Tech Billionaires' Quest to Build a New City in California Goes Terribly
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
However, another part of me thinks that if a city was built from the ground up in a thoughtful way it could be so much better than America's best cities. Also more cities would create more housing supply. Plus it feels nice just to root for the optimistic outcome sometime rather than reflexively be bitter.
Though my biggest concern is - and we see this in so many online platforms - a lot of tech/ceo types have a very... different... idea of what "optimal" looks like.
That's fundamentally the problem; these guys don't really want to build a living breathing vibrant and holistic city, they want to build a giant luxury lifeboat that could, ideally, fly. Left to actually execute with the technology that exists what they inevitably construct is a giant tumor that just sucks the life out of the surroundings. If they could make it nuclear powered and able to literally condense drinking water from the air so they genuinely didn't have to transact with society at all you better believe they'd do exactly that.
Ironically enough, if they genuinely could make their little city fly into space probably the best thing we could all do is hurry them along. There won't be a shortage of well-motivated smart people left behind. They'll just be the nice ones.
The funny thing about these people is that they're so out of touch and detached that you could literally meme them into naming it Galt's Gulch and they would absolutely do it thinking how cleverly ironic it was, while just not getting it at all.
I am sick of the euphemisms we give normal people. Traditional human language does nothing but propagate ridiculous hallucination.
Billionaires only exist because of propaganda. We could “kill” them easily via taxation. There’s absolutely no reason to foist such privilege on a handful of typical people, many of whom have not been direct contributors to science and engineering in years and just manipulate politics to stay fiat rich
The funniest part to me was that at one point there was a section on local jobs and they had a painting of some workers on a rickety scaffold expanding a villa.
That and, the whole thing will ultimately have to be a grift, right? How are they going to monetize their new city? Even with the best aspirations, this still becomes a corporate town centered around helping some oligarchs make their money back.
The best that can do is design the layout, zoning, and infrastructure. Maybe some core buildings. And maybe have design guidelines for streets and buildings.
Big problem for groups like this is that cities need a purpose to get started. Once they are big enough, they are self-perpetuating. Not sure what the purpose for this one was beyond wanting to build new city. Or why it would be bigger than Fairfield, Vacaville, or Davis.
Oh I don't think it has to be perfect. I think current US cities are like a 1 or 2 out of 10, and a new city from scratch could be a 5 or 6.
If you did good massive transport, walkable, dedicate beautiful areas (parks), enough traditional stoneface buildings, a way to automatically clean the streets like Paris has, a plan around safety/cleanliness/homelessness, a way to replace pipes without sawing through pavement, you'd be better than any current city.
While you're at it though, why not invite famous artists to designate certain areas to each have a unique architectural style and commission sculptures and architectural ideas every few blocks?
Most places are screaming for densification these days so your argument seems even more wrong.
The Soviets had critical housing shortage after the Civil war and even worse after WW2. And even those houses that existed were pre-WW1 standards of modernity.
Now I think a to strong embrace of modernism. A lack of small scale capitalism. And their hatred for pre-Soviet old town really hurt them. And eventually to much copying the US in terms of cars did hurt their program.
But saying its a failure is simply inaccurate. From 60-80 an absurd amount of modern housing was built.
If they really wanted to build the perfect city, they should work with local and state governments which supposedly represents the people, not the rich.
You dont need some billionair creating some dumb techno-futurist city that embracessas all the dumbest meme schemes for public transportation.
It's true some are empty, at least for now, but many aren't.
For example "Yangtze River Delta Megalopolis" was approved in 2016 and now has 240 million people.
Even if it's not doable to control everything, at least you could lay out excellent infrastructure from the beginning with modern tools and methods.
We do, but mostly peripheral cities around existing core cities, because there are geographical/resource things that make city building make sense, and -- other than with discovery of new resources (or technological/economic change making known but not economically exploitable resources exploitable), or some massive project that we have some reason to keep distant from existing settlement -- the places that make sense to build large population agglomerations already have them.
Advances in urban design (or changes in urban design fashion) don't create new city locations, so they mostly lead to redevelopment, not new cities.
There are villages everywhere, some grew and became small cities, some slighly larger and do on.
Founding city only happens if you move lots of people into a lightly lived in area or during a massive population boom due to agroculture.
And you dont need new cities to build great infrastrucute. Look at Istanbul. One of the oldest cities and yet the are massivly building out public infrastructure.
Copenhagen just added a totally modern subway. Amsterdam and co have totally revolutionized cycling in the last decades.
The bones of a city arnt that different. People still happly live in 300 year old city houses just fine. There is little point rebuilding that stuff.
There are cities that are 1000+ years old and feel totally modern. Its all about continual improvment and iteration.
Most by design cities embrace a bunch of terrible hype ideas. And even in the very best case, like Australia for example, the result isnt better then the older cities.
Cities are large enough that you can do large scale expermients within them. Transform one part of town with new methods.
The US has been making new cities, or at least growing smaller ones. Many of the metros in US like Phoenix, Miami, Tampa, and Orlando were small 50 years ago and barely existed before WW2.
There are lots of new cities in China. Shenzhen was a village 50 years ago and has 17 million people today.
That said, most of the island that they might buy were also home to other peoples before the current owners.
Exactly how the City of Houston was founded.
Can you think of a reason why this was normal in the US and not in Europe? And how this could inform the current situation?
After your work has been covered by the media, you may understand how the trick is executed.
So if you want clicks and readers for ad revenue, you're not going to spin this positively.