There are already so many dying or dead towns / cities in the US that building a new city in a desert sounds like thoughtless, careless waste (not to mention the ecological disaster of displacing / destroying the ecosystem of the desert). When there are so many habitable locations, why build a city in an inhospitable environment - so much energy resource is going to be wasted to make it habitable ...
This new city most likely depends on getting necessary regulatory and code approvals that would be impossible elsewhere. There's also a reason why towns become ghost towns, and the investors putting in $400B in funding probably don't want to start with one foot in the metaphorical grave.
From the sound of it, he’s still looking for all of the “investors putting in $400B of funding” at this point. For now, it seems he’s just doing PR and paying an architecture firm to make 3D renders.
To me the set of issues that come with building up a pre-existing city/town are similar to those faced by companies and municipalities looking to lay fiberoptic cable for internet service: endless political hurdles and obstructionism coming from the numerous groups and individuals involved, slowing development to a crawl or stopping it altogether.
It's no wonder why this project is pursuing a "clean slate" approach.
According to the article Appalachia is also under consideration, which I guess would alleviate the water concerns. The only justification I can think of for a project like this is BANANAs making the reformation of current cities impossible. But I share your skepticism. But it's always nice to see cool architectural mockups!
Because trying out new political structures that is the reason for building the new city. Nevada has passed a law recently that allows for basically the creation of new counties within existing ones. The county level is where quite a bit of political power lies, even though that level of government is often forgotten. Who knows what might come out of it, but I would like to see someone give it a try.
I love the ambition. One thing I've been really amazed about China has been the willingness to tackle big infrastructure projects - building cities like Shenzhen in a few decades and all of the infrastructure projects in the Pearl River Delta in general. I think we need more of that in the west. So I wish them luck - I hope real estate speculation doesn't ruin it.
One thing I've noticed with US politics is that things tend to be viewed as local issues instead of national ones. For example, NYC's public transit is a key part of the US's financial engine, but still chronically underfunded and mismanaged, and New York's problem to deal with. So I hope people see projects like this as points of national pride, even if they don't live there.
It's mind blowing how much land the US has. I live in India and here finding farmland is not easy to say least, while I see lot of cheap land available in the US all time with much more facilities than a small city in India would have.
I've always wondered why America has not built many more cities with all that available land.
The path to building a city involves first building a small town with some kind of economic activity. Because of a lack of people (especially young people), it's hard to create a brand new city with a vibrant economy. Most of the existing young people in America move to existing big cities. Small cities are becoming bigger.
This is unlike China where cities were built en masse to house migrants from rural areas. America just doesn't have the same volume of workers.
Probably because America has only about a quarter of the population that India has? Also, the ideal of the American homestead or even suburban home is one that doesn't place a high value on sharing space or being close to your neighbors.
Most of that cheap land you are seeing available in the US is not close to what you'd consider farmland.
Consider the location of the 100th meridian as it somewhat bisects the continent. West of that line, you cannot really grow anything without irrigation. East of that line, and to some extent there's enough rainfall that stuff will grow on its own, albeit not optimally.
Most the cheap available land you will find in the US is west of the 100th meridian, and is dry largely inorganic dirt.
As for the cities, you may not be aware of this, but the southwest (and perhaps western) US is in year 21 of a drought that rivals the worst of the last 1200 years, and there is no sign that the situation is likely to improve in the next century or so.
This is the basis of the plot of The Sea of Grass, a classic Spencer Tracy / Katherine Hepburn movie. Tracy is a rancher trying to make this argument to some optimistic farmers. They see it as self-serving, which they are right about, but so is Tracy. Tragedy ensues.
This. The western half of the US is going to become useless for farming in the next 50 years because all the aquifers are drying up and they take tens of thousands of years to recharge. Which is another way of saying that farming in the western US has only been possible because it harvested fossil water that's now almost gone.
This is not quite true. Most western US (well, say CA central valley back to the plains) agriculture has been made possible by large scale irrigation systems backed by the construction of substantial reservoirs. From time to time, it has been necessary to pull from groundwater, and from time to time, some farmers have done so even when it wasn't necessary. But in general, most of the agricultural expansion has been based on collected rainwater, distributed via huge systems. This system has worked "well" as long as the snow and the rain has kept coming (and flowing, rather than being absorbed into warm-weather baked soil). But the rain & snow are not making it into the rivers and reservoirs, and so this system has serious problems now.
By contrast, plains and some midwestern ag. has been drawing down the Ogallala aquifer at an insane rate, and that really is "fossil water".
Correct. I overgeneralized; the coastal western states might be able to continue some farming. Assuming cities like LA don't continue to appropriate more and more water that fell to the ground hundreds of miles away.
I just finished reading The Devil in the White City, which is about the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago and intercuts the story with serial killer H. H. Holmes’ crimes. What struck me most was how the event’s success was far from guaranteed, and it took a mix of national/civic pride, hubris, ambition, and luck to pull it off. We tend to think of massive engineering projects as guaranteed successes and scaling to fill their need, but I think we underestimate how much influence individual people have in pulling these projects off. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_in_the_White_City
I think with NYC it is the mismanaged part more so than underfunded. Limiting cities (and people) by having them live within their means forces better management. When that doesn’t work I feel the solution isn’t to pump more money in but rather to seek out alternatives. The market does that automatically - people will choose to live elsewhere to avoid ever higher local and state taxes, or to avoid an inadequate subway system. The country addresses the problem by decentralizing away from NYC, in your example. Of course in reality it doesn’t quite play out in a perfect idealistic way. The alternative is that the nation pump money in but also control NYC. Shenzhen may be a partially planned city but it isn’t also independent in the way American cities are.
> Limiting cities (and people) by having them live within their means forces better management.
New York State takes New York City's state taxes and gives a lot of them to a tiny number of upstate voters.
The US government takes New York City's federal taxes and gives a lot of them to do-nothing Republican states.
If New York City were allowed to keep all the state taxes it pays, it would not just "live within its means", it would run a huge surplus.
> the market
Here we are in 2021. "The market" is literally destroying our biosphere, and this only keeps accelerating. Surely no adult believes in the "Invisible Hand" by now?
