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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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Ah yes, please fix capitalism before building any more housing
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.
Why don't we found new cities anymore? It's not like the pinnacle of urban design was reached centuries ago.
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.
In places where humans have been a long town you simply dont create new cities. In a place like Switzerland I could imagine what that would even look like.
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.
> Why don't we found new cities anymore? It's not like the pinnacle of urban design was reached centuries ago.
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.
The main reason is that the developed world is developed. There are existing cities that attract new people. Cities need to have a reason, midsize ones have position and big ones are big. A new greenfield city has neither of those.
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.
It's impossible to judge the merit of the locals' antagonism without at least some information about the new billionaire city plan. The article provides none. Does anyone have a link?
aka article is completely one sided
In Finland and I guess most of Europe, every second city/town was founded because an industrialist put their factories in an area and the factories needed humans to live nearby.
That hilarously inaccurate. Most towns are far older then the industrial revolution.
I disagree to most German towns.
Yeah, after a bit of thought, this probably doesn't apply to the older nations almost at all.
Why don't these billionaires go to some desert? Or just retire and get out of the way of society.
Why don't they just buy an island like other billionaires?
100 years ago people founded cities all the time. Why is it so unpopular today?
I think people already lived there and collectively decided to found a city where they were. Rich out of towners swooping in and buying local land hasn't worked out well for the locals historically.
>Rich out of towners swooping in and buying local land
Exactly how the City of Houston was founded.
Yeah, in the US towns tended to grow up organically, after settlement by colonizers who stole the land from the indigenous residents. The white man staked property claims where none existed, and now the descendants of those white settlers live where the Patwin Indians lived and claim the right to exclude others.
That said, most of the island that they might buy were also home to other peoples before the current owners.
Guess what in places like Europe founding cities wasnt very common a few 100 years ago.
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?
Because all the nice ones that aren't taken already are going to be under water in a few years.
Investment opportunity, get some scientists to figure out where the beachfront is going to end up. Seeing the old cities by boat can also probably be a great tourist attraction, I can already see the memories being made. Grandmother telling the story of how she used to live in that building, and the rent was as cheap as $2000, or the price of a bar of chocolate.
Was Gizmodo ever great? Sad to see them chase the negative angle.
So you prefer news that lies to you to maintain a positive angle?
I want them to just tell me what's happening instead of trying to tell me what to think about it by using words like "quixotic" in the opening paragraph.
It is quixotic. Taking events in isolation without integrating an understanding of the history here would be a wild choice.
I prefer news that doesn't lie by omission or lie by selective retelling. It's naive to believe a story like this is complete and honest.
After your work has been covered by the media, you may understand how the trick is executed.
There's a lot more people eager to see billionaire's plans fail than billionaires.
So if you want clicks and readers for ad revenue, you're not going to spin this positively.
They were relentlessly negative before all the prestigious news orgs became so technologically-regressive.