Why Tech Moguls Are Obsessed with Building Utopian Cities | Hacker News Reader

Why Tech Moguls Are Obsessed with Building Utopian Cities

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What a strange thing to pin on tech. Company towns have existed forever, to the point of having laws made about how they can function. Walt Disney and ford also wanted to create a utopia city. I think this is more of a rich man's hobby than anything related to tech moguls at all. Hell, some even establish their own currency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip#Coal_company_s...

Not to mention the government mandated cities and folks like Le Corbusier! I think the vast majority of current new city developments are government mandated (e.g. Neom, Egypts new administrative capital, many new projects going up in China, etc.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neom

New Harmony, Indiana was the site of two successive utopian communities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Harmony,_Indiana

The Rappites were a religious/grass roots organization, but after they failed the town was bought by Robert Owen, an industrialist who wanted to design a utopian community.

A lot people think they know how society should be run; the rich ones just have the power to force other people to play along with them for awhile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bournville

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Sunlight

"It would not do you much good if you send it down your throats in the form of bottles of whisky, bags of sweets, or fat geese at Christmas. On the other hand, if you leave the money with me, I shall use it to provide for you everything that makes life pleasant – nice houses, comfortable homes, and healthy recreation." wow, what a quote. I feel like this really perfectly encapsulates the attitude behind projects like this.

Utopian designs are not just for tech moguls, they're for anyone powerful who wants to reshape society from the top down. But we don't have as many dictators these days, and tech is the hot sector where the money and influence is found.

You mean like every religious and mythological belief system since the dawn of civilization? I'd even argue every individual wants to and does (albeit in small steps) reshape society from the top of whatever rung they're on.

> What a strange thing to pin on tech. Company towns have existed forever, to the point of having laws made about how they can function.

The idea of building a utopian city doesn't need to be a brand new thing for tech moguls to have a greater interest in creating them than other types of contemporary moguls.

Also, I don't think a company town is really the same thing as a utopian city. In my mind a "company town" is mainly an attempt to maximize exploitation of a set of workers, while a "utopian city" is built as a pure expression of some subset of someone's ideals, relatively unsullied by competing ideas, which usually aren't so crass as "maximal exploitation of the residents."

They dont really seem too, though. Theres a lot of examples of rich people building towns even in these comments. Is there any evidence tech moguls do it any more frequently? As I said, company towns were so common large parts of them were outlawed. You can say alot of those were primarily predatory attempts to make money off workers, but no way a decent portion werent also a bored ceo trying to make a pet project dream town.

> They dont really seem too, though. Theres a lot of examples of rich people building towns even in these comments. Is there any evidence tech moguls do it any more frequently?

The OP didn't really establish it (e.g. take an inventory of all Americans building utopian cities, and see if tech moguls are over-represented), but I wouldn't be surprised if it was true. The combination of experience with disruptive innovation, engineer's syndrome, and power would seem like a recipe for these kinds of cities, though a less productive one than near-absolute power over some polity.

Also, a lot of the towns mentioned in the comments pre-date tech moguls.

>Also, a lot of the towns mentioned in the comments pre-date tech moguls.

That's kind of what I'm saying. Rich people making their own dream cities is probably as old as rich people and cities. Ig I could see an explosion of home automation tech giving more people a reason to try, though

> That's kind of what I'm saying. Rich people making their own dream cities is probably as old as rich people and cities. Ig I could see an explosion of home automation tech giving more people a reason to try, though

Not all rich people, though. It might be interesting to characterize the one's that have built a utopian city, and see if they conform to some common type. Maybe they share important characteristics with modern-day "tech moguls"?

Hamburg build from 2008 on a new district, the HafenCity, a soulless place of concrete, expensive apartments, and chain stores. I recently thought about how great it would have been to try something radical new – like building everything with wood, fantastic public transport, and as little cars as possible.

