I think that any new city that will be built, should be harmonious with nature. The buildings shouldn't be glass and steel, nor should they be heat sinks. They should have plenty of green spaces, and be designed for walking, cycling, or skating, as a means of getting around.
They should be designed to capture and reclaim water, and should be designed to accomodate gray water when watering grass and plants. Also no new city should house more than 300 thousand. The cities should be able to be fed using local farmers and ranchers.
Yes we need to build new cities but it's not a matter of remembering how to build things, it's more a matter of thinking differently of how to build. New cities can't just be bedroom communities, there has to be areas of commercial and industrial development to keep jobs close to home. In the 60's I managed properties in inner city Detroit where there was a white flight to the suburbs. The flight was not necessarily racial, but because the outdated factories were moving out of the downtown arena and many people wanted to be closer to work. Tech type institutions like we have in Silicon Valley can't be a sole source. There are still manufacturing plants needed. Over time many will become obsolete and there will be a repeat of Detroit. We can't assume all people will want to live on top of one another either. But build, we should on the best sustainable platform and this old man wishes you and people like Elli will keep pursuing it.
Hey Robert, 100% on the same page with respect to /not/ just throwing up bedroom communities. Looking at the history, I see the entire paradigm of separating (most) uses as a nearly century old sin in North American planning in need of redress.
I would say a bit of both. The proposal as I understand it contains a lot of unenforceable promises to do things to assuage local concerns, but is still very much focused on the needs of wealthy developers, the tech industry and high-income professionals rather than affordable housing or appropriate density.
Again, I don’t know a great deal about the project and all the pro/con. Obviously, building a whole city from scratch would HAVE to include large developers with the knowhow and capital to actually do it. But I think the community itself needs to have a large voice if such an effort isn’t to end up as just gentrification writ very large.
To my understanding, the plan is to develop agricultural land into housing (along with all the necessary infrastructure that goes with it). Further, that the team has a specific vision for a development that bakes in mixed-use zoning and multi-modal transit to a degree that we haven't seen since prior to WWII.
In as far as this is an accurate description of what's proposed (and what the team would actually do), this all sounds great to me. So, is your presumption that future windfalls from development ought to be preemptively taxed through a community benefits package?
I believe that our major cities would be in different locations if they were built and populated based off of access to energy and resources instead of economic opportunity. Originally, economic opportunity was a function of ample resources, but rapid advances in technology have disassociated the two and made some cities outgrow their regional capacity. All that to say, I think as we truly account for circular, sustainable economies in our urban centers, we will approach a network of interconnected villages (which Elle wrote about recently), or Ebenezer Howard's "Garden Cities," which I touched on in my City State article. I'm all for urban growth and new cities as long as they are ecocentric. I think the new model would be starting from scratch with novel power sources, closer to living biocities than the power grid model.
On a different note, Tomas Pueyo proposed ten new US cities. The first one is a provocative thought exercise that I really enjoyed. I haven't read the rest but your article reminded me to revisit his series. I thought you might enjoy diving into it as well.
Hey Stephen, I'm not convinced we can ever decouple cities from economic opportunity. Our point of divergence, though, might be that I don't see economic opportunity as necessarily related to material resources.
Boom towns built around extractive industries rarely take-off; they seemingly fall into a localized version of the resource trap. More often we've seen cities emerge in places or around infrastructure that facilitates commerce and, consequently, a diversified economic base.
I agree that cities and economic opportunity are inextricably linked, but I wonder how we can get out of large-scale environmental crisis driven by consumer demand. I think at the minimum, cities have to be self-sufficient in their water and energy supply. As it stands, many US cities get their water and energy from far-off places. We're doing fine right now, but I don't see this ending well in the long run. On top of that, a 2025 report found that 54 of the 75 largest cities are running off a deficit. I think we need to update the model, which is why I found your article inspiring. I'll check out your link, looking forward to reading more from you.
I like the idea of new cities. I lived in Reston, VA for many years, which is something between a planned community and a small city. (As you probably know, it's not incorporated in Virginia as a county, city, or town.) I loved Reston's vibe and the (for its time) mixed uses.
I wonder about two things. First, I'm big on Jane Jacobs and James C. Scott, both of whom have a distrust for utopian cities. Scott has it out particularly for cities built from scratch, such as Brasíila, where mixed use doesn't happen. I probably need to get my urban planning up to date; I know it has swung in Jacobs's direction in recent decades.
My second hesitation has to do with aesthetics. Here I turn to my suburban experience in a neo-traditional neighborhood. The look was better (in my opinion) than the standard suburban single-family neighborhoods surrounding ours. But there was an artificiality to our neighborhood. It sort of said, "We wish we were an old New England town, but we'll do the best we can under the budget constraints and the state's and county's strictures," such as road widths and zoning, which prevented narrow roads and foot traffic.
I love that photograph of “Ghibli-Hobbit” architecture, but how can you build something to look as if it were built by accretion over decades, as “Ghibli-Hobbit” architecture does? Trying to look like something from the past didn't entirely work in our suburban neighborhood.
