Checking In On Our New Cities

Exploring the attempts to build new cities around the globe, warts and all

Want to better understand the real estate industry but don’t know where to start? Thesis Driven’s Fundamentals of Commercial Real Estate course is back in NYC at 3 World Trade Center on May 8-9th. Learn more here.

---

In February of last year—a few months into writing Thesis Driven—I decided to catalogue the various attempts to build new cities around the globe. That letter, Where Are the New Cities?, was a bit of a inflection point in our publication’s growth and my approach to writing.

New Cities was a wacky letter; I rated new city projects by 🧠s, 🚇s, 🪚s, and 🏗️s, measuring (respectively) each project’s ambition, urbanism, oppression, and probability of actually happening. Prior to that, all our letters were a tad stilted, written strictly for an institutional audience I assumed was more uptight than the reality. New Cities drove a lot of positive attention and new subscribers. After that, I pretty much wrote whatever I wanted within a broad universe of real estate, innovation, tech, and urbanism. And it’s working pretty well.

Today, I’d like to revisit that letter and check in on our friends building new cities around the world. And—better yet—we have a few new ones to add to our list that we’ve discovered over the past year. For each city, we’ll tackle:

• The basics of the project;

• How it’s progressing (or not), measured in 📈s;

• Any updates to our ratings.

Let’s dive in!