My conclusion was that the only way that realistically could have happend was with subsidies from a billionaire who had some kind of grand vision. I hardly doubt that we'll see such a thing from the public sector anytime soon, be it from fiduciary duties or their general incompetence of doing any kind of big real estate development (at least here in Germany).

So from that angle, I welcome anyone with a vision for an utopian city.

As a general matter, I think Utopianism is a bad idea, and I don’t think we should be sinking huge amounts of resources into giant leaps like this. I’d rather see incremental tweaks in the right direction first, as I think those are far more effective at bringing lasting change.

Fundamentally, we’re really bad at predicting the future. Utopian projects involve making big bets on what the future might hold, which makes them high risk high reward. I think making smaller, incremental bets allows us to not only wager fewer resources, but to also begin getting feedback sooner on the outcome of our decisions rather than hoping that we’re spot on in 20 years.

More specifically, I’d like to see a lot less “we built a city for autonomous cars and hyperloops” and more “we added some bike lanes and bike parking, and converted commercial streets to pedestrian only.” These are changes we can make today to improve our quality of life, and they practically cost very little.

Accommodating cars is the most important variable in all places I see. Once you design for accommodating cars, everything is so spread out that it precludes a non-car oriented life. So while you can make commercial streets pedestrian, you can’t change the fundamental fact that everything is too far from everything else to have the necessary foot traffic to sustain businesses.

Not to mention the political challenges that come with trying to design a place simultaneously compatible with cars and pedestrians/bicyclists.

I’m convinced that there is no in between.

Maybe people like their cars and choose to live in places that accommodate them?

Personally, I am something of a bicycle extremist and have always found a way to navigate urban/suburban areas. It is something that comes with practice. Eventually you learn how to navigate these areas you felt were impassable. With practice you develop instincts for approaching new areas.

I know it will be a bit unpopular at HN, but I think you need to be something of a self-starter and willing to take the plunge. I've been on planned bike lanes that felt less safe than just riding on the street with traffic. They can create the wrong expectations for both motorists and cyclists.

Naturally you would encounter political problems in developing a "car-free" city, if your prospective residents want to use their cars. Especially if you are left using political leverage to impose your ideals upon the residents.

If people truly loved cycling more than the convenience of automobiles, wouldn't they develop the similar techniques for navigating urban and suburban areas?

That isn't to say that more can't be done to accommodate cyclists and pedestrians, but I disagree with your absolutist analysis.

This doesn’t address the root issue of things being too far from each other. What about all the old, young, and otherwise less mobile people getting around? How does shopping happen when everyone has a 100ft+ setback and you need to carry your groceries and whatnot that much further, for each individual property.

The proof of my statement is that you can see a marked difference in the lifestyle of urban Tokyo and London and other places where the layout was made pre automobile. You can make all the bike lanes you want, but as long as you’re still placing 4+ lane roads all over the place, it’s not going to bring you the type of day to day life you can experience in dense areas.

>Maybe people like their cars and choose to live in places that accommodate them?

I don’t think people like their cars, so much as the knock on effects of a car oriented lifestyle. Obviously, people like detached single family houses with garages and front and back yards. Who wouldn’t. The ideal would be having this in the middle of an urban core. Obviously that’s not realistic.

But the real benefits of cars come with pricing out people you may not want you and your family to deal with. You can separate into various socioeconomic classes, make it uneconomical for homeless and panhandlers to hang around since everything is so far apart. It’s definitely a valid solution to the situation in NYC/SF/SEA/PDX. I myself don’t see any other solution for a person than moving to a car oriented suburb.

You make some reasonable points. I appreciate the catch-22.

For me the absolute urban center is just too dense regardless of transportation options. It is nice to have a proximity to it, but even for a bicycle-centric life I prefer more open spaces.

The solution IMHO is to cultivate a pedestrian culture, where individuals create a demand, rather than imposing it on them as a city planner. If it comes to it parking lots can easily be redeveloped.

