Plans for a new city in the American desert
cnn.com
cnn.com
Solar and nuclear work great in deserts.
I'd be more concerned about water.
The power plant evaporates the water from the treated sewage from several nearby cities and towns to provide the cooling of the steam that it produces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...
I've been in your situation, and you know what I did? I got a roommate. Really cuts on costs, and getting married makes the situation permanent.
At no time in history have the poorest been able to afford one bedroom apartments alone. Remember the stories of huge families crammed into apartments from 100 years ago? The fact that you only need one roommate instead of eleven to get by is progress.
Also, I think penalizing vacant properties would also be a good idea.
The reason new construction never works like this is because developers only build housing when there's already a severe shortage of housing in the metro area. They respond to price signals, and the price only starts going up when you have multiple bidders bidding for the same home. And why wouldn't they? If they built housing in places that already had an abundance of housing, they're making an economically foolish choice and will go bankrupt. When you observe that developers never build affordable housing, you're observing the effect of selection bias: in a region where there are enough houses for everyone and hence they're affordable to the average worker, developers aren't going to build even more new houses.
You can observe this throughout the Rust Belt: there are more homes than people, so prices are very affordable, but developers would need to be insane to build even more houses (outside of specific neighborhoods or suburbs that are locally hot). Also when you get a macroeconomic crash in the middle of a housing boom: the houses get completed, they sell for dimes on the dollar, but nobody has jobs anymore so they can't afford to buy them,
Raw cost of housing is essentially the cost of the land + the cost of the building.
In established cites the cost of land is high and developers tend to build expensive buildings on that land. Low-income workers than move to older buildings as they're cheaper (expensive land, cheap building).
In a new greenfield city the land will be very cheap (for whoever established the city) so that can keep the cost of housing down (cheap land, expensive building).
We care more about the number of people housed, not merely just people who are housed who can afford their bills.
Remember, housing prices in high-priced areas are driven by location, location, location, location, location (yes, two more locations than ordinary housing), so "it's small" doesn't translate to "the market price is low." (It's just less expensive than big.)
When the "market price" exceeds the cash price, the folks who get to buy are the ones who have some way to pay outside the system.
Investors get much cheaper prices, developers get easy liquidity. The downside is that you have to wait a year or two before moving in, and some theoretical risk. (Which can be managed with proper legislation.)
But the scheme works if you want affordable housing.
Suppose that the residences will be worth $1000 when built and it costs $500 to build them.
The pay-in-advance price will be around $1000 - interest.
The pay-in-advance price won't be significantly less than $1000-interest because the builder can borrow the $500, and sell for $1000 when built, repaying the bank and pocketing the rest.
The pay-in-advance price won't be significantly more than $1000-interest because if it is, folks who want to buy will wait and pay $1000 when the units are built (forcing the builder to borrow $500).
In other words, pay in advance doesn't result in below market prices.
If you add in some units which would sell for $500 but you're forcing the builder to sell them for $250, the question is "who gets them?" The answer to that question does not depend on when the payment is made.
In the US, the vast majority of the "below market" units will be split between friends of the local govt and the developer.
Yes, it would be nice if that wasn't true, but it is absurd to behave as if it isn't true (in the US).
With "buyer-funded development" the developer gets free liquidity, with no interest and no obligation to pay anything back. (Just an obligation to build something.) Obviously more profitable than having a bank take a cut for a loan.
The property is cheaper for the buyer because there are obvious risks involved for those in on the scheme at an early time. (And yes, it can be significantly cheaper, both because of the risk and due to opportunity cost while the property becomes attractive on the second-hand market.)
So... How Safe Is Savannah Really?
Savannah is a reasonably unsafe city.
The crime index ranges from medium to high.
The main problems here are robberies and assaults, car theft and theft, vandalism, violent crime, and drug problems.
Nevertheless, the historic Savannah district is entirely safe for exploring the area day and night.
Better to be in a company than one.
