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Why Tech Moguls Are Obsessed with Building Utopian Cities

antwaneuh 6y ago
try
thatguy0900 6y ago
What a strange thing to pin on tech. Company towns have existed forever, to the point of having laws made about how they can function. Walt Disney and ford also wanted to create a utopia city. I think this is more of a rich man's hobby than anything related to tech moguls at all. Hell, some even establish their own currency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip#Coal_company_scrip https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip#Coal_company_s...
- atlasunshrugged 6y ago
  Not to mention the government mandated cities and folks like Le Corbusier! I think the vast majority of current new city developments are government mandated (e.g. Neom, Egypts new administrative capital, many new projects going up in China, etc.)
- pessimizer 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neom
- saalweachter 6y ago
  New Harmony, Indiana was the site of two successive utopian communities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Harmony,_Indiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Harmony,_Indiana The Rappites were a religious/grass roots organization, but after they failed the town was bought by Robert Owen, an industrialist who wanted to design a utopian community. A lot people think they know how society should be run; the rich ones just have the power to force other people to play along with them for awhile.
- conjectures 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bournville https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bournville
- rjsw 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Sunlight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Sunlight
  - thatguy0900 6y ago
    "It would not do you much good if you send it down your throats in the form of bottles of whisky, bags of sweets, or fat geese at Christmas. On the other hand, if you leave the money with me, I shall use it to provide for you everything that makes life pleasant – nice houses, comfortable homes, and healthy recreation." wow, what a quote. I feel like this really perfectly encapsulates the attitude behind projects like this.
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  Utopian designs are not just for tech moguls, they're for anyone powerful who wants to reshape society from the top down. But we don't have as many dictators these days, and tech is the hot sector where the money and influence is found.
  - Dracophoenix 6y ago
    You mean like every religious and mythological belief system since the dawn of civilization? I'd even argue every individual wants to and does (albeit in small steps) reshape society from the top of whatever rung they're on.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > What a strange thing to pin on tech. Company towns have existed forever, to the point of having laws made about how they can function. The idea of building a utopian city doesn't need to be a brand new thing for tech moguls to have a greater interest in creating them than other types of contemporary moguls. Also, I don't think a company town is really the same thing as a utopian city. In my mind a "company town" is mainly an attempt to maximize exploitation of a set of workers, while a "utopian city" is built as a pure expression of some subset of someone's ideals, relatively unsullied by competing ideas, which usually aren't so crass as "maximal exploitation of the residents."
  - thatguy0900 6y ago
    They dont really seem too, though. Theres a lot of examples of rich people building towns even in these comments. Is there any evidence tech moguls do it any more frequently? As I said, company towns were so common large parts of them were outlawed. You can say alot of those were primarily predatory attempts to make money off workers, but no way a decent portion werent also a bored ceo trying to make a pet project dream town.
    - ardy42 6y ago
      > They dont really seem too, though. Theres a lot of examples of rich people building towns even in these comments. Is there any evidence tech moguls do it any more frequently? The OP didn't really establish it (e.g. take an inventory of all Americans building utopian cities, and see if tech moguls are over-represented), but I wouldn't be surprised if it was true. The combination of experience with disruptive innovation, engineer's syndrome, and power would seem like a recipe for these kinds of cities, though a less productive one than near-absolute power over some polity. Also, a lot of the towns mentioned in the comments pre-date tech moguls.
      - thatguy0900 6y ago
        >Also, a lot of the towns mentioned in the comments pre-date tech moguls. That's kind of what I'm saying. Rich people making their own dream cities is probably as old as rich people and cities. Ig I could see an explosion of home automation tech giving more people a reason to try, though
abrowne 6y ago
Not a new obsession: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordlândia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordlândia Also, some have recently argued that people had to be forced to live in those first cities: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_History_of_the_Earliest_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_Hi...