The thing is we don't have the best part of a billion people living in a desolate backward, almost jobless countryside that needed to be funnelled into economically productive occupations over the last 30 years, as China has. Most of our populations are already urbanised. The majority of the people who would live in this city already live in cities.
We do have urban housing shortages and all sorts of demographic problems, I'm not saying a project like this is by necessity flawed, but the motivating dynamics for us are very different from what has been happening in China and SE Asia.
in this particular example (NYC subway), it is kinda hard to understand how that benefits people outside of the NYC metro area. I live in a much more distressed mid-atlantic city, and NYC already has one of the best public transit systems in the country. why would I be happy about my federal tax dollars subsidizing transit in one of the wealthiest US cities while my local public transit is barely off the ground?
NYC is about 8% of the US economy (and much more if you consider second order effects) - so their successes and failures are inevitably going to impact the entire country. At the very least, NYC (for example) being successful is something that I think should be of national interest not just local interest.
There are a lot of places like this in my opinion, where a large investment in a seemingly local thing would have national impact.
In my experience growing up (in Asia) almost every city that created by a government saying "let's build a new shiny city in the middle of nowhere" was an utter flop at getting people to move in.
People have families, livelihoods, businesses, kids that need schools, grandparents that need care, friends, and emotional attachments to cultural things like food. "Shiny new buildings" are great to look for an hour but it gets old quickly. After that you start missing that noodle shack at the end of the street, the park the kids play in, and the sights and sounds of a bustling street market. Homes being 3X the price just because they are newly built, and a lack of jobs for both parents, doesn't help make people want to move, either.
Interesting, because I hate ambition when it's used to do destructive things that only benefit the very rich.
> So I hope people see projects like this as points of national pride, even if they don't live there.
Why wouldn't this be a national _shame_? "We can't even keep our own citizens alive. We won't even try to protect you against climate change.
"Droughts are going to be a permanent feature of life for a lot of America, and our response to that is to spend billions on a city in the desert for the rich."
Real estate developers who can't find enough investors typically come up with some scam like TIF in order to extract funds from local governments with corrupt politicians. This project targets some area were the local government wouldn't have any capital to extract, so this wouldn't be an option. Maybe this billionaire can arrange for some federal-level corruption, like "opportunity zones".
"The cleanliness of Tokyo, the diversity of New York and the social services of Stockholm: Billionaire Marc Lore has outlined his vision for a 5-million-person "new city in America" and appointed a world-famous architect to design it"
"The mission of Telosa is to create a more equitable and sustainable future. That's our North Star."
I admire their ambition, but they are underestimating people's preference for inequity as long as they're on the right side of the graph. I don't know if they're asking the right questions and solving for the right problems... their web site hasn't moved beyond vaporware phase. https://cityoftelosa.com/
Framed like that it’s hard to imagine choosing one or the other and the answer might be intractable. A more interesting question might be: What would it take to align policies around housing for everyone with policies around increasing the prices of homes such that the two things are strongly positively correlated?
One might also question should land even be sold. Something like 20 or 30 year lease with re-evaluation of value at end might make more sense. Ofc, this would potentially lead to losing homes, but on other hand would allow redevelopment for increased density regularly.
Maybe replacing income taxes largely with property taxes? If the home is not seen as a source of tax free imputed income, then other things become more attractive, like investing in startups. It’s not a crazy idea. Switzerland taxes the imputed rental income on your own home.
I found a pretty interesting theory reading about Germany, since their property values are extremely stable:
'Local German officials, like local leaders everywhere, seek bigger budgets to provide more and better services to their constituents. What’s different about Germany is that the way to get bigger budgets is to increase local populations. And, as Professor Buettner says, “Ultimately, to get people, municipalities will need to support housing.”
The result is a system of incentives that is the opposite of “fiscal zoning”—the US practice of zoning land in ways that maximize local governments’ income and minimize their costs. In places with high sales taxes, such as Washington State, leaders zone more land for shopping centers. In places where residential property taxes are capped, such as California, they zone less land for homes and more for offices. In affluent suburbs, they often zone land for houses on large lots, excluding low-income people.
Maximizing property values is such a central concern of local government in the United States that Dartmouth economist William Fischel developed the notion into an entire political theory. His “homevoter hypothesis” holds that local governments are almost single-mindedly focused on maximizing real estate values, because homeowners typically vote their home values in local elections. German jurisdictions gain financially by maximizing population, not house values, and because renters outnumber homeowners in the country, homevoters are not the dominant electoral force in local German elections. Renters are.'
I'll vote for policies that have this affect, certainly. As a software developer I imagine my personal income would be lowered, but overall I still think I'd benefit from things like better healthcare and education provision, more accessible housing cost, not having to worry about my friends and family as much.
So essentially the former -- you will only do this if everybody else is forced to.
Which in itself is selfish, and against the greater good.
The marginal utility of $1 for someone in poverty vastly outweighs the benefit you will get from it. So you don't need to wait for anything to pass a vote or become popular opinion to selflessly advance the greater good. I know of very few socialists who take advantage of this opportunity, unfortunately.
I saw an election poster many years ago which I have acted on since, suggesting not to vote for yourself but for those less fortunate. Never forgot it.
As someone living in small town on world scale. I wonder if even trying to aim at 5 million is doing things wrong... Might it be that real sweet spot is somewhere lower than that?
I live in a city with a population around 1.3 million and it's a massive, sprawling place. Takes an hour to drive across, without traffic. Even 200-300k people could be enough, unless you really want to be attracting international tours, have major league sporting teams, etc.
> .. appointed a world-famous architect to design it"
LOL - this is ignorant ! there are two common Master's tracks in the field, Architecture i.e. the design of buildings and interior spaces, and Urban Planning i.e. the design of multiple buildings in a functional way. Anyone would hire an Urban Planner to design urban spaces, not an Architect.
source: 600 hours of working with Urban Planners in California
"Bjarke Ingels Group ... is a ... group of architects, designers and builders operating within the fields of architecture, urbanism, research and development."