Outside the historical site, district crime is more common.
When studying a historical area, remember that this is a tourist area, and there will always be those who hunt tourists – be careful, but especially at night.
One still needs to follow the dictates of common sense to avoid being victimized.
Don’t walk around alone at night, particularly in unfamiliar neighborhoods.
Lock vehicles and keep valuables out of sight.
For cars, perhaps you need to be especially careful – the number of car thefts and hacks is enormous.
Be sure to close the car and park in a guarded parking lot to avoid problems.
Never leave anything in the car, not even trinkets.
Do not get involved in any relationship with drug dealers; drugs are illegal here. Nevertheless, there are many who wish to offer or sell them to you.
Keep an eye on your drink at the bar – there have been times when strangers added opiates to rob a victim.We thought Savannah (in the context of the planned area being discussed) was great. The unique little garden squares are probably the first thing I'd replicate were I designing a new city.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajneeshpuram?wprov=sfla1
Not closely related to the article but a very odd story.
Social disapproval over time, including that expressed through government policy, has effect on culture. So, while it may not result particularly from the government doing something immediate to cause the cleanliness, I would be hesitant to assert it is independent of government action merely because it is cultural.
It is not clear to me that shame as a function of policy works in the USA.
A more worthwhile thing to discuss is the prevalence of people ducking their heads or rushing across streets when cars approach, with a level of embarrassment that would better accompany being caught defecating in the street (well, maybe not in SF.) Our culture has so utterly failed around mobility that people are ashamed to be caught walking.
What's absurd is that roads where people live and shop and walk are allowed to be unsafe for people walking.
The two places where you encounter unwanted crossings in volume in the US are 1. Streets (for commerce, not travel) that were built too wide, either to accommodate too much vehicle traffic or to accommodate a despotic authority that forces wide streets(probably your local fire department or your state DOT); or 2. Stroads that do nothing well, at great expense. If it has a 45mph speed limit and stop lights, it's probably this.
In general, sure. It also is one of many things that influences it. Culture doesn't just arrive ex nihilo with no influence from concrete experience.
A counterpoint is Singapore and birthrates. For decades, decades, the government has tried incentivizing the native population to produce more children, and no matter what they do, they still aren't having results. Sometimes the government can only do so much and the rest is up to the people themselves.
Birth incentives don't work quite as well, because a $500 voucher doesn't go very far in a country where a public housing flat can sell for $1,000,000 and the schooling system is a pressure cooker mandating extensive paid tuition.
It works, but it works against you, as Mitt Romney discovered with his "makers and takers" gaffe and Hilary Clinton discovered with her "deplorables" gaffe.
The rest of the paragraph doesn't support your main point. How do your Japanese friends scolding you on the cultural nuances of japan prove or help support your point of government policy reflecting culture?
There a huge number of examples about the influence of commercial advertising on the effect of the behavior of the Japanese consumer. Just spend sometime asking why the Japanese order KFC for Christmas or why beer is poured with a head targeted at 70/30.
I think that in some cases an outsider looking in that learns the culture might see things that the people on the inside miss as they where not born into the group think of the culture. I know my Japanese friends have at times asked my questions about the American cultural where I did a bit of a double take, forcing me to see things I just sort of went with in the past.
For anyone that has interest in seeing how Japan got where it is this book is really good...but 800+ pages and you better like history and details.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shikata_ga_nai
As a westerner I am not sure I could have stood by and put up with the hosting of the Olympics.
Not at all. It was once a mess. In "High and Low" from Akira Kurosawa, you could see the river was filled with garbage. The government did many campaigns especially around the Olympics in the 60s.
It's not culture specifically, it's city management.
遠慮の塊
Literally "hold back / show reserve" and "mass"
English maybe "refrain from taking the last piece".
One thing I've noticed with US politics is that things tend to be viewed as local issues instead of national ones. For example, NYC's public transit is a key part of the US's financial engine, but still chronically underfunded and mismanaged, and New York's problem to deal with. So I hope people see projects like this as points of national pride, even if they don't live there.