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  And https://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/jan/23/bournville-cadbury-town https://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/jan/23/bournville-...
- jdxcode 6y ago
  Not a new thing of course, but there is a big difference between trying to build a utopia and building a city to house workers
strikelaserclaw 6y ago
so why are tech moguls obsessed with building utopian cities? i don't think that question ever got answered.
jokethrowaway 6y ago
Because government run cities are doing a terrible job? I'd love to live in a nice environment with services and smart people around me, it's just that most cities are quite degraded (at least here in Europe / UK). The choice right now is between living in a nice small town / rural settings surrounded by people who got stuck in their rural hometown, or live in a city surrounded by smart people, homeless and drug dealers and terrible air quality.
- atlasunshrugged 6y ago
  Really? I'm sorry to hear it's the same in the UK but I loved Berlin and Tallinn wasn't bad (most of what was bad was out of their control ie the weather). I've lived in SF, San Diego, northern Nevada, DC, Berlin, Tallinn, London (Enfield) and Yerevan and by far European cities were much better run in my opinion
  - jokethrowaway 6y ago
    I haven't lived in US cities but I'm sure you're correct. I wasn't trying to make an argument for US cities over EU - I've heard they've even bigger problems. Still I don't consider EU cities (Italy, France, Germany at least) to be great for living. Maybe with electric transport and better use of police enforcement.
    - atlasunshrugged 6y ago
      I'm curious why in those places you mentioned better use of police enforcement? I haven't done much living (or even traveling outside of major tourist areas) in France and Italy but living in Berlin I can honestly say I don't think I ever felt unsafe. Contrasting that to the US and China (and I know you're not saying the US is better, it's just what I'm more familiar with) in the US I would worry about either 1) being attacked by a mentally disturbed person or robbed and the police not caring unless it was life threatening or 2) being shot by police (I'm brown). In China it was totally different, the only thing I'd worry about there is being injured by or offending a well connected person who seem like they operate with relative impunity (I have visceral memories of Lambos and Ferraris parked on public sidewalks and no one would touch them because if you could afford them you were well connected enough that you could destroy whatever cop messed with you)
nahuel0x 6y ago
Utopias with big capitalist bosses are not utopias.
- ezconnect 6y ago
  It's utopia to the bosses since they create their own rules that favors them.
  - itwy 6y ago
    I like how both of you are right in a sense.
atlasunshrugged 6y ago
Maybe I missed it but I'm a little surprised they didn't mention the new Innovation Zone legislation the Nevada Governor mentioned (and that was seeded by Blockchains LLC) and the broader Charter City movement (e.g. Pronomos, Charter City Institute, etc.)
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Probably because "Innovation Zones" popped up a few weeks after this article.
  - atlasunshrugged 6y ago
    Sorry, yes it was a week after this was published when Sisolak mentioned them first!
shockfist 6y ago
You can't engineer around the failings of modern society by throwing out modern society, unless you want to consign millions of people to the trash heap in the most callous way imaginable. Is it just me or are we rapidly sliding into some of the most bog standard of dystopian cyberpunk?
jeffbee 6y ago
It's because tech moguls are Americans and America doesn't have any good cities. I don't care much for these techno-towns because most of what's wrong with America is architectural, not technological, but I do think America should do a lot more building new cities from scratch.
MattGaiser 6y ago
Plenty of people dream about what their cities could do better. Tech people are just uniquely positioned to do it as engineers with resources.
- esotericimpl 6y ago
  Software engineers in tech are not the kind of people that can make cities "better" and are no better positioned than any other well off profession. The best cities are built organically.
swayvil 6y ago
It's home-improvement taken to the obvious next level. And who doesn't like home-improvement?
mensetmanusman 6y ago
I hope they don’t find inspiration from the UAE cities... since those are built on the backs of migrant slaves.
- chadlavi 6y ago
  I got bad news for you about America!
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    The US is bad, but Kafala is something else.
gamechangr 6y ago
If you have 10,000 engineers working at your company, it seems like a natural extension of wanting to create - first the optimum workplace and then have that spill over to "what would the optimum city look like?" It's not just tech. I'm sure other large non tech companies have wanted to build cities for their employees. Think of companies who build a product that in new and developing the details - like Ford. They would also want to build a huge headquarters and in a way that spills over to the whole town.