They have 500+ staff and think it'd be a safe bet that they have urban planners in their existing mix. Their job opportunities page indicates they're hiring more.
I feel every attempt at community-by-design bears within it the seed of inhumane horror. Forget about the energy equation of building a city in a desert, what's the on-boarding process for prospective inhabitants ? Putting the price of accommodation sky-high to make sure everybody's in the right tax-bracket (or even earns enough to not pay taxes) ? Going through an interview process to only take in people with the "right vibes" ? How do you get teachers, garbage collectors, plumbers, nurses, all sorts of manual workers ? Park them in a ghetto like in Dubai, make ideological adhesion rather than money the filter (good luck with funding) or try to automate them away ?
One idea is an expansion of a law already on the books in many cities. When you create a new building / housing complex (which will be 100% in a new city), you require X% of units to be "affordable housing". I could see the city just increasing the required % and then giving tax credits to developers to offset the lost revenue to them. Given that this city would be built in stages, it will give them time to hone in on the desired percentage.
The point is that no matter how much housing you reserve to be "affordable housing", it will still be scarce and thus unaffordable to most. And this kind of well-intentioned red tape often ends up shrinking the supply of housing as a whole, which only makes it even less affordable.
The original question was "How do you get teachers, garbage collectors, plumbers, nurses, all sorts of manual workers ?" Those people all have some amount of money they can afford to pay their bills. Since a city needs some percentage of those workers, having housing they can afford is a big step towards attracting them.
But where is the line? Rampant development can completely alter the feel and culture of a neighborhood and city. It can take away from those things the existing residents enjoy. Sure more supply can accommodate more humans but they won’t necessarily be the same humans if current residents leave, and it won’t necessarily be the same place afterwards. Desirability (demand) creates scarcity but scarcity can also be desirable in itself for some things. At some threshold, the answer isn’t build more but locate people elsewhere and build a more distributed economy rather than a few concentrated powerful cities or states.
If "affordable housing" means "under market price", in practice AH means that it goes to the connected at that price. If they can, they resell at market later, if they can't, well, they just got subsidized housing.
Remember, housing prices in high-priced areas are driven by location, location, location, location, location (yes, two more locations than ordinary housing), so "it's small" doesn't translate to "the market price is low." (It's just less expensive than big.)
When the "market price" exceeds the cash price, the folks who get to buy are the ones who have some way to pay outside the system.
Some countries have what's called "buyer-funded development". Property buyers invest into shares of the development company which then uses the funds to buy land and build housing.
Investors get much cheaper prices, developers get easy liquidity. The downside is that you have to wait a year or two before moving in, and some theoretical risk. (Which can be managed with proper legislation.)
But the scheme works if you want affordable housing.
No, that scheme doesn't do what you think it does (and that scheme is occasionally done in the US, especially for luxury residences).
Suppose that the residences will be worth $1000 when built and it costs $500 to build them.
The pay-in-advance price will be around $1000 - interest.
The pay-in-advance price won't be significantly less than $1000-interest because the builder can borrow the $500, and sell for $1000 when built, repaying the bank and pocketing the rest.
The pay-in-advance price won't be significantly more than $1000-interest because if it is, folks who want to buy will wait and pay $1000 when the units are built (forcing the builder to borrow $500).
In other words, pay in advance doesn't result in below market prices.
If you add in some units which would sell for $500 but you're forcing the builder to sell them for $250, the question is "who gets them?" The answer to that question does not depend on when the payment is made.
In the US, the vast majority of the "below market" units will be split between friends of the local govt and the developer.
Yes, it would be nice if that wasn't true, but it is absurd to behave as if it isn't true (in the US).
With "buyer-funded development" the developer gets free liquidity, with no interest and no obligation to pay anything back. (Just an obligation to build something.) Obviously more profitable than having a bank take a cut for a loan.
The property is cheaper for the buyer because there are obvious risks involved for those in on the scheme at an early time. (And yes, it can be significantly cheaper, both because of the risk and due to opportunity cost while the property becomes attractive on the second-hand market.)
In practice I don’t think this works for an green field city. Filtering takes decades to occur. In the meantime new housing will always be more expensive than a low-income worker can afford. If the city wants service workers they’re going to have to subsidize their initial housing.
One alternative is to pay workers enough to afford housing. It’s surprising how rarely people mention that idea. It’s very likely thee d of “worker+housing shortage” which is just a very roundabout way to say “massive inflation.”
Probably becayse the inflation has been disproportionately in housing only. Less true now since covid of course, but housing is still a separate problem to be dealt with.
Raw cost of housing is essentially the cost of the land + the cost of the building.
In established cites the cost of land is high and developers tend to build expensive buildings on that land. Low-income workers than move to older buildings as they're cheaper (expensive land, cheap building).
In a new greenfield city the land will be very cheap (for whoever established the city) so that can keep the cost of housing down (cheap land, expensive building).
If there are more houses built than people who want to live in the city, housing will be affordable for everybody, because an unhoused worker will just buy the vacant unit next door for less if a developer tries to gouge them.
The reason new construction never works like this is because developers only build housing when there's already a severe shortage of housing in the metro area. They respond to price signals, and the price only starts going up when you have multiple bidders bidding for the same home. And why wouldn't they? If they built housing in places that already had an abundance of housing, they're making an economically foolish choice and will go bankrupt. When you observe that developers never build affordable housing, you're observing the effect of selection bias: in a region where there are enough houses for everyone and hence they're affordable to the average worker, developers aren't going to build even more new houses.
You can observe this throughout the Rust Belt: there are more homes than people, so prices are very affordable, but developers would need to be insane to build even more houses (outside of specific neighborhoods or suburbs that are locally hot). Also when you get a macroeconomic crash in the middle of a housing boom: the houses get completed, they sell for dimes on the dollar, but nobody has jobs anymore so they can't afford to buy them,
The problem is "affordable housing" isnt actually affordable for many. I qualify for it in the city I live in, and despite working full time for significantly above minimum wage, the rent on a 1bd apartment through this program would be about 75% of my take-home income.
Would you be willing to state what city this is and your profession? I think it would go a long way towards showing how real this problem is to skeptics.