I think we need to stop mindlessly expand roads, and reconsider our infrastructure priority before we can start doing massive megaprojects.
We do have urban housing shortages and all sorts of demographic problems, I'm not saying a project like this is by necessity flawed, but the motivating dynamics for us are very different from what has been happening in China and SE Asia.
I've always wondered why America has not built many more cities with all that available land.
Consider the location of the 100th meridian as it somewhat bisects the continent. West of that line, you cannot really grow anything without irrigation. East of that line, and to some extent there's enough rainfall that stuff will grow on its own, albeit not optimally.
Most the cheap available land you will find in the US is west of the 100th meridian, and is dry largely inorganic dirt.
As for the cities, you may not be aware of this, but the southwest (and perhaps western) US is in year 21 of a drought that rivals the worst of the last 1200 years, and there is no sign that the situation is likely to improve in the next century or so.
By contrast, plains and some midwestern ag. has been drawing down the Ogallala aquifer at an insane rate, and that really is "fossil water".
This is unlike China where cities were built en masse to house migrants from rural areas. America just doesn't have the same volume of workers.
America is still pretty empty.
I'd be interested in moving there, depending. I love the idea.
I moved my company to a new city "GIFT city" in India. It's awesome.
How do you explain that things like this are still beneficial to him? That a rising tide lifts all boats?
There are a lot of places like this in my opinion, where a large investment in a seemingly local thing would have national impact.
> So I hope people see projects like this as points of national pride, even if they don't live there.
Why wouldn't this be a national _shame_? "We can't even keep our own citizens alive. We won't even try to protect you against climate change.
"Droughts are going to be a permanent feature of life for a lot of America, and our response to that is to spend billions on a city in the desert for the rich."
People have families, livelihoods, businesses, kids that need schools, grandparents that need care, friends, and emotional attachments to cultural things like food. "Shiny new buildings" are great to look for an hour but it gets old quickly. After that you start missing that noodle shack at the end of the street, the park the kids play in, and the sights and sounds of a bustling street market. Homes being 3X the price just because they are newly built, and a lack of jobs for both parents, doesn't help make people want to move, either.
New York State takes New York City's state taxes and gives a lot of them to a tiny number of upstate voters.
The US government takes New York City's federal taxes and gives a lot of them to do-nothing Republican states.
If New York City were allowed to keep all the state taxes it pays, it would not just "live within its means", it would run a huge surplus.
> the market
Here we are in 2021. "The market" is literally destroying our biosphere, and this only keeps accelerating. Surely no adult believes in the "Invisible Hand" by now?
I mean, all of the cities that are most "livable" in my mind are old cities that were designed before the car and thus have enough density and public transportation to make things both close and also the kind of place where it's fun to just walk around.
These "master planned cities" always end up like houses that are designed with all these pretty rooms that nobody actually uses.
It also has a decent rundown of modern American ones (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_community#Modern_plann...).
You'll have to use your own judgement on a case by case basis if they were successful or not and if they meet your personal definition of master planned.
But I found the lists a very interesting read.
It's sad, because in the US, there are actually a lot of good templates for new cities, designed for growth on the outset, that strike a balance between dense and verdant. The oldest part of places like Savannah, Charleston, New Orleans, smaller college towns, streetcar suburbs, ... It's so weird that when new suburbs are built, why they are not just straight up copying those 19th century templates.
Dutch urbanism is good but it requires a lot of trust in the government. Urbanists make top down plans, and then work together with property developers to create neighbourhoods. These property developers have to follow a lot of rules and guidelines and there are municipal committees that check whether the architecture is good enough for example. Top down urbanism is often seen as a recipe for disaster, but it seems to work there. I guess there are enough feedback loops in the system so that urbanists get a clue about what people like and implement that. For example, people like living close to water so constructing a neighbourhood often coincides with creating lots of canals and ponds.