- mc32 6y ago
  I believe in Korea big conglomerates (Chaebol) build and offer housing to their employees. On the one hand it’s nice and convenient, on the other hand you’re depending on a company for much of your life. Kind like if you depend too much on the government, you’re at the whim of either.
- atlasunshrugged 6y ago
  Yes exactly, plus when you're already creating housing for employees or subsidizing it in the community it seems a very logical extension to consider https://apnews.com/article/0f770c947b00426bab5054ad657a4000 https://apnews.com/article/0f770c947b00426bab5054ad657a4000
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  Wolfsburg, Germany by Volkswagen.
niklasd 6y ago
Hamburg build from 2008 on a new district, the HafenCity, a soulless place of concrete, expensive apartments, and chain stores. I recently thought about how great it would have been to try something radical new – like building everything with wood, fantastic public transport, and as little cars as possible. My conclusion was that the only way that realistically could have happend was with subsidies from a billionaire who had some kind of grand vision. I hardly doubt that we'll see such a thing from the public sector anytime soon, be it from fiduciary duties or their general incompetence of doing any kind of big real estate development (at least here in Germany). So from that angle, I welcome anyone with a vision for an utopian city.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  As a general matter, I think Utopianism is a bad idea, and I don’t think we should be sinking huge amounts of resources into giant leaps like this. I’d rather see incremental tweaks in the right direction first, as I think those are far more effective at bringing lasting change. Fundamentally, we’re really bad at predicting the future. Utopian projects involve making big bets on what the future might hold, which makes them high risk high reward. I think making smaller, incremental bets allows us to not only wager fewer resources, but to also begin getting feedback sooner on the outcome of our decisions rather than hoping that we’re spot on in 20 years. More specifically, I’d like to see a lot less “we built a city for autonomous cars and hyperloops” and more “we added some bike lanes and bike parking, and converted commercial streets to pedestrian only.” These are changes we can make today to improve our quality of life, and they practically cost very little.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    Accommodating cars is the most important variable in all places I see. Once you design for accommodating cars, everything is so spread out that it precludes a non-car oriented life. So while you can make commercial streets pedestrian, you can’t change the fundamental fact that everything is too far from everything else to have the necessary foot traffic to sustain businesses. Not to mention the political challenges that come with trying to design a place simultaneously compatible with cars and pedestrians/bicyclists. I’m convinced that there is no in between.
cbm-vic-20 6y ago
Maintaining legacy systems is difficult and boring, and not as sexy and fun as imagining something new without the legacy baggage. But someone's still got to maintain those legacy systems...
tempsy 6y ago
Is this really a new concept? Disney built a town Celebration, Florida near Disneyworld which has a pop of 7500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida
- fullshark 6y ago
  Henry Ford did this multiple times, even in Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia
- echoradio 6y ago
  Celebration is not anything close the utopian city dreamed of by Walt Disney. EPCOT was still in blue sky planning stages when he died. It’s a pity we never saw what was possible. The land for Walt Disney World has its own government and possibly could have developed the concept without public interference. Disney (the company) commandeered the idea of EPCOT concept thinking it would be a nostalgic nod to the founder and created a theme park and real estate development which barely, if at all, reflected Disney’s (the person) vision. Meanwhile, Celebration kind of turned into a dystopian situation.[1] [1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/celebration-florida-how-disneys-community-of-tomorrow-became-a-total-nightmare https://www.thedailybeast.com/celebration-florida-how-disney...
helen___keller 6y ago
Planned communities, organized by the rich and powerful around the latest and greatest in technology or political change, are not novel in the slightest and certainly not unique to tech billionaires. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_community We've been doing this for about the history of humankind, and many of the world's capitals are planned cities. Sometimes it works well and sometimes it does not. For example Brasilia was a planned utopia built around the great innovations and delights of the 20th century - such being planned around motor traffic. And upon reaching a state of overpopulation, it became well known as a dystopia instead.