Only in the late twentieth century has a private 1br apartment for single people become something people feel they're entitled to.
I've been in your situation, and you know what I did? I got a roommate. Really cuts on costs, and getting married makes the situation permanent.
At no time in history have the poorest been able to afford one bedroom apartments alone. Remember the stories of huge families crammed into apartments from 100 years ago? The fact that you only need one roommate instead of eleven to get by is progress.
Note that this strategy is a bit regressive. The law usually only applies to multi unit housing, and exempts single family housing. But those who live in single family housing are usually are richer than those in multi unit housing, so this essentially makes housing more expensive and difficult to build for the lower income people.
What's more did any of these planned communities ever pan out? There were plenty projects started in the 20th century alone. Guess Walt Disney's Epcot is the most well known failure.
There are a bunch of planned new towns in the UK from the 20th century, as well as 'model' factory villages from the 19th. Some of them are really nice, some less so. Milton Keynes is the most interesting, I think. Well loved by the people who live there, mocked by those who don't, still successfully growing.
So... How Safe Is Savannah Really?
Savannah is a reasonably unsafe city.
The crime index ranges from medium to high.
The main problems here are robberies and assaults, car theft and theft, vandalism, violent crime, and drug problems.
Nevertheless, the historic Savannah district is entirely safe for exploring the area day and night.
Better to be in a company than one.
Outside the historical site, district crime is more common.
When studying a historical area, remember that this is a tourist area, and there will always be those who hunt tourists – be careful, but especially at night.
One still needs to follow the dictates of common sense to avoid being victimized.
Don’t walk around alone at night, particularly in unfamiliar neighborhoods.
Lock vehicles and keep valuables out of sight.
For cars, perhaps you need to be especially careful – the number of car thefts and hacks is enormous.
Be sure to close the car and park in a guarded parking lot to avoid problems.
Never leave anything in the car, not even trinkets.
Do not get involved in any relationship with drug dealers; drugs are illegal here. Nevertheless, there are many who wish to offer or sell them to you.
Keep an eye on your drink at the bar – there have been times when strangers added opiates to rob a victim.
Those tips would be written about almost every city in almost every country.
We thought Savannah (in the context of the planned area being discussed) was great. The unique little garden squares are probably the first thing I'd replicate were I designing a new city.
depends what you mean by "pan out". columbia, md [0] is a fairly successful planned community. I personally wouldn't want to live there, but it's a fine place to live if you enjoy life in the suburbs.
The Palo Verde Generating Station is a nuclear power plant located near Tonopah, in western Arizona. It is located about 72 km due west of downtown Phoenix, Arizona, and it is located near the Gila River, which is dry save for the rainy season in late summer.
The power plant evaporates the water from the treated sewage from several nearby cities and towns to provide the cooling of the steam that it produces.
Water is the biggest challenge. All the city's waste water will need to be recycled. That's doable, but to compensate for evaporation they might also need to pipe in water from coastal desalination plants if they cannot harvest enough rain. That's a lot harder.
I'd be concerned about their ability to handle sewage which requires water for processing. Burj Khalifa has to have its sewage trucked out daily because nobody bothered to plan for the load on the Dubai infrastructure.
The idea is ambitious but incredibly dystopian because it completely excludes conflicts arising from our innate differences. It's literally a real-world imitation of the Brave New World plot.
I feel like deserts are instinctively slept on. It’s always sunny, nice and hot, low humidity, great for solar energy and clean. The only problem is water and the plan seems to address that issue.
That initial stage isn't very promising. 50000 people on 1500 acres is only about 30 dwellings per acre, not very impressive. You can achieve that density with traditional row houses.
Why would anyone move there? You need work to attract workers. Why would any company move/start there?
Middle of the desert smh. Why not build it underwater and get rid of all the pesky ethical/moral laws, allow any biotech research and free experimentation on humans?
Speak for yourself. Middle of the desert is amazing given there is a source of water (aquifer, desalination plant etc.). Deserts are clean, nice and hot year round, not humid and extremely conducive to solar energy.
Building human-comfortable areas in a desert is quite environmentally friendly, given a source of water (and I don't want to brush this one under the rug; it's actually fairly difficult).
Things about a desert that make energy use lower:
- Evaporative cooling can decrease cooling needs. Using a fan or an evaporative cooler is much more feasible in dry environments.
- Hot days and cool nights mean it's fairly simple to store thermal energy and use that for cooking, water heating, area heating, and/or clothes drying (if you want to actively heat your clothes) at night
- Lots of sun, so solar energy is highly viable. That means lighting can be done through solar energy.
- If the area is windy, fairly easy to ventilate homes just through outdoor wind and maybe an E/HRV if necessary
High humidity areas are really difficult to cool because after a certain Relative Humidity level in the air, fans just stop being effective due to evaporative cooling being insufficient. ACs were originally invented as a method of dehumidification. That said, growing crops in these environments can be a challenge (you can certainly grow aeroponically in greenhouses, but that's energy use, so the numbers need to be crunched) and using transport to fetch water and crops could make the whole project non-viable. There is potential for using solar to desalinate but the water itself needs to come from somewhere.
What is viability of storing thermal energy for cooking? Out-side very few specific scenarios like sous-vide proteins, the temperatures generally used are too high for efficient energy transfer.
Sous-vide (and heating the water through solar energy) is indeed one way to do it. Another way in a sunny area:
Try to grab a solar parabolic dish (an example is the Haines Cooker [1]) and place something with a large thermal mass inside. An example of this is firebrick, but regular brick will do (regular brick has a lower heat capacity). Firebrick has a heat capacity [2] of 0.5 MWh / m^3. As the sun sets, put something with high thermal conductivity atop the heated firebricks, and use that to cook. A practical item that works is a cast iron pot or grill.
Another way to cook like this is to use thermal cookers ([3], [4]). Thermal cookers work by wrapping a pot with a large layer of insulation, keeping the food cooking over time. They're popular in East Asia to make porridges (congee) and slow-boiled vegetable/meat dishes (nabe). If you can make your pot come to a boil in something like a Haines cooker and plop the pot inside the insulated chamber, then you can have a hot meal ready by evening.