The English did planned villages really well.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poundbury [2]: https://robskinner.net/2020/09/03/poundbury-prince-charles-m...
Irvine, California (current population, 300,000) was developed by a private corporation.
Development started in the 1960s.
I have heard that Dubai does not have street names, so giving directions and arranging deliveries can be… challenging. Is this statement accurate?
>They were the will of powerful, bright and respected people.
Not the first adjectives I'd use to describe imperialists, colonialists and warlords personally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George
When he died 100,000 people showed up at his funeral:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George#Death_and_funeral
Can you imagine anyone showing up at an economists funeral today, except to heckle?
It's unfortunate that this project mixes Georgism w/ dehumanized modern architecture. Most people want to live in traditional, walkable neighborhoods, as prices suggest.
Well. Good luck. Should be able to nail at least one out of those three.
Not that building this project virtually anywhere else might've made it easier.
Going to depend a lot on the local politics and where they can find the land.
Something more like Hong Kong or Chongqing.
> The building features elevated water storage, aeroponic farms and an energy-producing photovoltaic roof that allow it to "share and distribute all it produces."
In other words, this building is going to be freaking expensive: (1) Upper floors of a skyscraper is probably the most expensive place you could store water in. (2) There's a reason why we're not buying cabbages and avocados from aeroponic farms now - they're much more expensive than traditional farming. (3) If you have a city in the middle of a desert, why would you put solar panels on top of a building, instead of right next to the city?
Also, there's no mention on what kind of industry and jobs the city could attract - which isn't surprising given the tone of the article.
Water pipes are pressurized using gravity (there's a reason tanks for water distribution systems are commonly referred to as "water towers"); indeed, water systems frequently measure pressure using the height above sea level it can reach without pumps rather than more natural units of pressure. If the city's water mains aren't capable of pushing it to every floor of your building (which is going to be true for a skyscraper), then you'll have to naturally pressurize it yourself by keeping the main water tank high.
If you don't do that, your options are either to pump the main water main anyways (just without a natural tank on the top), with lots of pressure regulators for the lower flows; several vertical water mains to service different vertical pressure zones; or one water main with lots and lots of smaller (and hence less efficient overall) pumps to keep the pressure reasonable at different altitudes. Keeping the water tank high instead lowers the amount of infrastructure you need, lowers the costs of regulating pressure, and has better fail-safe conditions if the power cuts out for a while.
Location: We need new cities in there north add climate change ramps up. Desert doesn't sound great. And new cities need to be built in low population states to balance out the Senate. Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, WV would be best. Otherwise the country continues to become more dysfunctional. Up north there's underutilized Amtrak lines too.
Local Transportation: autonomous cars are cool, but are still space inefficient compare to mass transit. A new city is an amazing opportunity to build mass transit more cheaply with cut-and-cover tunnels. You can also plan for commercial transportation with delivery tunnels and below ground docks. These are the kinds of things you can't easily add to an existing city and should be the focus.
Regional Transportation: Where's the airport and how does it connect to the city? Will there be a central train station? How do carless residents reach regional attractions like state/national parks and recreation areas?
Parks: It's nearly impossible to add large parks to a new city, but they immensely improve quality of life. A new city should be designed around large central parks and neighborhood parks. You also need to have a green belt surrounding the city to prevent sprawl.
Density: SF density isn't it. SF is mostly a suburb west of Van Ness. Shoot for Paris.
Industry: People need jobs. Where are the light industrial areas and how do they integrate with the city so they're not blighted pollution centers? Will they be transit connected so people don't need cars?
If you boost density substantially, you might only need a portion of the current land area (simplifying the acquisition and clearing process).
Maybe you can even use the existing population base to help bootstrap the economy. I could see making some sort of offer for people to sign over their land (with decrepit buildings and worn-out infrastructure) for highly subsidized or free units in the newly built city.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ghost_towns_in_the_Uni...