There's also the option of public transit, but that brings a proximity to the "undesirables" you mentioned.

Above all strip malls, big box stores, modern bridges, overpasses and underpasses are all eyesores for me.

>Above all strip malls, big box stores, modern bridges, overpasses and underpasses are all eyesores for me.

They're an eyesore for everyone. But this is one of those situations where the local maxima for individuals results in a local minima as a society. Once you have a car, it makes no sense to not use it. And no one is going to beat big box stores on pricing. So I'm not going to spend 15% extra at my neighborhood store when I can save a ton of money by driving to Costco, with the car I already have.

And I find that anything more than 30min away walking is basically not in walking distance, and in a suburb with large intersections where you have to wait 45+ seconds for light changes and cross large intersections, it's very easy to justify just driving. Especially for the old or those with little kids.

I would like to think your solution would work, but I'm at the point of saying it's politically impossible (in a timeframe relevant to a voter's quality of life).

Then you should take a look at a place in the UK called Milton Keynes. High speed roads (70mph limit) with pedestrians and cyclists seperated by 'Redways'. It comes pretty close to being both car and pedestrian friendly

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Keynes#Grid_roads_and_g...

The fundamental problem with utopian vision usually isn't its bets on the future, it's the fact that there's no meaningful feedback loop. Typically, such a vision is the self-centered self-expression of some mogul or architect or politician who hopes to reshape the world, but does not understand the world and the people who live in the world, and will never bear the burden of the failures of his design.

See, for instance, Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse, or even Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City.

I would argue that this is already happening. We have some new bike lanes, and a little less cars here in Berlin, at some places. And I do not suggest that every development should be utopian. But why not give some utopies a try within a certain scope, e.g. a new district of one town? Worst thing that could happen is we sink a lot of money, and we have a not so nice quarter, but one could argue that exactly this happend with the conservative approach at the HafenCity.

Best case is we recognize that this is actually the way we want to live, and it serve as a role model for future developments.

Presumably, even if one thought that utopian projects were a good idea, experimenting with incremental improvements first would likely inform utopian projects better. Provided a utopian project has little outright chance of success, deferring them until we have more information about what solutions work (as well as what problems we'll need to solve in the future as these things change) seems wise.

There may be a break-even point where the efficacy of incremental improvements is too low, requiring us to make larger leaps to make progress, but we're clearly not there yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poundbury

>Poundbury is "the town that Prince Charles built." Not surprisingly, given His Royal Highness's vocal campaign against modern architecture, British critics have been merciless in their ridicule of Poundbury's perceived shortcomings.

https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/behind-the-facade-o...

> Hamburg build from 2008 on a new district, the HafenCity, a soulless place of concrete, expensive apartments, and chain stores.

I find your description here fascinating, because it's exactly how I've described the CityPlace district [1] here in Toronto that was built over the last 20 years, with most development in the last 10. Makes me wonder how common this style of modern, sterile, "ideal" development is in big cities around the world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CityPlace,_Toronto

(I also think it's interesting how both HafenCity and CityPlace work the word "city" into their title, with a similar naming scheme)

Really feel like they could have tried about 5% harder with the name. At least the brand doesn’t have to be soulless even if the place is.

Interestingly, Long Island City in New York has become the same sort of concrete soulless high rise area, with an equally uninteresting name.

https://ny.curbed.com/2016/8/31/12732412/long-island-city-de...

Yeah, it sure shounds like a CityPlace

Hudson Yards in NYC is probably the most notorious example of this trend. Seems to be emblematic of a shift toward real estate as a luxury commodity investment, combined with massive developers having free rein to set up inorganic star mega-blocks. All this in close cooperation with cities that have an incentive to improve what were once brownfield sites and are now the most valuable undeveloped sites into tax behemoths.

See also: Seaport in Boston, Navy Yard in DC, Mission Bay in San Francisco

Hmm. Has even more parallels. What was Railway Lands in Toronto was the 'Freihafen' / 'Free Port Zone' in that part of Hamburg, also with extensive railways/switching yards.