- thesuitonym 6y ago
  I'm reminded immediately of the EPCOT, which never manifested due to Walt Disney's death, but was a city planned around transportation. I don't know about the PeopleMover as a means of public transit but I love the hub and spoke ideal that the original plan had. I wish a pedestrian first city would happen in the US. Imagine how much more quickly Florida's light rail may have manifested if we had a city that was already rail-centric in the 60s?
- JamesLeonis 6y ago
  Brasilia is a case study in the book Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott. It's a great book that digs into the whole thinking behind such grand plans and why they often fall apart. EDIT: The quote at the start of chapter 4 (The High Modernist City) captures the Ideology of these blank-slate planners. > Time is a fatal handicap to the baroque conception of the world: its mechanical order makes no allowances for growth, change, adaptation, and creative renewal. In short, a baroque plan was a block achievement. It must be laid out at a stroke, fixed and frozen forever, as if done overnight by Arabian nights genii. Such a plan demands an architectural despot, working for an absolute ruler, who will live long enough to complete their own conceptions. To alter this type of plan, to introduce fresh elements of another style, is to break its esthetic backbone. — Lewis Mumford, The City in History
didip 6y ago
I am not convinced with the examples. I haven't seen FAANG and Microsoft efforts to buy a bunch of land and provide housing in large volume. Planned Cities are nothing but rich people pet projects and it has been like that for a long time.
screye 6y ago
Urban Design and police has become a kafkaesque mess. It has become near impossible to summon the political will to actually build something livable. Developments generally lean towards familiar and easy, instead of building anything interesting. Tragically, in many parts of the world, one of 3 types of plans fall in the easy+familiar domain. You have the grossly inefficient suburbs of the US, lifeless concrete planned cities of communist fame and wild-best of haphazard urban densification as seen in Indian cities like Bangalore. What's even worse, is that the average consumer is woefully under-equipped to recognize problems with this system until it is too late. It isn't until their kids start growing up that they realize how dead the suburb feels, and how the car dependence relegates one of the parents to a soccer mom nanny. Why it takes 2 hours to get to anywhere in Bangalore or why the incredibly dense concrete jungle feels spiritually dead despite how hard you try to fix it. Years of brainwashing towards the American dream and a tall condo with a view, really do not help consumers make informed decisions either. Not like contractors do user-studies anyways, but still. Funny thing is, these problems are already solved in some capacity. City has been studied to death for millennia. It is no wonder that people in modern 1st world countries, pay good money to spend 1 week in European cities that have been "preserved" as they were. I am not even advocating for some replica of Copenhagen or Vienna (as much as I love biking). Strong towns[1] and Not-just-bikes[2] are evangelists of just two of many well thought out ways of building better cities. Even the much maligned Apple Park could have been amazing if not for Cupertino's parking minimum rules. Guess billionaires can only do so much. The plans are already there, what's lacking is political will. If billionaires is what it takes to break cities out of this terrible inertia, then so be it. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Em7nqDqQ8oM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Em7nqDqQ8oM [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ
Brajeshwar 6y ago
I think Pronomos[1] was specifically started with the idea of investing in such ideas. 1. https://www.pronomos.vc https://www.pronomos.vc
jellicle 6y ago
Tech utopia as drawn by illustrators imagining what tech overlords might want: Jetsons, flying cars, Disney Tomorrowland Tech utopia as drawn by actual tech overlords when they actually get to build their dreams: Rio de Janeiro favela slums inhabited by as many expendable gig workers as can be crammed in living under 24/7 oppressive police presence and ultrasurveillance, plus also a separate, fully gated and guarded community for the rich people to live in and high opaque walls so that group 2 doesn't have to see group 1 or think about them
eli_gottlieb 6y ago
Because the Bay Area is run by the world's worst NIMBYs, duh.
napier 6y ago
Maybe it’s a desire to compensate for what San Francisco transformed into over the last 30 years.
carapace 6y ago
Cities are one of the higher art forms, and oldest, the urge to make a great city goes back at least to the Potbelly Hill[1]. [1] Göbekli Tepe "Dated at around 9,500 BC, these megaliths are 5,500 years older than the first cities of Mesopotamia and 7,000 years older than Stonehenge." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