- https://www.businessinsider.com/10-american-cities-that-are-...
It's no wonder why this project is pursuing a "clean slate" approach.
Imagine small villages with self-sustained planning, energy efficiency and agriculture.
Imagine living as a human being close to nature but with all benefits of civilization. We will have hyper-connectivity available soon.
This pandemic situation has given me something valuable after all. I can live away from the big city and be happy, productive and healthy. This grandiose futuristic dream is not exiting anymore for me. Behind all the beautiful picture I can fell dystopian reality. But hey, I am a regular guy with a regular dream:)
https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Canberra+ACT+2601/@-35....
- A billionaire "with a vision"
- Someone who has spent more than 10k hours playing Cities: Skylines
What if the people that move there decide they don’t want any of these things? What if the first settlers decide to vote for individual property ownership?
This place sounds more like a utopian commune than a realistic place.
"The mission of Telosa is to create a more equitable and sustainable future. That's our North Star."
I admire their ambition, but they are underestimating people's preference for inequity as long as they're on the right side of the graph. I don't know if they're asking the right questions and solving for the right problems... their web site hasn't moved beyond vaporware phase. https://cityoftelosa.com/
'Local German officials, like local leaders everywhere, seek bigger budgets to provide more and better services to their constituents. What’s different about Germany is that the way to get bigger budgets is to increase local populations. And, as Professor Buettner says, “Ultimately, to get people, municipalities will need to support housing.”
The result is a system of incentives that is the opposite of “fiscal zoning”—the US practice of zoning land in ways that maximize local governments’ income and minimize their costs. In places with high sales taxes, such as Washington State, leaders zone more land for shopping centers. In places where residential property taxes are capped, such as California, they zone less land for homes and more for offices. In affluent suburbs, they often zone land for houses on large lots, excluding low-income people.
Maximizing property values is such a central concern of local government in the United States that Dartmouth economist William Fischel developed the notion into an entire political theory. His “homevoter hypothesis” holds that local governments are almost single-mindedly focused on maximizing real estate values, because homeowners typically vote their home values in local elections. German jurisdictions gain financially by maximizing population, not house values, and because renters outnumber homeowners in the country, homevoters are not the dominant electoral force in local German elections. Renters are.'
https://www.sightline.org/2021/05/27/yes-other-countries-do-...
1. https://www.credit-suisse.com/articles/private-banking/2018/...
Anyway, your proposal still run into the issue of acquiring political will. It may work after it's implemented, but not before it.
Radically rewiring human nature.
Which in itself is selfish, and against the greater good.
The marginal utility of $1 for someone in poverty vastly outweighs the benefit you will get from it. So you don't need to wait for anything to pass a vote or become popular opinion to selflessly advance the greater good. I know of very few socialists who take advantage of this opportunity, unfortunately.
LOL - this is ignorant ! there are two common Master's tracks in the field, Architecture i.e. the design of buildings and interior spaces, and Urban Planning i.e. the design of multiple buildings in a functional way. Anyone would hire an Urban Planner to design urban spaces, not an Architect.
source: 600 hours of working with Urban Planners in California
They have 500+ staff and think it'd be a safe bet that they have urban planners in their existing mix. Their job opportunities page indicates they're hiring more.
"Now, he just needs somewhere to build it -- and $400 billion in funding"
That's a rather odd way of framing it. For one thing, having higher density seems like a rather obvious environmental good, since it means less total natural area disrupted. If you refuse high density in some area, the people who would've lived there don't just disappear; they go live in some other area, probably lower density, in a way that hurts the environment even more.
And while there's obviously life in desert ecosystems, there's substantially less of it compared to most other ecosystems -- you could say the same thing you said of grasslands or forest or what have you, except it'd be much more true.