Ours should have been almost fully developed by now, at least that is how I remember the countless presentations since about the year 2000. Alas, the economy had a little hiccup, so it is only half complete at most, rather one third.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4QYkEpw9pA "This new district of Helsinki is being made almost entirely from timber [...]"

I think a large source of problems with cities actually comes from planning too much. Cities aren't larger houses. They are living things that need to be able to evolve. Most governments make the mistake of only interacting with that proves by introducing rules that stifle change or by planning the entire thing or large portions and getting it wrong or at least in more successful cases building something that cannot adapt when the world changes.

Making it easier to build new things but keeping the shake of control any one entity gets small would likely yield much better results. That's how parts of older cities that we now love were build in the first place. Individuals build their buildings on fairly small lots, we didn't have developers build entire neighborhoods.

I recommend the book Order Without Design and/or its corresponding podcast for great insights: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/order-without-design

Wasn? Ham doch 'ne U-Bahn da!

Have you ever been there at night in the new station at the end of the line, when all the gazillions of bridge spiders are crawling out onto their nets, including the ones over the touchscreens of the ticket ATMs? They are everywhere!

Besides that, one could witness how they inject stinking glue into the sand, to make for sturdier foundations. I wonder how that is working out in the following decades, regarding outgassing into basements, garages and so on :-)

Since seeing that happen around 2:30AM it is 'Pattexdorf' for me.

See also 'Lackdosen-/Klebstoffschnüffeln'

If you have 10,000 engineers working at your company, it seems like a natural extension of wanting to create - first the optimum workplace and then have that spill over to "what would the optimum city look like?"

It's not just tech. I'm sure other large non tech companies have wanted to build cities for their employees. Think of companies who build a product that in new and developing the details - like Ford. They would also want to build a huge headquarters and in a way that spills over to the whole town.

I believe in Korea big conglomerates (Chaebol) build and offer housing to their employees.

On the one hand it’s nice and convenient, on the other hand you’re depending on a company for much of your life. Kind like if you depend too much on the government, you’re at the whim of either.

Yes exactly, plus when you're already creating housing for employees or subsidizing it in the community it seems a very logical extension to consider

https://apnews.com/article/0f770c947b00426bab5054ad657a4000

Wolfsburg, Germany by Volkswagen.

Not a new obsession:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordlândia

Also, some have recently argued that people had to be forced to live in those first cities:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_Hi...

And https://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/jan/23/bournville-...

Not a new thing of course, but there is a big difference between trying to build a utopia and building a city to house workers

You can't engineer around the failings of modern society by throwing out modern society, unless you want to consign millions of people to the trash heap in the most callous way imaginable. Is it just me or are we rapidly sliding into some of the most bog standard of dystopian cyberpunk?

Planned communities, organized by the rich and powerful around the latest and greatest in technology or political change, are not novel in the slightest and certainly not unique to tech billionaires.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_community We've been doing this for about the history of humankind, and many of the world's capitals are planned cities. Sometimes it works well and sometimes it does not. For example Brasilia was a planned utopia built around the great innovations and delights of the 20th century - such being planned around motor traffic. And upon reaching a state of overpopulation, it became well known as a dystopia instead.

I'm reminded immediately of the EPCOT, which never manifested due to Walt Disney's death, but was a city planned around transportation. I don't know about the PeopleMover as a means of public transit but I love the hub and spoke ideal that the original plan had. I wish a pedestrian first city would happen in the US. Imagine how much more quickly Florida's light rail may have manifested if we had a city that was already rail-centric in the 60s?

Brasilia is a case study in the book Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott. It's a great book that digs into the whole thinking behind such grand plans and why they often fall apart.

EDIT: The quote at the start of chapter 4 (The High Modernist City) captures the Ideology of these blank-slate planners.

