I'm sad by how short this list is. And how low probability the projects are (I generally agree with your assessments).
We seemed to have lost the ability to create new places. And therefore our ability to experiment on better ways of living, governing, and coordinating human activity has suffered.
None of the 10 most populous cities in the US were founded in the last 150 years. Our youngest city - Phoenix - was founded in 1868 and that was the same year as the first underground railroad and the French still occupied Mexico.
We've inherited our cities from a distant and unrecognizable past. We are governed by ghosts from a forgotten era.
I wonder if we can dispense with the utopian undertones here and set our sites on just creating new places that are moderately better along some dimensions for a specific group of people. The Villages seems like the project most in this spirit and I wouldn't want to live there personally, I like the intentionality and resident-centricity of the approach.
While I agree with you, let me lay out a somewhat more generous interpretation:
We build fewer new cities now because we're generally more comfortable. Many of the cities of the past were settled by migrants facing some kind of severe economic strain or persecution. Uprooting yourself / your family and moving to a new city is incredibly hard, *particularly* if that city is itself a startup. I might've done it in my 20s or early 30s, but probably not today.
If we do see the resurgence of new-city-building, it'll likely be driven by things getting substantially worse in our existing cities: crime, schools, taxes, business climate, etc.
As you know as well as I do, there are also significant regulatory barriers to building new cities in the developed world today. I don't see that changing. The only positive I can think of there is that there really only needs to be *one* jurisdiction that gets comfortable with this kind of development; you don't need broad-based reform such as the YIMBY movement is pushing.
Local electeds fundamentally report to their constituents, and I can't think of many cases where the constituents would want this kind of thing. It's a bit like what we did at Common with the Remote Work Hub RFP - we got some great responses (28 different cities!) but the scope was much smaller than what we're talking about here.
I'm sad by how short this list is. And how low probability the projects are (I generally agree with your assessments).
We seemed to have lost the ability to create new places. And therefore our ability to experiment on better ways of living, governing, and coordinating human activity has suffered.
None of the 10 most populous cities in the US were founded in the last 150 years. Our youngest city - Phoenix - was founded in 1868 and that was the same year as the first underground railroad and the French still occupied Mexico.
We've inherited our cities from a distant and unrecognizable past. We are governed by ghosts from a forgotten era.
I wonder if we can dispense with the utopian undertones here and set our sites on just creating new places that are moderately better along some dimensions for a specific group of people. The Villages seems like the project most in this spirit and I wouldn't want to live there personally, I like the intentionality and resident-centricity of the approach.
While I agree with you, let me lay out a somewhat more generous interpretation:
We build fewer new cities now because we're generally more comfortable. Many of the cities of the past were settled by migrants facing some kind of severe economic strain or persecution. Uprooting yourself / your family and moving to a new city is incredibly hard, *particularly* if that city is itself a startup. I might've done it in my 20s or early 30s, but probably not today.
If we do see the resurgence of new-city-building, it'll likely be driven by things getting substantially worse in our existing cities: crime, schools, taxes, business climate, etc.
As you know as well as I do, there are also significant regulatory barriers to building new cities in the developed world today. I don't see that changing. The only positive I can think of there is that there really only needs to be *one* jurisdiction that gets comfortable with this kind of development; you don't need broad-based reform such as the YIMBY movement is pushing.
The "one jurisdiction" point does give me some hope.
I just wonder why we aren't seeing more RFPs from states/counties inviting this sort of thing.
On the other hand .. it should also be easier now than ever w/ modern supply chains, remote work, off-grid tech, etc.
So where are all the new cities??
Local electeds fundamentally report to their constituents, and I can't think of many cases where the constituents would want this kind of thing. It's a bit like what we did at Common with the Remote Work Hub RFP - we got some great responses (28 different cities!) but the scope was much smaller than what we're talking about here.
I also wonder where the risk-capital will ultimately come from. It can't be sheiks and tech billionaires as the only possible funding sources.
Manhattan is worth a few trillion dollars. Donald Bren is the richest developer in the US.
There are outsized gains here for those with long-term vision and patience.