Of course the most "comfortable" way to cook on clean energy would probably be to store the excess generated solar energy in large batteries and discharge through an induction stove or into a modern PID-based slow/pressure cooker (like the Instant Pot). You're dealing with the losses in battery storage and energy transmission, but that allows people to cook with the "flow" that they expect (e.g. turn a knob and wait for your burner to come to temperature.) There's also a world of biomass stoves out there but if there's enough surplus solar, it's best to stick to an induction stove powered through solar.
It's fun to play sim-city, but if you don't have a plan for what new industries your new city is going to be supporting you're not attracting new residents.
Shenzhen and Dubai are key port cities, making them global hotspots for the flow of wealth and goods long before they became the modern cities of today. A city in the desert has none of those foundational benefits.
Definitely neither. The proposal here is a joke, only intended to grab money from investors - make some small efforts and to then run away with the money.
And Cities Skylines has the large issue of separating housing, work (not really industrial, that belongs separated) and commercial parts; just like the american suburb.
I'm very curious, have there ever been any "cities from the ground up" projects that don't turn out to be total shit that end up just reflecting the urban planning fallacies of the day? (Looking at you, Brasilia)
I mean, all of the cities that are most "livable" in my mind are old cities that were designed before the car and thus have enough density and public transportation to make things both close and also the kind of place where it's fun to just walk around.
These "master planned cities" always end up like houses that are designed with all these pretty rooms that nobody actually uses.
You'll have to use your own judgement on a case by case basis if they were successful or not and if they meet your personal definition of master planned.
Agreed that the most liveable cities really exist already, and they are all older, walkable, and predate cars. These new ecotechnic utopian proposals fetishize efficiency and convenience. They also completely fail to capture what makes a city great.
It's sad, because in the US, there are actually a lot of good templates for new cities, designed for growth on the outset, that strike a balance between dense and verdant. The oldest part of places like Savannah, Charleston, New Orleans, smaller college towns, streetcar suburbs, ... It's so weird that when new suburbs are built, why they are not just straight up copying those 19th century templates.
I lived in Port Sunlight in the UK. It's delightful - I don't think it really has or had any planning or social issues. For the first few years there weren't any pubs due to the temperance politics of the founder, but it does now.
Almere and Lelystad come to mind, built from the 70ies onwards in the Netherlands on land reclaimed from the sea. They’re relatively small but still impressive to me, with decent public transport and excellent biking infrastructure. Of course many people prefer older cities with more ‘character’ but if it’s your thing the architecture really is quite nice.
Dutch urbanism is good but it requires a lot of trust in the government. Urbanists make top down plans, and then work together with property developers to create neighbourhoods. These property developers have to follow a lot of rules and guidelines and there are municipal committees that check whether the architecture is good enough for example. Top down urbanism is often seen as a recipe for disaster, but it seems to work there. I guess there are enough feedback loops in the system so that urbanists get a clue about what people like and implement that. For example, people like living close to water so constructing a neighbourhood often coincides with creating lots of canals and ponds.
You can't have the cleaniless of Tokyo in a US city unless you're willing to harshly punish people - Singapore style - for transgressions. That won't stand up legally in terms of civil rights. You have to entirely remake the culture to get that outcome, and that's not going to happen. Urban US culture is largely mediocre. The last thing the US needs is another Las Vegas, building another major US city in the desert is moronic.
In general the US does not need more cities. The US can't operate its existing cities properly. It's embarrassing how disgusting and violent most US cities are. Culturally the US should figure out how to run the cities it has before building new ones. To say nothing of the fact that the US has no need of new mega cities from a practical standpoint, we're facing population decline or stagnation, not a population boom.
Cities are cultural extensions of the nations they reside in, along with regional influences. It's highly predictable what you'll get out of another city built in the US. Let's focus $400 billion on public transportation improvements for our existing cities, including rail and a lot more electric buses.
Yeah, when you start thinking about what you could do for infrastructure in existing cities for $400B then you start realising what a bad idea this project is.
Singapore doesn’t harshly punish to maintain its level of cleanliness. There is plenty of littering. They just have a massive army of cheap foreign labor to constantly clean.
There's still plenty of water in the SW for residential purposes. At least 70% of the water use is for commercial agriculture, an idea hatched in the early 20th century after two of the wettest decades in the last 1200 years. People living in this part of the world is not so much of an issue; growing lots of crops (especially high-water-use ones like alfalfa, rice, almonds) is.
West of the Mississippi, this is generally correct. The ability to lease/transfer water rights varies state by state. In NM where I live, it is extremely difficult.
I am not really educated about how things are going now, but, when I was attending school, they used Brasilia[0], as an example of a "great idea that never made it." I have also read about the giant Chinese "ghost cities."
I think that having a reason to be there, is 99% of the incentive to build a city.
There's a reason that almost every city is on a body of water.
The Chinese ghost city stories were largely unfounded. There was a supposed 'ghost city' near my wife's hometown in China, but it's now a thriving city full of people. The thing is building and kickstarting something like that takes time. The facades and roads go up first, but it takes months to get all the homes made liveable and get the basic utilities up and running, then ramp up the population.
I assume a major issue with Brasilia and co are that they are designed at car scale. I suspect if you designed without cars as a key factor, you'd immediately have a better chance of creating a more enjoyable place?
"Build it and they will come" is fascinating but hasn't even worked for Dubai, and the Emirates have poured into Dubai way more than 400B since they decided that they'd open themselves up to the world.
Dubai development started in 1980s.
Still today Dubai is made up of Westeners who made money in their home country and they relocated there blinded by the lights and the promise of an "endless summer" (matter of fact it gets chilly in winter and I hope you like 120F on the regular during the summer).
A city spurs up, you can't just build it and hope that people will come, it's too big of a project.
Me thinks this is a PR move to get his name out there and use as a hook to get some fundraising for some more sensible project.
What are you on about? More than 50% of Dubai is Indians and Pakistanis and not in a second class citizen way you’re imagining. Most businesses, LEO, administration are south Asians. Not sure why you’re latching on to the small minority of westerners that live there.
