Cities are not start-ups

 Jersey City's Urban Design Laboratory

Molly Turner, They’re Ultrarich Techies, and They Want to Build a City From Scratch. What Could Go Wrong? NYTimes, Sept. 17, 2023.

From the article:

Cities and their problems have long bedeviled people in power. The Technotopians are just the latest in a grand tradition of American business magnates aspiring to build their dreams — from Pullman, Ill., to Epcot Center in Disney World. They tend to approach building cities the same way they’ve approached building tech start-ups. And that is unfortunate.

To state the obvious: Cities are not start-ups. They can’t keep up with the tech industry’s rate of innovation. That frustrates many Technotopians, like the Thumbtack co-founder Jonathan Swanson, who once complained that “humans currently live in cities that are the equivalent of flip phones” — the worst possible insult in Silicon Valley at the time.

Cities aren’t like phones. They’re not like computers either, a distinction that the University of Pennsylvania professor Shannon Mattern wrote an entire book to explain. Urban problems are too complex and politically fraught to be programmed into an app. Constructing a building takes much longer than constructing a website. And undoing the racist legacy of urban policies is more complicated than pushing through a software update.

Later:

It’s challenging to transform our existing cities and to pilot new tech solutions on our streets. Just look at the rocky rollout of e-scooters around the world. Wouldn’t it be easier to test new technologies, business models and government structures in cities free of pesky people? That’s certainly the aim of many Technotopian plans, which call for new cities to be built, new rules to be written and new residents to opt in to being guinea pigs. Mr. Lonsdale, of Palantir, explains: “The idea is simple: found new cities, free from old bureaucratic and legal structures, and explore bold new visions of how government should work. Market them to people who choose to join and see what the world learns.”

But, these new cities are never really built from scratch. They usually encroach on someone else’s land or run contrary to local plans. The Technotopians rarely acknowledge that, which often leads to their downfall, as with Alphabet in Toronto and the Seasteaders in French Polynesia. The Solano project appears to be on a similar trajectory. They’ve snapped up land under a veil of secrecy, which has undermined needed political support. “If these investors plan to convince Solano residents and their elected representatives that building a new city on productive agricultural land is a wise scheme, they are off to a terrible start at earning the community’s trust,” John Garamendi, a Democrat who represents part of Solano County, testified at a recent State Senate committee hearing.

There's more at the link.