My concern was around our civilization's poor understanding of the interplay between ecosystems, high density, energy flows, authority flows and fiscal flows. I'm a proponent of organically learning by building in incrementally higher densities in both cold and hot-dry deserts; it frees up more arable land elsewhere, and might have the least environmental impact of other build patterns. "Might" because that is a pure supposition based upon the lower densities of life supported by those climate zones. But small, rapidly iterative experiments because I think we need lots of time and small failures to understand how to maintain sustainable, equitable high-density urban cores over long durations (hundreds to thousands of years), that do not exacerbate the centralization of socioeconomic power and authority which seem to plague lots of large-organization decision matrices.
I've been looking for many years for literature that studies these kinds of inter-relationships. Our civilization seems to have a pretty good grasp of how to start building an urban core area (see China as the latest example, and many currently less-developed nations in elsewhere I expect will follow suit in the coming decades). But the wheels start to come off when land and improvements speculation (driven by the unique leverage+asset treatments real estate enjoys in law) drives up the pricing of a successfully started urban core, and emerges suburban and other anti-pattern responses when no other solutions to stay within high-density urban come forward.
In the context of the desert builds, I'm reasonably confident after looking into the patterns I've researched so far, that absent some pretty fundamental changes in how high-density urban cores are maintained after they are started, even successful starts will rapidly (within two generations, say 40-80 years) dilute and falter from their original excellent high-density-driven metrics as the expected anti-patterns emerge again.
I think Arcosanti has a second design advantage tho, it started with a small but livable urban core, so even with 50 residents the city is functional (given enough tourists) but the plans include expansions for 500 and then 5,000 residents. To grow the city as people show up seems like a better move then spending billions of dollars before you open the gates.
I actually went and listened to the "billionaire visionary" on a podcast about this: https://ideas.beondeck.com/mission-driven-cities-with-marc-l...
You can get a very quick sense that he has no appreciate for even the textbook issues in urbanism.
At 41:00, he says, "One of the reasons I don't read is that it takes time away from thinking." Gavin Belson could not have said it better.
Will be interesting to see how sustainable that is.
I'm guessing that the energy harvesting from the geography and leveraging the locale's low humidity for evaporative cooling, along with the generally ultra-low cost of acquiring the dirt, are pretty attractive for moonshot projects like these. I've yet to see any of these types of projects start with fundamentals like better-than-PassivHaus insulation standards, or NetZero standards, or make form follow function by performing and designing around an energy flow analysis, or learn from the lessons that Strong Towns extracted from the population density factors, and so on, so these projects are likely run into many of the same foundational challenges that many nations and cities struggle with today. I think coming up with a framework that allows organic evolution towards integrating these many different factors continuously over the long-term is all we can really hope to accomplish for practical success; we likely simply don't have the sufficient analytical tools to design-up-front except in the most basic, infrastructural ways.
- no minimum parking requirements
- no zoning requirements
- no community involvement
- no free street parking
- a plan for walkability & parks
- a community of "doers" or committed (this is the hardest)
I feel like Starbase in Texas is perhaps the most exciting new city.
Wouldn't you still want some zoning laws to prevent for example having a sewage treatment plant put up in your back yard?
Interesting, one of these things is not like the others.
I'd love to know more about this.
Especially as we are continually learning more about our ability to estimate how much water is available to us:
https://www.kuer.org/health-science-environment/2021-02-09/m...
Perhaps this is a side-effect due to the state or country chosen, where there are no realistic alternatives? Even going to a more moderate location slightly farther away from the equator doesn't seem all that difficult vs. really sticking with a desert.
That region is wildly over-populated for the amount of water available.
$500,000 each for the first 50,000. Guessing I wouldn't fit into that "new model for society."
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/california-city-ghost-town-i...
Look at Brasilia for example. I dont see the desert aspect, with what water?
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120825041721/http://www.shimz....
I think that having a reason to be there, is 99% of the incentive to build a city.
There's a reason that almost every city is on a body of water.
That makes perfect sense.
What are the big skeletal towers with a few plants hung on them supposed to do?