Of course, you're talking about entire cities and not just neighborhoods. I love the mixed uses, walkability, and transit systems that your diagram suggests.
Thanks for your cool and stimulating thought experiment here.
Hey Bryce, you're hitting on an important question (that's frankly not well developed in my post). Specifically, "what things are planned at what scale?"
In the abstract, we can think about examples like major infrastructure as falling into a class of things where transaction costs of coordinating piecemeal are prohibitively high, so we should have a single provider. Things like individual buildings, though, we can - and ought to - leave much, much more up to individual trial and error. Preserving those degrees of freedom in architecture and use (i.e. you can choose to use your garage as a garage or as a neighborhood coffee shop) is how we open up the possibility of that accretive development.
And here's the punchline (that, again, is probably not clear at all from this essay) - in my view, city building should not be an attempt to erect some Potemkin village that we hope real people will eventually fill in. Instead, it should be an exercise in building a platform (in terms of physical infrastructure and governmental institutions) that enables people to arrive and co-create the place they'll all share over time. Of course, there are varying degrees of planned development (I'm actually didn't know about Reston, but I'm read up on The Woodlands if you're familiar), but the idea is platform, not product.
As an old guy, I wonder what happens to the old cities...This feels like it could be just another version of white flight that could lead to old city blight...
Hey Jonathan, I appreciate the read and the comment.
I hope it came through that I don't see the prospect of building new cities as an alternative to continuing to improve the ones we've already got. To the comment you I think you're more likely making, though, there are definitely different versions of "building new cities", some which I could imagine being dystopian (building large scale gated communities does not prosperity make).
That, however, is such a complex topic I ended up writing an entire series on it. If you're interested in my take on the good version — what I mean when I speak positively about building new cities here — check out this post: https://www.urbanproxima.com/p/urbanism-as-a-service
I have a daughter and DIL in Oakland, CA along with two grandchildren. I am forwarding your link to them for their thoughts.
I hope to have more time to study the model personally in the future. I just need to stay in my lane of expertise which is more in community development rather than city development.
I think that any new city that will be built, should be harmonious with nature. The buildings shouldn't be glass and steel, nor should they be heat sinks. They should have plenty of green spaces, and be designed for walking, cycling, or skating, as a means of getting around.
They should be designed to capture and reclaim water, and should be designed to accomodate gray water when watering grass and plants. Also no new city should house more than 300 thousand. The cities should be able to be fed using local farmers and ranchers.
But that's just me talking.
Yes we need to build new cities but it's not a matter of remembering how to build things, it's more a matter of thinking differently of how to build. New cities can't just be bedroom communities, there has to be areas of commercial and industrial development to keep jobs close to home. In the 60's I managed properties in inner city Detroit where there was a white flight to the suburbs. The flight was not necessarily racial, but because the outdated factories were moving out of the downtown arena and many people wanted to be closer to work. Tech type institutions like we have in Silicon Valley can't be a sole source. There are still manufacturing plants needed. Over time many will become obsolete and there will be a repeat of Detroit. We can't assume all people will want to live on top of one another either. But build, we should on the best sustainable platform and this old man wishes you and people like Elli will keep pursuing it.
Hey Robert, 100% on the same page with respect to /not/ just throwing up bedroom communities. Looking at the history, I see the entire paradigm of separating (most) uses as a nearly century old sin in North American planning in need of redress.
New cities, yes, but California Forever— wealthy developers who are disconnected from local needs and using their fortunes to “buy” local support—is not a great example of how to do it: https://www.hcn.org/articles/the-california-forever-debate-moves-underground/
Hey Paul, do you take issue with the proposal itself or the way the company has gone about things to date?
I would say a bit of both. The proposal as I understand it contains a lot of unenforceable promises to do things to assuage local concerns, but is still very much focused on the needs of wealthy developers, the tech industry and high-income professionals rather than affordable housing or appropriate density.
Again, I don’t know a great deal about the project and all the pro/con. Obviously, building a whole city from scratch would HAVE to include large developers with the knowhow and capital to actually do it. But I think the community itself needs to have a large voice if such an effort isn’t to end up as just gentrification writ very large.
To my understanding, the plan is to develop agricultural land into housing (along with all the necessary infrastructure that goes with it). Further, that the team has a specific vision for a development that bakes in mixed-use zoning and multi-modal transit to a degree that we haven't seen since prior to WWII.
In as far as this is an accurate description of what's proposed (and what the team would actually do), this all sounds great to me. So, is your presumption that future windfalls from development ought to be preemptively taxed through a community benefits package?
No.
I think where we may part company is the idea that there’s more to a community than zoning and taxation.
I believe that our major cities would be in different locations if they were built and populated based off of access to energy and resources instead of economic opportunity. Originally, economic opportunity was a function of ample resources, but rapid advances in technology have disassociated the two and made some cities outgrow their regional capacity. All that to say, I think as we truly account for circular, sustainable economies in our urban centers, we will approach a network of interconnected villages (which Elle wrote about recently), or Ebenezer Howard's "Garden Cities," which I touched on in my City State article. I'm all for urban growth and new cities as long as they are ecocentric. I think the new model would be starting from scratch with novel power sources, closer to living biocities than the power grid model.