It's exciting to see a new ambitious project like this. America definitely needs new cities to help with housing abd environmental problems. I have a few concerns though:
Location: We need new cities in there north add climate change ramps up. Desert doesn't sound great. And new cities need to be built in low population states to balance out the Senate. Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, WV would be best. Otherwise the country continues to become more dysfunctional. Up north there's underutilized Amtrak lines too.
Local Transportation: autonomous cars are cool, but are still space inefficient compare to mass transit. A new city is an amazing opportunity to build mass transit more cheaply with cut-and-cover tunnels. You can also plan for commercial transportation with delivery tunnels and below ground docks. These are the kinds of things you can't easily add to an existing city and should be the focus.
Regional Transportation: Where's the airport and how does it connect to the city? Will there be a central train station? How do carless residents reach regional attractions like state/national parks and recreation areas?
Parks: It's nearly impossible to add large parks to a new city, but they immensely improve quality of life. A new city should be designed around large central parks and neighborhood parks. You also need to have a green belt surrounding the city to prevent sprawl.
Density: SF density isn't it. SF is mostly a suburb west of Van Ness. Shoot for Paris.
Industry: People need jobs. Where are the light industrial areas and how do they integrate with the city so they're not blighted pollution centers? Will they be transit connected so people don't need cars?
Why not pick an old Rust Belt town, plane it smooth, and start over?
If you boost density substantially, you might only need a portion of the current land area (simplifying the acquisition and clearing process).
Maybe you can even use the existing population base to help bootstrap the economy. I could see making some sort of offer for people to sign over their land (with decrepit buildings and worn-out infrastructure) for highly subsidized or free units in the newly built city.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] thread- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ghost_towns_in_the_Uni...
- https://www.businessinsider.com/10-american-cities-that-are-...
It's no wonder why this project is pursuing a "clean slate" approach.
"Now, he just needs somewhere to build it -- and $400 billion in funding"
One thing I've noticed with US politics is that things tend to be viewed as local issues instead of national ones. For example, NYC's public transit is a key part of the US's financial engine, but still chronically underfunded and mismanaged, and New York's problem to deal with. So I hope people see projects like this as points of national pride, even if they don't live there.
I think we need to stop mindlessly expand roads, and reconsider our infrastructure priority before we can start doing massive megaprojects.
I've always wondered why America has not built many more cities with all that available land.
This is unlike China where cities were built en masse to house migrants from rural areas. America just doesn't have the same volume of workers.
America is still pretty empty.
Consider the location of the 100th meridian as it somewhat bisects the continent. West of that line, you cannot really grow anything without irrigation. East of that line, and to some extent there's enough rainfall that stuff will grow on its own, albeit not optimally.
Most the cheap available land you will find in the US is west of the 100th meridian, and is dry largely inorganic dirt.
As for the cities, you may not be aware of this, but the southwest (and perhaps western) US is in year 21 of a drought that rivals the worst of the last 1200 years, and there is no sign that the situation is likely to improve in the next century or so.
By contrast, plains and some midwestern ag. has been drawing down the Ogallala aquifer at an insane rate, and that really is "fossil water".
I'd be interested in moving there, depending. I love the idea.
I moved my company to a new city "GIFT city" in India. It's awesome.
New York State takes New York City's state taxes and gives a lot of them to a tiny number of upstate voters.
The US government takes New York City's federal taxes and gives a lot of them to do-nothing Republican states.
If New York City were allowed to keep all the state taxes it pays, it would not just "live within its means", it would run a huge surplus.
> the market
Here we are in 2021. "The market" is literally destroying our biosphere, and this only keeps accelerating. Surely no adult believes in the "Invisible Hand" by now?
We do have urban housing shortages and all sorts of demographic problems, I'm not saying a project like this is by necessity flawed, but the motivating dynamics for us are very different from what has been happening in China and SE Asia.
How do you explain that things like this are still beneficial to him? That a rising tide lifts all boats?
There are a lot of places like this in my opinion, where a large investment in a seemingly local thing would have national impact.
People have families, livelihoods, businesses, kids that need schools, grandparents that need care, friends, and emotional attachments to cultural things like food. "Shiny new buildings" are great to look for an hour but it gets old quickly. After that you start missing that noodle shack at the end of the street, the park the kids play in, and the sights and sounds of a bustling street market. Homes being 3X the price just because they are newly built, and a lack of jobs for both parents, doesn't help make people want to move, either.
> So I hope people see projects like this as points of national pride, even if they don't live there.
Why wouldn't this be a national _shame_? "We can't even keep our own citizens alive. We won't even try to protect you against climate change.
"Droughts are going to be a permanent feature of life for a lot of America, and our response to that is to spend billions on a city in the desert for the rich."
I'd love to know more about this.
Especially as we are continually learning more about our ability to estimate how much water is available to us:
https://www.kuer.org/health-science-environment/2021-02-09/m...
"The mission of Telosa is to create a more equitable and sustainable future. That's our North Star."
I admire their ambition, but they are underestimating people's preference for inequity as long as they're on the right side of the graph. I don't know if they're asking the right questions and solving for the right problems... their web site hasn't moved beyond vaporware phase. https://cityoftelosa.com/
1. https://www.credit-suisse.com/articles/private-banking/2018/...
Anyway, your proposal still run into the issue of acquiring political will. It may work after it's implemented, but not before it.
'Local German officials, like local leaders everywhere, seek bigger budgets to provide more and better services to their constituents. What’s different about Germany is that the way to get bigger budgets is to increase local populations. And, as Professor Buettner says, “Ultimately, to get people, municipalities will need to support housing.”
The result is a system of incentives that is the opposite of “fiscal zoning”—the US practice of zoning land in ways that maximize local governments’ income and minimize their costs. In places with high sales taxes, such as Washington State, leaders zone more land for shopping centers. In places where residential property taxes are capped, such as California, they zone less land for homes and more for offices. In affluent suburbs, they often zone land for houses on large lots, excluding low-income people.