A better example would be Houston in 1911: https://twitter.com/larsiusprime/status/1427107150053183505
Or if you want a really good and thorough modern empirical study on the effects of land value tax, this paper from Denmark from 2017: https://www.zbw.eu/econis-archiv/bitstream/11159/1082/1/arbe...
Middle of the desert smh. Why not build it underwater and get rid of all the pesky ethical/moral laws, allow any biotech research and free experimentation on humans?
Things about a desert that make energy use lower:
- Evaporative cooling can decrease cooling needs. Using a fan or an evaporative cooler is much more feasible in dry environments.
- Hot days and cool nights mean it's fairly simple to store thermal energy and use that for cooking, water heating, area heating, and/or clothes drying (if you want to actively heat your clothes) at night
- Lots of sun, so solar energy is highly viable. That means lighting can be done through solar energy.
- If the area is windy, fairly easy to ventilate homes just through outdoor wind and maybe an E/HRV if necessary
High humidity areas are really difficult to cool because after a certain Relative Humidity level in the air, fans just stop being effective due to evaporative cooling being insufficient. ACs were originally invented as a method of dehumidification. That said, growing crops in these environments can be a challenge (you can certainly grow aeroponically in greenhouses, but that's energy use, so the numbers need to be crunched) and using transport to fetch water and crops could make the whole project non-viable. There is potential for using solar to desalinate but the water itself needs to come from somewhere.
Try to grab a solar parabolic dish (an example is the Haines Cooker [1]) and place something with a large thermal mass inside. An example of this is firebrick, but regular brick will do (regular brick has a lower heat capacity). Firebrick has a heat capacity [2] of 0.5 MWh / m^3. As the sun sets, put something with high thermal conductivity atop the heated firebricks, and use that to cook. A practical item that works is a cast iron pot or grill.
Another way to cook like this is to use thermal cookers ([3], [4]). Thermal cookers work by wrapping a pot with a large layer of insulation, keeping the food cooking over time. They're popular in East Asia to make porridges (congee) and slow-boiled vegetable/meat dishes (nabe). If you can make your pot come to a boil in something like a Haines cooker and plop the pot inside the insulated chamber, then you can have a hot meal ready by evening.
Of course the most "comfortable" way to cook on clean energy would probably be to store the excess generated solar energy in large batteries and discharge through an induction stove or into a modern PID-based slow/pressure cooker (like the Instant Pot). You're dealing with the losses in battery storage and energy transmission, but that allows people to cook with the "flow" that they expect (e.g. turn a knob and wait for your burner to come to temperature.) There's also a world of biomass stoves out there but if there's enough surplus solar, it's best to stick to an induction stove powered through solar.
[1]: https://hainessolarcookers.com
[2]: https://inldigitallibrary.inl.gov/sites/sti/sti/Sort_8882.pd...
[3]: https://www.wonderbagworld.com/
[4]: https://www.thermos.com.sg/thermos/products/shuttle-chef/tcr...
It's fun to play sim-city, but if you don't have a plan for what new industries your new city is going to be supporting you're not attracting new residents.
Dubai development started in 1980s.
Still today Dubai is made up of Westeners who made money in their home country and they relocated there blinded by the lights and the promise of an "endless summer" (matter of fact it gets chilly in winter and I hope you like 120F on the regular during the summer).
A city spurs up, you can't just build it and hope that people will come, it's too big of a project.
Me thinks this is a PR move to get his name out there and use as a hook to get some fundraising for some more sensible project.
In general the US does not need more cities. The US can't operate its existing cities properly. It's embarrassing how disgusting and violent most US cities are. Culturally the US should figure out how to run the cities it has before building new ones. To say nothing of the fact that the US has no need of new mega cities from a practical standpoint, we're facing population decline or stagnation, not a population boom.
Cities are cultural extensions of the nations they reside in, along with regional influences. It's highly predictable what you'll get out of another city built in the US. Let's focus $400 billion on public transportation improvements for our existing cities, including rail and a lot more electric buses.