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Comment by zug_zug | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand it's easy to see this as a "screw the rich billionaires upsetting these poor locals"

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.

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> 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.

Bonobo tribes that kill their alphas live in harmony.

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

Based on what was on their website before, it looks like mainly they are trying to find an alternative to flying all the way to Spain or Italy to stay at a nice vacation villa and town.

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.

I’m not sure that it is possible to design a perfect city. A city is an organic thing that grows based on needs of residents. It is too big to be designed in one go. It also changes over time.

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.

> I’m not sure that it is possible to design a perfect city.

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?

US cities are hollowed out. With absurdly bad land use. They can easly be improved with actually very little effort. Improve bus lines, priority and zoning.

You dont need some billionair creating some dumb techno-futurist city that embracessas all the dumbest meme schemes for public transportation.

Soviet Union built a lot of those “designed by numbers” cities. They had certain distances to stores, planned density of kindergartens and hospitals, so on. Complete failure. Society changes a lot in those 10-15 years while you plan and build those cities. That’s even if you ignore the fact that SU stopped existing while some places where not finished (I grew up in a district with ridiculous population - but no subway to connect to the rest of the city and not enough roads for cars)

I’ve grew up in one. While it’s not as nice as a single family home in Silicon Valley climate it did create tons of affordable housing.

Most places are screaming for densification these days so your argument seems even more wrong.

Soviet housing buildup was not a complete failure. That's an absurd thing to claim. It was maybe one of the best most successful program in the Soviet Union.

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.

It was a complete and utter failure. Dense housing produces slums. Everybody in my old country is trying to get a house away from cities.

China has tried building a dozen thoughtful cities from the ground up. They're empty ghost towns

For whatever reason this keeps getting thrown around as though it's true, possibly because it's a bit scary to see a radically different system that is by some measurements surpassing our own.

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.

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

Ok, so some are empty? I'm not comparing the systems, Im saying building a perfect road-to-building ratio utopia isn't going to matter if people don't move there

I have observed the same thing w.r.t the people who always seem to lead "new city" projects. I think there's a lot of elite projection when a billionaire seeks funding from other billionaires. These guys ride in limos to work everyday and have no idea how good a well-built mass transit system could be, for instance.

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.

No idea in this master plan, inorganic cities suffer eventually the oversights of their designers. As to how to monetize a city, check out Santa Clarita, or before that San Clemente/Mission Viejo, or before the families that own Long Beach or Vernon. Oil. They acquired the spanish land grants by hook or crook, kept the oil/mineral rights and the commercial properties as leases and sold the houses plots off (except Vernon which has almost 0 residential). This lets them perpetually gain rent and oil money. Some are even worse like Lennar who puts 'runs with the land' deed provisions that each sale/transfer you must donate a significant percent to their "Charity" which is run by the corporate owners of questionable administrative overhead and goals. But forget it Jake, It's Chinatown.

I think it is kind of absurd for private companies to build public infrastructure. Capitalism isn’t going to create more “housing supply”, it’s going to find ways to maximise profit and revenue. That’s diametrically opposed to the social or common good of a utopian city.

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.

I don’t think Dubai should be held up as a model city, but it definitely a place that shows that greed and capitalism can create lots and lots of housing supply.

Ah yes, please fix capitalism before building any more housing

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