Plans for $400B new city in the American desert unveiled
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
Chicago ( aside from the crime which is almost absent from Lakeview/Wigglyvile) is pretty much the perfect city. Cheapish housing + affordable high quality public transit.
Rather than move to your magic theme park, I can go to Chicago. Apart from tech bros and their families I can't imagine anyone liking this.
We already have a ton of rusted out near ghost towns. Why not invest money in one of those ?
Poverty is still rampant in most US cities. That seems like the most pressing matter.
Just because existing conditions are adequate for those with resources doesn't mean we can't do better.
Housing supply and housing quality should be a key area of focus.
Unless there are hills nearby or a good winter/outdoor culture it can be rough.
Or an ocean nearby to mollify the temperature a little bit in the port city.
These cities are visually stunning in the era the designer made them, but they age about as well as 'Disney Futureland'.
'Culture' is the fabric of any worthwhile city and it seems to be not even an afterthought of these futurists.
It looks like Dubai - which is in real life, a city-sized shopping mall, an unwalkable concrete and steel jungle with upper middle class American brands never more than an arms reach.
The only tiny bit of redeeming quality there is actually the culture of the tribes themselves - the Arabs make it interesting - everything else is ridiculous.
Oddly, even Monaco which has at least some kind of aesthetic foundation, when they built out the newer areas ... they look about as 'glamorous' and 'Mediterranean' as a Starbucks in a remote suburb of Toronto.
It's really not an abstract concept and yet when you try to discuss these terms to some people, it's as though the language doesn't even exist for some people to grasp.
It's really weird.
Some planned cities are successful in a civic sense, but almost zero planned cities are successful in the greater cultural sense.
That said 'Diversity of City Types' is always nice, and the world can't go entirely wrong with an American Dubai.
My first prediction is that the Latino-American and Undocumented labour force that will do 'All Of The Work' will be at serious odds with the mostly White and Asian residents, who will be forever at odds with the social quagmire that very few African Americans will ever be able to afford to live there. Kind of like the unspoken 'Social Elephant In The Room' walking around Google campus. In Dubai, nobody cares a bit about the labourers locked into contracts with absolutely no rights, in America, it will be a thing.
I am curious to see how this experiment unfolds.