It takes 200 years for a city to organically grow into an interesting and vibrant place. Can this process be sped up? Perhaps. But then the city itself would be in constant development. Construction everywhere, loud trucks hauling materials. Vacant buildings getting torn down without apology. This is what building a new city at speed looks like. Total chaos. Not bad, but chaos. It doesn't look anything like the concept art of idyllic European streets with cafes and kids biking by themselves.
Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled
21–30 of 79 posts
Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled
#22I'm surprised at the investment in an area that's likely to undergo major environmental challenges but it will be fascinating to see how this turns out. Superficially it looks like an American version of Neom. https://www.neom.com/en-us
Having worked on Neom, I can tell you that Neom is fractally insane. The approval process for headline projects at Neom is: have idea; produce cyberpunk-themed renders; show to Crown Prince; receive approval. (MBS loves cyberpunk.) There was one day where the target population for the city just doubled with no real feasibility analysis.
California Forever (awful name) seems to just be fairly normal planned city so far.
Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled
#23Well, this is going to be the source of grim jokes for some time, as they gradually re-discover things that society does already.
Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled
#24The renderings did not help me visualise the real possibility.
For perspective on how big 55,000 acres is, 640 per square mile, is 86 square miles, enough land to hold the city limits of Choose 2 of 3: Paris, Barcelona, and San Francisco.
Paris city limits, 2.1 million residents, 41 square miles
Barcelona city limits, 1.6 million residents, 39 square miles
San Francisco city, 800k residents, 47 square miles
Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled
#25Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled
#26> The group only recently started interacting with local officials and residents, according to media reports, and had sued landowners who sold their land over what it deemed an “illegal price-fixing conspiracy”. > “To date, our company has been quiet about our activities. This has, understandably, created interest, concern, and speculation. Now that we’re no longer limited by confidentiality, we are eager to begin a…
Building a city makes the land more valuable. If you tell people that you plan to invest a ton of money into the area they will include that information in their calculations when you are trying to buy their land. Some will then only sell their land for skyhigh prices, and some won’t sell at all in the hopes that they can sell it for even more once the city has been built around them. This can strangle the project in its infancy.
> If you want to join a community, you can just, like, go join it.
Yeah and that works perfectly well if you want to buy a single farm. You negotiate with the seller, you do the contract stuff, you pay, you move in. All good. But that is not what they plan.
It is almost as if you haven’t thought about why they do what they do at all.
Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled
#27The real challenge with this is keeping the type of people out who let SF devolve into the feverish nightmare politics it's currently running on. Any progressive quality-focused community will, over time, be infiltrated by people who's only contribution is subvertering and sabotaging what has been built, usually in the name of egalitarianism or some other veil.
I don't think you can run a "utopian project" in the USA at all. You're subject to US laws, and that means you're easy prey for litigants (even sufficiently motivated pro se litigants) -- and the civil justice system is an ordeal where there's only one outcome: You lose.
In most cases, you lose lots of money in legal fees that you won't be able to claw back; in virtually all cases, you're slapped with injunctions and other roadblocks to development, which can be fatal and can take years to resolve; in all cases, you lose tremendous amounts of time, which could otherwise have been spent productively.
The utopian planners should have attempted their scheme somewhere on Nevis or a Bahaman island -- where the government would probably be cooperative rather than nakedly adversarial.
Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled
#28Honestly the description of this place sounds like what I’ve found Sweden to be, since moving here from Palo Alto last month.
I am walking distance from everything I need, I am 10 minutes from a huge park with a large body of water, I walk to work, and if I need to detach I can take a boat to a summer house that’s off the grid.
Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled
#29The real challenge with this is keeping the type of people out who let SF devolve into the feverish nightmare politics it's currently running on. Any progressive quality-focused community will, over time, be infiltrated by people who's only contribution is subvertering and sabotaging what has been built, usually in the name of egalitarianism or some other veil.
> let SF devolve
You have to ask yourself whether SF would have been 'let' to devolve if the type of people who support projects like this instead were active in the governance of their own city.
You might also ask yourself whether the devolution of SF is entirely organic; to me, some of the decisions being made there seem rather like deliberate sabotage.
I find the hubris of these people that just want to run off and do their own thing a bit disturbing; it's the 'you're standing on the shoulders of giants yet think you are seeing the answer with your own eyes alone' thing.
By and large I find the type of people that support these projects to be alarmingly lacking in any sort of empathy.
Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled
#30In practice, utopia usually becomes dystopia.
In practice or in fictional books? If in practice I’m sure you can share a handful of examples.
Fordlandia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia
And for a really dark example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonia_Dignidad
Also Disney's failed attempt:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_(concept)
Finally an example that actually worked:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemensstadt
...the project reminds me much more of the Chinese 'fake European cities' though:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/duplitecture-d...