> Time is a fatal handicap to the baroque conception of the world: its mechanical order makes no allowances for growth, change, adaptation, and creative renewal. In short, a baroque plan was a block achievement. It must be laid out at a stroke, fixed and frozen forever, as if done overnight by Arabian nights genii. Such a plan demands an architectural despot, working for an absolute ruler, who will live long enough to complete their own conceptions. To alter this type of plan, to introduce fresh elements of another style, is to break its esthetic backbone.

— Lewis Mumford, The City in History

It's because tech moguls are Americans and America doesn't have any good cities. I don't care much for these techno-towns because most of what's wrong with America is architectural, not technological, but I do think America should do a lot more building new cities from scratch.

I hope they don’t find inspiration from the UAE cities... since those are built on the backs of migrant slaves.

I got bad news for you about America!

The US is bad, but Kafala is something else.

Maintaining legacy systems is difficult and boring, and not as sexy and fun as imagining something new without the legacy baggage.

But someone's still got to maintain those legacy systems...

Plenty of people dream about what their cities could do better. Tech people are just uniquely positioned to do it as engineers with resources.

Software engineers in tech are not the kind of people that can make cities "better" and are no better positioned than any other well off profession.

The best cities are built organically.

Is this really a new concept? Disney built a town Celebration, Florida near Disneyworld which has a pop of 7500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida

Henry Ford did this multiple times, even in Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia

Celebration is not anything close the utopian city dreamed of by Walt Disney. EPCOT was still in blue sky planning stages when he died.

It’s a pity we never saw what was possible. The land for Walt Disney World has its own government and possibly could have developed the concept without public interference.

Disney (the company) commandeered the idea of EPCOT concept thinking it would be a nostalgic nod to the founder and created a theme park and real estate development which barely, if at all, reflected Disney’s (the person) vision.

Meanwhile, Celebration kind of turned into a dystopian situation.[1]

[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/celebration-florida-how-disney...

Maybe I missed it but I'm a little surprised they didn't mention the new Innovation Zone legislation the Nevada Governor mentioned (and that was seeded by Blockchains LLC) and the broader Charter City movement (e.g. Pronomos, Charter City Institute, etc.)

Probably because "Innovation Zones" popped up a few weeks after this article.

Sorry, yes it was a week after this was published when Sisolak mentioned them first!

so why are tech moguls obsessed with building utopian cities? i don't think that question ever got answered.

Tech utopia as drawn by illustrators imagining what tech overlords might want: Jetsons, flying cars, Disney Tomorrowland

Tech utopia as drawn by actual tech overlords when they actually get to build their dreams: Rio de Janeiro favela slums inhabited by as many expendable gig workers as can be crammed in living under 24/7 oppressive police presence and ultrasurveillance, plus also a separate, fully gated and guarded community for the rich people to live in and high opaque walls so that group 2 doesn't have to see group 1 or think about them

Cities are one of the higher art forms, and oldest, the urge to make a great city goes back at least to the Potbelly Hill[1].

[1] Göbekli Tepe "Dated at around 9,500 BC, these megaliths are 5,500 years older than the first cities of Mesopotamia and 7,000 years older than Stonehenge." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

Because government run cities are doing a terrible job?

I'd love to live in a nice environment with services and smart people around me, it's just that most cities are quite degraded (at least here in Europe / UK).

The choice right now is between living in a nice small town / rural settings surrounded by people who got stuck in their rural hometown, or live in a city surrounded by smart people, homeless and drug dealers and terrible air quality.

Really? I'm sorry to hear it's the same in the UK but I loved Berlin and Tallinn wasn't bad (most of what was bad was out of their control ie the weather). I've lived in SF, San Diego, northern Nevada, DC, Berlin, Tallinn, London (Enfield) and Yerevan and by far European cities were much better run in my opinion

I haven't lived in US cities but I'm sure you're correct. I wasn't trying to make an argument for US cities over EU - I've heard they've even bigger problems.

