Mini Exasperation #15
Rich people daydream of building a modern Ur. U r dumb to believe them.
Article link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/business/land-purchases-solano-county.html
There’s an adage that says: “Show me an idiot and I’ll find you a bigger idiot,” and that’s not a real saying because I just made it up. But if you look from right to left there are four of the “smartest” men in America who want to sell you a bridge. But if you believe in the modern Ur, turn your screen off, and you’ve found the biggest idiot looking back at you.
These hacky salesmen and wool-pullers have been trying to sell us new cities since the creation of the first cities. Our current cities are unaffordable, unwalkable, and unlivable, they say, so let’s build a new one, from scratch, where, this time, we’ll get it right. We’ll all win because there will be new jobs, a pedestrian utopia, and a density that can support a modern utopia. If we can engineer this new transit-laden marvel, we can point to this new city as a modern blueprint, recreate it everywhere, and solve the housing crisis. Every inefficiency will be buffed out and every wrong, automatically righted. The problem, you see, is not that we have too much humanity—messiness and ambition and all—but not enough.
In theory, we love the idea of starting over; that we can start over.1 Our current cities are only a few hundred years or even a few decades old, unlike the urs of yesturyear, which boast bones from before. So if building a new city worked then, why wouldn’t it work now? I think there’s both a spatial mismatch and a temporal one; our ambition doesn’t match the land available, and we’re all careening to an environmental death long before any of these new cities can be realized.
Some new city-building will be successful—but it’s wildly hard to predict based on traditional economic, social, cultural, and environmental indicators. It’s not that they don’t exist, but the complexity of a new city is just outrivaled by the intersection of unlimited and unpredictable interactions: each new person, business, bus, bike, and park, adds a new factor that can be “valued,” sure—but by who and for how much? I am unconvinced that we pour our resources and limited attention into what could amount to dozens of ghost cities, whose insurance payouts reach far greater limits than the economic output could ever reach. Would the “citymakers” know this? Is this idea a total Ponzi scheme?
We’ll see the most successful new cities outside the traditional, developed world. It’s a lot easier to develop a theory of urbanism when there really isn’t one to model it after, culturally. Yes, BRIC+ countries have access to the internet and no shortage of ambitious architects and finance ghoul cash; for every Lagos there’s a Pudong—for every Brasilia, Canberra, and Chandigarh, there’s an equally ambitious modernist who thinks that those planned places are successful because of their ideas and their ideas alone. There’s no such thing as a good Robert Moses or a non-toxic Le Corbusier. They’re necessary evils if you ascribe to either theory of urbanism—either the city is the economy or the city is for the economy. I have more questions for you to think about, and I’m happy to answer them in the comments.
If the land is so ready for a city—why hasn’t it been developed already?
Who decides who gets to live and work in this new city? Who are the Philosihpur Kings with the power to make and break lives?
If everyone stands to win—why not directly socialize all profits? Why do we still have winners and losers in a perfect society?
Why don’t we take all this energy and invest in the cities we already have?
These idiots have been trying for years. https://cityoftelosa.com/