Building Cities From Scratch
Or, alternatively, building them with a head start.
Hello from Morningside Heights! Before we dive in, I’m thinking of hosting a somewhat silly mystery live event for April Fools’ Day, could you all please let me know your availability for that evening? (it’s a Monday)
Charter Cities are having a moment this year. There’s a whole bunch in development, most notably those being built by Próspera, and a bunch more planned, all of which have been well documented by Scott Alexander. Noah Smith’s ringing endorsement of one project, California Forever, has led some forecasters to be noticeably more bullish about the likelihood of one existing in the U.S. soon, with at least one prediction market’s probability doubling over the past month:
As someone who loved Sim City growing up (and who avidly watches long YouTube video essays bemoaning a century of bad urban policy in the U.S. — characterized by bad zoning, unchecked sprawl, NIMBYism, and the destruction of vibrant downtowns in the name of massive highways) I find the prospect of building new American cities from scratch — and avoiding all the mistakes of the past — truly thrilling.
Meanwhile, I've been following these guys closely. They are building a village from scratch on abandoned land in Portugal. This got me thinking: what could a smaller scale project like this look like in an already built environment like an abandoned city, with perhaps a bit more funding and reliance on new technologies?
For instance, what would happen if one set up a bit of vertical farming infrastructure in an abandoned city like Kupari, which Mr. Beast recently featured in one of his videos? He and his friends managed to make a part of the environment quite cozy for themselves in the space of one week.
After its heyday as a luxury resort, Kupari was repurposed as a military base and badly damaged by war, which, to be fair, may mean that inhabiting its structures carries some risk. But there are thousands of potentially safer places like it that have been abandoned for all kinds of reasons, many of which could be addressed with modern technology.
At the very least, a project like it could be a testbed for innovation: invite desalination startups, vertical farming startups, energy startups, waste disposal startups, and see if they can meet the ultimate challenge: to reverse collapse. I still contend that terraforming almost any post-apocalyptic environment on Earth would be far easier than terraforming Mars. Why wait for SpaceX to do what we can already do here on Earth? And if it’s somewhere coastal and warm like Kupari, founding companies are far likelier to attract tourism if the cohort collectively succeeds, and as we’ve already seen from more than one influencer, a project like this would get a lot of attention.
Anyways, these are obviously very prototypical ideas, and what will matter far more is execution, which is one of the things folks are saying California Forever promises to do in a refreshingly thoughtful way. In the meantime, please weigh in in the comments if you have your own thoughts — either on execution, or on alternative concepts that could also show promise!