try

What a strange thing to pin on tech. Company towns have existed forever, to the point of having laws made about how they can function. Walt Disney and ford also wanted to create a utopia city. I think this is more of a rich man's hobby than anything related to tech moguls at all. Hell, some even establish their own currency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip#Coal_company_scrip https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip#Coal_company_s...

atlasunshrugged 6y ago
Not to mention the government mandated cities and folks like Le Corbusier! I think the vast majority of current new city developments are government mandated (e.g. Neom, Egypts new administrative capital, many new projects going up in China, etc.)
pessimizer 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neom
saalweachter 6y ago
New Harmony, Indiana was the site of two successive utopian communities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Harmony,_Indiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Harmony,_Indiana The Rappites were a religious/grass roots organization, but after they failed the town was bought by Robert Owen, an industrialist who wanted to design a utopian community. A lot people think they know how society should be run; the rich ones just have the power to force other people to play along with them for awhile.
conjectures 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bournville https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bournville
rjsw 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Sunlight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Sunlight
- thatguy0900 6y ago
  "It would not do you much good if you send it down your throats in the form of bottles of whisky, bags of sweets, or fat geese at Christmas. On the other hand, if you leave the money with me, I shall use it to provide for you everything that makes life pleasant – nice houses, comfortable homes, and healthy recreation." wow, what a quote. I feel like this really perfectly encapsulates the attitude behind projects like this.
fennecfoxen 6y ago
Utopian designs are not just for tech moguls, they're for anyone powerful who wants to reshape society from the top down. But we don't have as many dictators these days, and tech is the hot sector where the money and influence is found.
- Dracophoenix 6y ago
  You mean like every religious and mythological belief system since the dawn of civilization? I'd even argue every individual wants to and does (albeit in small steps) reshape society from the top of whatever rung they're on.
ardy42 6y ago
> What a strange thing to pin on tech. Company towns have existed forever, to the point of having laws made about how they can function. The idea of building a utopian city doesn't need to be a brand new thing for tech moguls to have a greater interest in creating them than other types of contemporary moguls. Also, I don't think a company town is really the same thing as a utopian city. In my mind a "company town" is mainly an attempt to maximize exploitation of a set of workers, while a "utopian city" is built as a pure expression of some subset of someone's ideals, relatively unsullied by competing ideas, which usually aren't so crass as "maximal exploitation of the residents."
- thatguy0900 6y ago
  They dont really seem too, though. Theres a lot of examples of rich people building towns even in these comments. Is there any evidence tech moguls do it any more frequently? As I said, company towns were so common large parts of them were outlawed. You can say alot of those were primarily predatory attempts to make money off workers, but no way a decent portion werent also a bored ceo trying to make a pet project dream town.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > They dont really seem too, though. Theres a lot of examples of rich people building towns even in these comments. Is there any evidence tech moguls do it any more frequently? The OP didn't really establish it (e.g. take an inventory of all Americans building utopian cities, and see if tech moguls are over-represented), but I wouldn't be surprised if it was true. The combination of experience with disruptive innovation, engineer's syndrome, and power would seem like a recipe for these kinds of cities, though a less productive one than near-absolute power over some polity. Also, a lot of the towns mentioned in the comments pre-date tech moguls.
    - thatguy0900 6y ago
      >Also, a lot of the towns mentioned in the comments pre-date tech moguls. That's kind of what I'm saying. Rich people making their own dream cities is probably as old as rich people and cities. Ig I could see an explosion of home automation tech giving more people a reason to try, though

abrowne 6y ago

Not a new obsession: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordlândia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordlândia Also, some have recently argued that people had to be forced to live in those first cities: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_History_of_the_Earliest_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_Hi...

goatinaboat 6y ago
And https://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/jan/23/bournville-cadbury-town https://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/jan/23/bournville-...
jdxcode 6y ago
Not a new thing of course, but there is a big difference between trying to build a utopia and building a city to house workers

strikelaserclaw 6y ago

so why are tech moguls obsessed with building utopian cities? i don't think that question ever got answered.