Maximizing property values is such a central concern of local government in the United States that Dartmouth economist William Fischel developed the notion into an entire political theory. His “homevoter hypothesis” holds that local governments are almost single-mindedly focused on maximizing real estate values, because homeowners typically vote their home values in local elections. German jurisdictions gain financially by maximizing population, not house values, and because renters outnumber homeowners in the country, homevoters are not the dominant electoral force in local German elections. Renters are.'
https://www.sightline.org/2021/05/27/yes-other-countries-do-...
Which in itself is selfish, and against the greater good.
The marginal utility of $1 for someone in poverty vastly outweighs the benefit you will get from it. So you don't need to wait for anything to pass a vote or become popular opinion to selflessly advance the greater good. I know of very few socialists who take advantage of this opportunity, unfortunately.
Radically rewiring human nature.
LOL - this is ignorant ! there are two common Master's tracks in the field, Architecture i.e. the design of buildings and interior spaces, and Urban Planning i.e. the design of multiple buildings in a functional way. Anyone would hire an Urban Planner to design urban spaces, not an Architect.
source: 600 hours of working with Urban Planners in California
They have 500+ staff and think it'd be a safe bet that they have urban planners in their existing mix. Their job opportunities page indicates they're hiring more.
Also, I think penalizing vacant properties would also be a good idea.
We care more about the number of people housed, not merely just people who are housed who can afford their bills.
Remember, housing prices in high-priced areas are driven by location, location, location, location, location (yes, two more locations than ordinary housing), so "it's small" doesn't translate to "the market price is low." (It's just less expensive than big.)
When the "market price" exceeds the cash price, the folks who get to buy are the ones who have some way to pay outside the system.
Investors get much cheaper prices, developers get easy liquidity. The downside is that you have to wait a year or two before moving in, and some theoretical risk. (Which can be managed with proper legislation.)
But the scheme works if you want affordable housing.
Suppose that the residences will be worth $1000 when built and it costs $500 to build them.
The pay-in-advance price will be around $1000 - interest.
The pay-in-advance price won't be significantly less than $1000-interest because the builder can borrow the $500, and sell for $1000 when built, repaying the bank and pocketing the rest.
The pay-in-advance price won't be significantly more than $1000-interest because if it is, folks who want to buy will wait and pay $1000 when the units are built (forcing the builder to borrow $500).
In other words, pay in advance doesn't result in below market prices.
If you add in some units which would sell for $500 but you're forcing the builder to sell them for $250, the question is "who gets them?" The answer to that question does not depend on when the payment is made.
In the US, the vast majority of the "below market" units will be split between friends of the local govt and the developer.
Yes, it would be nice if that wasn't true, but it is absurd to behave as if it isn't true (in the US).
With "buyer-funded development" the developer gets free liquidity, with no interest and no obligation to pay anything back. (Just an obligation to build something.) Obviously more profitable than having a bank take a cut for a loan.
The property is cheaper for the buyer because there are obvious risks involved for those in on the scheme at an early time. (And yes, it can be significantly cheaper, both because of the risk and due to opportunity cost while the property becomes attractive on the second-hand market.)
Raw cost of housing is essentially the cost of the land + the cost of the building.
In established cites the cost of land is high and developers tend to build expensive buildings on that land. Low-income workers than move to older buildings as they're cheaper (expensive land, cheap building).
In a new greenfield city the land will be very cheap (for whoever established the city) so that can keep the cost of housing down (cheap land, expensive building).
The reason new construction never works like this is because developers only build housing when there's already a severe shortage of housing in the metro area. They respond to price signals, and the price only starts going up when you have multiple bidders bidding for the same home. And why wouldn't they? If they built housing in places that already had an abundance of housing, they're making an economically foolish choice and will go bankrupt. When you observe that developers never build affordable housing, you're observing the effect of selection bias: in a region where there are enough houses for everyone and hence they're affordable to the average worker, developers aren't going to build even more new houses.
You can observe this throughout the Rust Belt: there are more homes than people, so prices are very affordable, but developers would need to be insane to build even more houses (outside of specific neighborhoods or suburbs that are locally hot). Also when you get a macroeconomic crash in the middle of a housing boom: the houses get completed, they sell for dimes on the dollar, but nobody has jobs anymore so they can't afford to buy them,
I've been in your situation, and you know what I did? I got a roommate. Really cuts on costs, and getting married makes the situation permanent.
At no time in history have the poorest been able to afford one bedroom apartments alone. Remember the stories of huge families crammed into apartments from 100 years ago? The fact that you only need one roommate instead of eleven to get by is progress.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oglethorpe_Plan
We thought Savannah (in the context of the planned area being discussed) was great. The unique little garden squares are probably the first thing I'd replicate were I designing a new city.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia,_Maryland
Solar and nuclear work great in deserts.
I'd be more concerned about water.
The power plant evaporates the water from the treated sewage from several nearby cities and towns to provide the cooling of the steam that it produces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajneeshpuram?wprov=sfla1
Not closely related to the article but a very odd story.
Middle of the desert smh. Why not build it underwater and get rid of all the pesky ethical/moral laws, allow any biotech research and free experimentation on humans?
Things about a desert that make energy use lower:
- Evaporative cooling can decrease cooling needs. Using a fan or an evaporative cooler is much more feasible in dry environments.
- Hot days and cool nights mean it's fairly simple to store thermal energy and use that for cooking, water heating, area heating, and/or clothes drying (if you want to actively heat your clothes) at night
- Lots of sun, so solar energy is highly viable. That means lighting can be done through solar energy.
- If the area is windy, fairly easy to ventilate homes just through outdoor wind and maybe an E/HRV if necessary
High humidity areas are really difficult to cool because after a certain Relative Humidity level in the air, fans just stop being effective due to evaporative cooling being insufficient. ACs were originally invented as a method of dehumidification. That said, growing crops in these environments can be a challenge (you can certainly grow aeroponically in greenhouses, but that's energy use, so the numbers need to be crunched) and using transport to fetch water and crops could make the whole project non-viable. There is potential for using solar to desalinate but the water itself needs to come from somewhere.