On a different note, Tomas Pueyo proposed ten new US cities. The first one is a provocative thought exercise that I really enjoyed. I haven't read the rest but your article reminded me to revisit his series. I thought you might enjoy diving into it as well.
Here's the link to the first one: https://substack.com/@tomaspueyo/p-154874624
Hey Stephen, I'm not convinced we can ever decouple cities from economic opportunity. Our point of divergence, though, might be that I don't see economic opportunity as necessarily related to material resources.
Boom towns built around extractive industries rarely take-off; they seemingly fall into a localized version of the resource trap. More often we've seen cities emerge in places or around infrastructure that facilitates commerce and, consequently, a diversified economic base.
I get into it a bit in this section of a diff post, but full disclosure I'm echoing Alain Bertaud, full stop. https://www.urbanproxima.com/i/149573605/where-do-cities-come-from
I agree that cities and economic opportunity are inextricably linked, but I wonder how we can get out of large-scale environmental crisis driven by consumer demand. I think at the minimum, cities have to be self-sufficient in their water and energy supply. As it stands, many US cities get their water and energy from far-off places. We're doing fine right now, but I don't see this ending well in the long run. On top of that, a 2025 report found that 54 of the 75 largest cities are running off a deficit. I think we need to update the model, which is why I found your article inspiring. I'll check out your link, looking forward to reading more from you.
I like the idea of new cities. I lived in Reston, VA for many years, which is something between a planned community and a small city. (As you probably know, it's not incorporated in Virginia as a county, city, or town.) I loved Reston's vibe and the (for its time) mixed uses.
I wonder about two things. First, I'm big on Jane Jacobs and James C. Scott, both of whom have a distrust for utopian cities. Scott has it out particularly for cities built from scratch, such as Brasíila, where mixed use doesn't happen. I probably need to get my urban planning up to date; I know it has swung in Jacobs's direction in recent decades.
My second hesitation has to do with aesthetics. Here I turn to my suburban experience in a neo-traditional neighborhood. The look was better (in my opinion) than the standard suburban single-family neighborhoods surrounding ours. But there was an artificiality to our neighborhood. It sort of said, "We wish we were an old New England town, but we'll do the best we can under the budget constraints and the state's and county's strictures," such as road widths and zoning, which prevented narrow roads and foot traffic.
I love that photograph of “Ghibli-Hobbit” architecture, but how can you build something to look as if it were built by accretion over decades, as “Ghibli-Hobbit” architecture does? Trying to look like something from the past didn't entirely work in our suburban neighborhood.
Of course, you're talking about entire cities and not just neighborhoods. I love the mixed uses, walkability, and transit systems that your diagram suggests.
Thanks for your cool and stimulating thought experiment here.
Hey Bryce, you're hitting on an important question (that's frankly not well developed in my post). Specifically, "what things are planned at what scale?"
In the abstract, we can think about examples like major infrastructure as falling into a class of things where transaction costs of coordinating piecemeal are prohibitively high, so we should have a single provider. Things like individual buildings, though, we can - and ought to - leave much, much more up to individual trial and error. Preserving those degrees of freedom in architecture and use (i.e. you can choose to use your garage as a garage or as a neighborhood coffee shop) is how we open up the possibility of that accretive development.
And here's the punchline (that, again, is probably not clear at all from this essay) - in my view, city building should not be an attempt to erect some Potemkin village that we hope real people will eventually fill in. Instead, it should be an exercise in building a platform (in terms of physical infrastructure and governmental institutions) that enables people to arrive and co-create the place they'll all share over time. Of course, there are varying degrees of planned development (I'm actually didn't know about Reston, but I'm read up on The Woodlands if you're familiar), but the idea is platform, not product.
If you have the inclination, I lay that idea out more fully here: https://www.urbanproxima.com/p/urbanism-as-a-service
Jeff, thanks. "Platform, not product" and trial and error to stimulate "accretive development." I love it.
As an old guy, I wonder what happens to the old cities...This feels like it could be just another version of white flight that could lead to old city blight...
Hey Jonathan, I appreciate the read and the comment.
I hope it came through that I don't see the prospect of building new cities as an alternative to continuing to improve the ones we've already got. To the comment you I think you're more likely making, though, there are definitely different versions of "building new cities", some which I could imagine being dystopian (building large scale gated communities does not prosperity make).
That, however, is such a complex topic I ended up writing an entire series on it. If you're interested in my take on the good version — what I mean when I speak positively about building new cities here — check out this post: https://www.urbanproxima.com/p/urbanism-as-a-service
I have a daughter and DIL in Oakland, CA along with two grandchildren. I am forwarding your link to them for their thoughts.
I hope to have more time to study the model personally in the future. I just need to stay in my lane of expertise which is more in community development rather than city development.
Jeff! It's been too long! Well done, sir. I hope you're well.
Max - what's up dude!