jokethrowaway 6y ago

Because government run cities are doing a terrible job? I'd love to live in a nice environment with services and smart people around me, it's just that most cities are quite degraded (at least here in Europe / UK). The choice right now is between living in a nice small town / rural settings surrounded by people who got stuck in their rural hometown, or live in a city surrounded by smart people, homeless and drug dealers and terrible air quality.

atlasunshrugged 6y ago
Really? I'm sorry to hear it's the same in the UK but I loved Berlin and Tallinn wasn't bad (most of what was bad was out of their control ie the weather). I've lived in SF, San Diego, northern Nevada, DC, Berlin, Tallinn, London (Enfield) and Yerevan and by far European cities were much better run in my opinion
- jokethrowaway 6y ago
  I haven't lived in US cities but I'm sure you're correct. I wasn't trying to make an argument for US cities over EU - I've heard they've even bigger problems. Still I don't consider EU cities (Italy, France, Germany at least) to be great for living. Maybe with electric transport and better use of police enforcement.
  - atlasunshrugged 6y ago
    I'm curious why in those places you mentioned better use of police enforcement? I haven't done much living (or even traveling outside of major tourist areas) in France and Italy but living in Berlin I can honestly say I don't think I ever felt unsafe. Contrasting that to the US and China (and I know you're not saying the US is better, it's just what I'm more familiar with) in the US I would worry about either 1) being attacked by a mentally disturbed person or robbed and the police not caring unless it was life threatening or 2) being shot by police (I'm brown). In China it was totally different, the only thing I'd worry about there is being injured by or offending a well connected person who seem like they operate with relative impunity (I have visceral memories of Lambos and Ferraris parked on public sidewalks and no one would touch them because if you could afford them you were well connected enough that you could destroy whatever cop messed with you)

nahuel0x 6y ago

Utopias with big capitalist bosses are not utopias.

ezconnect 6y ago
It's utopia to the bosses since they create their own rules that favors them.
- itwy 6y ago
  I like how both of you are right in a sense.

atlasunshrugged 6y ago

Maybe I missed it but I'm a little surprised they didn't mention the new Innovation Zone legislation the Nevada Governor mentioned (and that was seeded by Blockchains LLC) and the broader Charter City movement (e.g. Pronomos, Charter City Institute, etc.)

jeffbee 6y ago
Probably because "Innovation Zones" popped up a few weeks after this article.
- atlasunshrugged 6y ago
  Sorry, yes it was a week after this was published when Sisolak mentioned them first!

shockfist 6y ago

You can't engineer around the failings of modern society by throwing out modern society, unless you want to consign millions of people to the trash heap in the most callous way imaginable. Is it just me or are we rapidly sliding into some of the most bog standard of dystopian cyberpunk?

jeffbee 6y ago

It's because tech moguls are Americans and America doesn't have any good cities. I don't care much for these techno-towns because most of what's wrong with America is architectural, not technological, but I do think America should do a lot more building new cities from scratch.

MattGaiser 6y ago

Plenty of people dream about what their cities could do better. Tech people are just uniquely positioned to do it as engineers with resources.

esotericimpl 6y ago
Software engineers in tech are not the kind of people that can make cities "better" and are no better positioned than any other well off profession. The best cities are built organically.

swayvil 6y ago

It's home-improvement taken to the obvious next level. And who doesn't like home-improvement?

mensetmanusman 6y ago

I hope they don’t find inspiration from the UAE cities... since those are built on the backs of migrant slaves.

chadlavi 6y ago
I got bad news for you about America!
- pessimizer 6y ago
  The US is bad, but Kafala is something else.

gamechangr 6y ago

If you have 10,000 engineers working at your company, it seems like a natural extension of wanting to create - first the optimum workplace and then have that spill over to "what would the optimum city look like?" It's not just tech. I'm sure other large non tech companies have wanted to build cities for their employees. Think of companies who build a product that in new and developing the details - like Ford. They would also want to build a huge headquarters and in a way that spills over to the whole town.

