You can build as many as you want, but how are you going to get people to move there?
There’s already lots of very affordable housing in the US. It just isn’t where anybody wants to live.
Hey I’m with you Mr. Natural. Go yell at the bosses.
It smells so bad down there from all the dead fish in the Saltón Sea. Toxic dust everywhere.
Nobody lives in big cities anymore; they’re too crowded.
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I’ve had zero energy the last two days. I know it’s stupid, and this never happened when I was younger, but I think my internal clock is rebelling against the real clock.
God damn, it was even dumber than I imagined, even after taking your warning into account.
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Not too mention new cities actually are created not infrequently.
I sometimes consider the possibility of building new cities from scratch between Chicago and Cleveland that would justify a Midwestern version of the Acela corridor with high speed rail.
When I first read this, I mistakenly removed the “l” in clock.
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Aaaaaaand this is why that shit should be illegal.
I don’t know, man, starting a net negative pyramid scheme where you get rich and other people hold the bag is the American Dream for the 21st century. Why should hedge fund managers have all the fun? I say let the disadvantaged women of color rip off people too.
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It’s not even that new cities are necessarily a bad idea, it’s that the premise of the article is that people are wrong blinded by “capitalist realism” when they dismiss the idea of new cities. But normally an article with that premise would go on to talk about why new cities are actually feasible. Instead, we get:
The problem is that building a new city from scratch requires a certain level of central economic planning of the kind associated with Soviet Communism and thus ideologically verboten.
Is the problem with adopting Soviet-style command economy principles that it’s ideologically verboten? Or is the reason it’s ideologically verboten that it was a disastrous failure in the Soviet Union? How do we avoid those failures?
Development of places should be democratic, and building new cities in California will be an opportunity to figure out how to balance efficient central planning with broad public input and a design that gives people what they want rather than what planners or architects assume that they want.
Ah, we’ll have an opportunity to figure it out! Where will the city go? TBD, but " perhaps in the largely uninhabited northern third of the state. (Taking care to avoid the redwood forests, of course.)" Why are there no large cities in the northern part of California? Eh, probably capitalist realism. I’m sure there are lots of navigable rivers and water and it’s not full of giant mountains. Another opportunity to figure stuff out!
What’s striking is that even the arguments he uses to support his idea, are usually arguments against it. Here are the other examples of “new cities” he brings up:
- “When China needs new places for people to live, they just build a new city. They’ve built 600 of them since 1949.” These are, of course, China’s ghost cities that no one wants to live in.
- T"hese megaprojects even occur in poorer countries in the developing world—although, as Katie Fernelius documents in a report on a privatized city rising in Nigeria, some of these places serve dubious interests." Well, I guess we’ll just have to avoid those dubious interests.
- “In Britain, after World War II, new towns were built to relieve urban overcrowding. (I was actually born in one of these.) Many were ugly, because everything built in the ‘50s and ‘60s was ugly. But the idea was sound.” Ah.
- “Of course, some American oligarchs are so rich that they talk of single-handedly funding the building of their dream cities. But (1) these projects are almost certainly never going to happen, because most billionaires are full of shit, and (2) if they do happen, the resulting cities will be dystopian. (See, e.g., the Saudi crown prince’s pet project NEOM.)”
- “I’ve previously written about the Garden City movement, which produced one of the loveliest places in Britain, Welwyn Garden City. It was a planned city, but it was planned thoughtfully and is full of lush green spaces.” A quick visit shows us that: (1) this is not really a city, it’s just an exurb of London with 50k population, and (2) “loveliest place in Britain” is not the high praise you might initially take it for:
To tie it all together:
There is something a bit utopian about the idea of new cities. They give the opportunity to create something totally different, something that embodies our conception of how things ought to be, which may depart substantially from how they are now. Any such proposal forces us to ask questions like: “In what way does the ideal city differ from 21st century Los Angeles?” The answer will likely be that it differs in many ways, and so the very act of building a new city requires the revolutionary rethinking of the status quo.
This, I think, partly explains why the idea is completely “off the table” even though it makes perfect sense. It should be that the idea of razing historic neighborhoods and cramming ever more people into the confines of San Francisco sounds ridiculous. Instead, for some reason, it is the much more rational idea of building new cities that has slipped out of the realm of the conceivable.
The “revolutionary rethinking of the status quo” is “a bit utopian,” but it’s “much more rational” than demolishing single-family houses and building apartment buildings.
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Toledo. You invented Toledo.
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We need more Toledos.
Late sunrises fuck my head up.
Abolish DST.
You can buy the current one for about $3.50.
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I do think the most persuasive version of “hey let’s build a bunch of cities” isn’t building ghost city boondoggles in the desert in California, it’s showering Federal money on places like Toledo (or Cleveland or whatever) to create a bunch of attractive jobs for people that currently only want the jobs they have in NY and LA and other coastal elitist cities. Basically it’s a form of homesteading for dead urban centers. I am pretty sure this would actually work in theory if there was a political will to, like, double the size of the Federal government.
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Really, I think there have been some forms of this proposed by moving certain important federal agencies to the Midwest or other struggling areas.