Still I don't consider EU cities (Italy, France, Germany at least) to be great for living.

Maybe with electric transport and better use of police enforcement.

I'm curious why in those places you mentioned better use of police enforcement? I haven't done much living (or even traveling outside of major tourist areas) in France and Italy but living in Berlin I can honestly say I don't think I ever felt unsafe. Contrasting that to the US and China (and I know you're not saying the US is better, it's just what I'm more familiar with) in the US I would worry about either 1) being attacked by a mentally disturbed person or robbed and the police not caring unless it was life threatening or 2) being shot by police (I'm brown). In China it was totally different, the only thing I'd worry about there is being injured by or offending a well connected person who seem like they operate with relative impunity (I have visceral memories of Lambos and Ferraris parked on public sidewalks and no one would touch them because if you could afford them you were well connected enough that you could destroy whatever cop messed with you)

This is a vast oversimplification on my part, but I suspect what you observed was because the European cities are run by governments that are more inclined to serve the needs of citizens, and US cities are run by governments that are more inclined to serve business interests.

Generally I agree, although I think there's also some weird other effects going on - I don't think it's in any businesses interest that there are tons of homeless people or drug addicts in SF or pushing prosecutors not to get them off the streets for instance. But yes, as a longtime Nevada resident who saw the harm casinos did to local populations, I can definitely say that cities often do what makes the most tax revenue if the costs are diffused enough (or not politically important)

The real estate situation in SF is a huge cause of homelessness. The Pharma industry is a huge driver of drug addiction. Those are both things that aren't necessarily within the purview of the city government (the real estate one is, I guess), but they're situations that could be ameliorated with government action.

I am not convinced with the examples. I haven't seen FAANG and Microsoft efforts to buy a bunch of land and provide housing in large volume.

Planned Cities are nothing but rich people pet projects and it has been like that for a long time.

I think Pronomos[1] was specifically started with the idea of investing in such ideas.

1. https://www.pronomos.vc

Urban Design and police has become a kafkaesque mess. It has become near impossible to summon the political will to actually build something livable. Developments generally lean towards familiar and easy, instead of building anything interesting. Tragically, in many parts of the world, one of 3 types of plans fall in the easy+familiar domain. You have the grossly inefficient suburbs of the US, lifeless concrete planned cities of communist fame and wild-best of haphazard urban densification as seen in Indian cities like Bangalore.

What's even worse, is that the average consumer is woefully under-equipped to recognize problems with this system until it is too late. It isn't until their kids start growing up that they realize how dead the suburb feels, and how the car dependence relegates one of the parents to a soccer mom nanny. Why it takes 2 hours to get to anywhere in Bangalore or why the incredibly dense concrete jungle feels spiritually dead despite how hard you try to fix it. Years of brainwashing towards the American dream and a tall condo with a view, really do not help consumers make informed decisions either. Not like contractors do user-studies anyways, but still.

Funny thing is, these problems are already solved in some capacity. City has been studied to death for millennia. It is no wonder that people in modern 1st world countries, pay good money to spend 1 week in European cities that have been "preserved" as they were.

I am not even advocating for some replica of Copenhagen or Vienna (as much as I love biking). Strong towns[1] and Not-just-bikes[2] are evangelists of just two of many well thought out ways of building better cities.

Even the much maligned Apple Park could have been amazing if not for Cupertino's parking minimum rules. Guess billionaires can only do so much.

The plans are already there, what's lacking is political will. If billionaires is what it takes to break cities out of this terrible inertia, then so be it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Em7nqDqQ8oM

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ

Maybe it’s a desire to compensate for what San Francisco transformed into over the last 30 years.

Because the Bay Area is run by the world's worst NIMBYs, duh.

Utopias with big capitalist bosses are not utopias.

It's utopia to the bosses since they create their own rules that favors them.

I like how both of you are right in a sense.

It's home-improvement taken to the obvious next level. And who doesn't like home-improvement?

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