mc32 6y ago
I believe in Korea big conglomerates (Chaebol) build and offer housing to their employees. On the one hand it’s nice and convenient, on the other hand you’re depending on a company for much of your life. Kind like if you depend too much on the government, you’re at the whim of either.
atlasunshrugged 6y ago
Yes exactly, plus when you're already creating housing for employees or subsidizing it in the community it seems a very logical extension to consider https://apnews.com/article/0f770c947b00426bab5054ad657a4000 https://apnews.com/article/0f770c947b00426bab5054ad657a4000
LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
Wolfsburg, Germany by Volkswagen.

niklasd 6y ago

Hamburg build from 2008 on a new district, the HafenCity, a soulless place of concrete, expensive apartments, and chain stores. I recently thought about how great it would have been to try something radical new – like building everything with wood, fantastic public transport, and as little cars as possible. My conclusion was that the only way that realistically could have happend was with subsidies from a billionaire who had some kind of grand vision. I hardly doubt that we'll see such a thing from the public sector anytime soon, be it from fiduciary duties or their general incompetence of doing any kind of big real estate development (at least here in Germany). So from that angle, I welcome anyone with a vision for an utopian city.

ashtonkem 6y ago
As a general matter, I think Utopianism is a bad idea, and I don’t think we should be sinking huge amounts of resources into giant leaps like this. I’d rather see incremental tweaks in the right direction first, as I think those are far more effective at bringing lasting change. Fundamentally, we’re really bad at predicting the future. Utopian projects involve making big bets on what the future might hold, which makes them high risk high reward. I think making smaller, incremental bets allows us to not only wager fewer resources, but to also begin getting feedback sooner on the outcome of our decisions rather than hoping that we’re spot on in 20 years. More specifically, I’d like to see a lot less “we built a city for autonomous cars and hyperloops” and more “we added some bike lanes and bike parking, and converted commercial streets to pedestrian only.” These are changes we can make today to improve our quality of life, and they practically cost very little.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  Accommodating cars is the most important variable in all places I see. Once you design for accommodating cars, everything is so spread out that it precludes a non-car oriented life. So while you can make commercial streets pedestrian, you can’t change the fundamental fact that everything is too far from everything else to have the necessary foot traffic to sustain businesses. Not to mention the political challenges that come with trying to design a place simultaneously compatible with cars and pedestrians/bicyclists. I’m convinced that there is no in between.

cbm-vic-20 6y ago

Maintaining legacy systems is difficult and boring, and not as sexy and fun as imagining something new without the legacy baggage. But someone's still got to maintain those legacy systems...

tempsy 6y ago

Is this really a new concept? Disney built a town Celebration, Florida near Disneyworld which has a pop of 7500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida

fullshark 6y ago
Henry Ford did this multiple times, even in Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia
echoradio 6y ago
Celebration is not anything close the utopian city dreamed of by Walt Disney. EPCOT was still in blue sky planning stages when he died. It’s a pity we never saw what was possible. The land for Walt Disney World has its own government and possibly could have developed the concept without public interference. Disney (the company) commandeered the idea of EPCOT concept thinking it would be a nostalgic nod to the founder and created a theme park and real estate development which barely, if at all, reflected Disney’s (the person) vision. Meanwhile, Celebration kind of turned into a dystopian situation.[1] [1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/celebration-florida-how-disneys-community-of-tomorrow-became-a-total-nightmare https://www.thedailybeast.com/celebration-florida-how-disney...

helen___keller 6y ago

Planned communities, organized by the rich and powerful around the latest and greatest in technology or political change, are not novel in the slightest and certainly not unique to tech billionaires. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_community We've been doing this for about the history of humankind, and many of the world's capitals are planned cities. Sometimes it works well and sometimes it does not. For example Brasilia was a planned utopia built around the great innovations and delights of the 20th century - such being planned around motor traffic. And upon reaching a state of overpopulation, it became well known as a dystopia instead.