Try to grab a solar parabolic dish (an example is the Haines Cooker [1]) and place something with a large thermal mass inside. An example of this is firebrick, but regular brick will do (regular brick has a lower heat capacity). Firebrick has a heat capacity [2] of 0.5 MWh / m^3. As the sun sets, put something with high thermal conductivity atop the heated firebricks, and use that to cook. A practical item that works is a cast iron pot or grill.
Another way to cook like this is to use thermal cookers ([3], [4]). Thermal cookers work by wrapping a pot with a large layer of insulation, keeping the food cooking over time. They're popular in East Asia to make porridges (congee) and slow-boiled vegetable/meat dishes (nabe). If you can make your pot come to a boil in something like a Haines cooker and plop the pot inside the insulated chamber, then you can have a hot meal ready by evening.
Of course the most "comfortable" way to cook on clean energy would probably be to store the excess generated solar energy in large batteries and discharge through an induction stove or into a modern PID-based slow/pressure cooker (like the Instant Pot). You're dealing with the losses in battery storage and energy transmission, but that allows people to cook with the "flow" that they expect (e.g. turn a knob and wait for your burner to come to temperature.) There's also a world of biomass stoves out there but if there's enough surplus solar, it's best to stick to an induction stove powered through solar.
[1]: https://hainessolarcookers.com
[2]: https://inldigitallibrary.inl.gov/sites/sti/sti/Sort_8882.pd...
[3]: https://www.wonderbagworld.com/
[4]: https://www.thermos.com.sg/thermos/products/shuttle-chef/tcr...
It's fun to play sim-city, but if you don't have a plan for what new industries your new city is going to be supporting you're not attracting new residents.
Look at Brasilia for example. I dont see the desert aspect, with what water?
Although the project quotes problems with capitalism, they intend to maintain safe distance from socialist states.
- A billionaire "with a vision"
- Someone who has spent more than 10k hours playing Cities: Skylines
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120825041721/http://www.shimz....
I mean, all of the cities that are most "livable" in my mind are old cities that were designed before the car and thus have enough density and public transportation to make things both close and also the kind of place where it's fun to just walk around.
These "master planned cities" always end up like houses that are designed with all these pretty rooms that nobody actually uses.
It also has a decent rundown of modern American ones (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_community#Modern_plann...).
You'll have to use your own judgement on a case by case basis if they were successful or not and if they meet your personal definition of master planned.
But I found the lists a very interesting read.
I have heard that Dubai does not have street names, so giving directions and arranging deliveries can be… challenging. Is this statement accurate?
>They were the will of powerful, bright and respected people.
Not the first adjectives I'd use to describe imperialists, colonialists and warlords personally.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daybreak_(community)
It's sad, because in the US, there are actually a lot of good templates for new cities, designed for growth on the outset, that strike a balance between dense and verdant. The oldest part of places like Savannah, Charleston, New Orleans, smaller college towns, streetcar suburbs, ... It's so weird that when new suburbs are built, why they are not just straight up copying those 19th century templates.
The English did planned villages really well.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poundbury [2]: https://robskinner.net/2020/09/03/poundbury-prince-charles-m...
Irvine, California (current population, 300,000) was developed by a private corporation.
Development started in the 1960s.
Dutch urbanism is good but it requires a lot of trust in the government. Urbanists make top down plans, and then work together with property developers to create neighbourhoods. These property developers have to follow a lot of rules and guidelines and there are municipal committees that check whether the architecture is good enough for example. Top down urbanism is often seen as a recipe for disaster, but it seems to work there. I guess there are enough feedback loops in the system so that urbanists get a clue about what people like and implement that. For example, people like living close to water so constructing a neighbourhood often coincides with creating lots of canals and ponds.
In general the US does not need more cities. The US can't operate its existing cities properly. It's embarrassing how disgusting and violent most US cities are. Culturally the US should figure out how to run the cities it has before building new ones. To say nothing of the fact that the US has no need of new mega cities from a practical standpoint, we're facing population decline or stagnation, not a population boom.
Cities are cultural extensions of the nations they reside in, along with regional influences. It's highly predictable what you'll get out of another city built in the US. Let's focus $400 billion on public transportation improvements for our existing cities, including rail and a lot more electric buses.
That region is wildly over-populated for the amount of water available.
I think that having a reason to be there, is 99% of the incentive to build a city.
There's a reason that almost every city is on a body of water.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bras%C3%ADlia
That makes perfect sense.
Dubai development started in 1980s.
Still today Dubai is made up of Westeners who made money in their home country and they relocated there blinded by the lights and the promise of an "endless summer" (matter of fact it gets chilly in winter and I hope you like 120F on the regular during the summer).
A city spurs up, you can't just build it and hope that people will come, it's too big of a project.
Me thinks this is a PR move to get his name out there and use as a hook to get some fundraising for some more sensible project.
Location: We need new cities in there north add climate change ramps up. Desert doesn't sound great. And new cities need to be built in low population states to balance out the Senate. Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, WV would be best. Otherwise the country continues to become more dysfunctional. Up north there's underutilized Amtrak lines too.
Local Transportation: autonomous cars are cool, but are still space inefficient compare to mass transit. A new city is an amazing opportunity to build mass transit more cheaply with cut-and-cover tunnels. You can also plan for commercial transportation with delivery tunnels and below ground docks. These are the kinds of things you can't easily add to an existing city and should be the focus.
Regional Transportation: Where's the airport and how does it connect to the city? Will there be a central train station? How do carless residents reach regional attractions like state/national parks and recreation areas?
Parks: It's nearly impossible to add large parks to a new city, but they immensely improve quality of life. A new city should be designed around large central parks and neighborhood parks. You also need to have a green belt surrounding the city to prevent sprawl.
Density: SF density isn't it. SF is mostly a suburb west of Van Ness. Shoot for Paris.
Industry: People need jobs. Where are the light industrial areas and how do they integrate with the city so they're not blighted pollution centers? Will they be transit connected so people don't need cars?
If you boost density substantially, you might only need a portion of the current land area (simplifying the acquisition and clearing process).
Maybe you can even use the existing population base to help bootstrap the economy. I could see making some sort of offer for people to sign over their land (with decrepit buildings and worn-out infrastructure) for highly subsidized or free units in the newly built city.