.

IIRC Las Vegas was originally the company town for the workers building the Hoover Dam.

Not only that.

I had a friend who studied geo economics (or something like that)

Basically: why do cities build around mountains, rivers etc and why do citizens s build "clusters" of expertise. Like a city full of indie developers.

To make it short: ylu just can't build planned cities.