thesuitonym 6y ago
I'm reminded immediately of the EPCOT, which never manifested due to Walt Disney's death, but was a city planned around transportation. I don't know about the PeopleMover as a means of public transit but I love the hub and spoke ideal that the original plan had. I wish a pedestrian first city would happen in the US. Imagine how much more quickly Florida's light rail may have manifested if we had a city that was already rail-centric in the 60s?
JamesLeonis 6y ago
Brasilia is a case study in the book Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott. It's a great book that digs into the whole thinking behind such grand plans and why they often fall apart. EDIT: The quote at the start of chapter 4 (The High Modernist City) captures the Ideology of these blank-slate planners. > Time is a fatal handicap to the baroque conception of the world: its mechanical order makes no allowances for growth, change, adaptation, and creative renewal. In short, a baroque plan was a block achievement. It must be laid out at a stroke, fixed and frozen forever, as if done overnight by Arabian nights genii. Such a plan demands an architectural despot, working for an absolute ruler, who will live long enough to complete their own conceptions. To alter this type of plan, to introduce fresh elements of another style, is to break its esthetic backbone. — Lewis Mumford, The City in History

didip 6y ago

I am not convinced with the examples. I haven't seen FAANG and Microsoft efforts to buy a bunch of land and provide housing in large volume. Planned Cities are nothing but rich people pet projects and it has been like that for a long time.

screye 6y ago

Urban Design and police has become a kafkaesque mess. It has become near impossible to summon the political will to actually build something livable. Developments generally lean towards familiar and easy, instead of building anything interesting. Tragically, in many parts of the world, one of 3 types of plans fall in the easy+familiar domain. You have the grossly inefficient suburbs of the US, lifeless concrete planned cities of communist fame and wild-best of haphazard urban densification as seen in Indian cities like Bangalore. What's even worse, is that the average consumer is woefully under-equipped to recognize problems with this system until it is too late. It isn't until their kids start growing up that they realize how dead the suburb feels, and how the car dependence relegates one of the parents to a soccer mom nanny. Why it takes 2 hours to get to anywhere in Bangalore or why the incredibly dense concrete jungle feels spiritually dead despite how hard you try to fix it. Years of brainwashing towards the American dream and a tall condo with a view, really do not help consumers make informed decisions either. Not like contractors do user-studies anyways, but still. Funny thing is, these problems are already solved in some capacity. City has been studied to death for millennia. It is no wonder that people in modern 1st world countries, pay good money to spend 1 week in European cities that have been "preserved" as they were. I am not even advocating for some replica of Copenhagen or Vienna (as much as I love biking). Strong towns[1] and Not-just-bikes[2] are evangelists of just two of many well thought out ways of building better cities. Even the much maligned Apple Park could have been amazing if not for Cupertino's parking minimum rules. Guess billionaires can only do so much. The plans are already there, what's lacking is political will. If billionaires is what it takes to break cities out of this terrible inertia, then so be it. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Em7nqDqQ8oM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Em7nqDqQ8oM [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ

Brajeshwar 6y ago

I think Pronomos[1] was specifically started with the idea of investing in such ideas. 1. https://www.pronomos.vc https://www.pronomos.vc

jellicle 6y ago

Tech utopia as drawn by illustrators imagining what tech overlords might want: Jetsons, flying cars, Disney Tomorrowland Tech utopia as drawn by actual tech overlords when they actually get to build their dreams: Rio de Janeiro favela slums inhabited by as many expendable gig workers as can be crammed in living under 24/7 oppressive police presence and ultrasurveillance, plus also a separate, fully gated and guarded community for the rich people to live in and high opaque walls so that group 2 doesn't have to see group 1 or think about them

eli_gottlieb 6y ago

Because the Bay Area is run by the world's worst NIMBYs, duh.

napier 6y ago

Maybe it’s a desire to compensate for what San Francisco transformed into over the last 30 years.

carapace 6y ago

Cities are one of the higher art forms, and oldest, the urge to make a great city goes back at least to the Potbelly Hill[1]. [1] Göbekli Tepe "Dated at around 9,500 BC, these megaliths are 5,500 years older than the first cities of Mesopotamia and 7,000 years older than Stonehenge." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe