Big Tech's Dream City

[Stevicus]

I looked at the plans for the new city proposed by Silicon Valley elites. They're really terrible.

The planned city in Solano County, California, is a big, beautiful illusion.

www.businessinsider.com

I had been hearing about this idea for a new city in California, and apparently there are some tech giants investing some $800 million in the project.

Right now, California Forever is just a website with some ideology and a handful of hopeful sketches with a faintly socialist-utopian flair. The money behind it, though, is real — $800 million from a conclave of tech and tech-adjacent billionaires who for years have been secretly buying rural land in Solano County, between Travis Air Force Base and the Sacramento River. And they would've gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for the meddling kids at the New York Times unmasking last month the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, and Michael Moritz; philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs; the Stripe-founding Collison brothers; and others. They've all heaped money onto something called Flannery Associates and its leader, a Peter Thiel-quoting former Goldman high flyer named Jan Sramek. Now Sramek is making the media rounds more openly, as well as courting the political and landholding forces in Solano.

This article raises some interesting observations about the nature of cities and how they develop.

Put aside your feelings about billionaires pitching private libertarian paradises away from us hoi polloi (which: barf). What the company says it wants to build says a lot about how rich people think cities work — what cities are. They're mostly wrong.

If you were hoping that, given a chance to design a greenfield urban enclave, a bunch of secretive billionaires might cough up a zombie- and climate-proof arcology or a neon-lit anime downtown with a space elevator station, you're out of luck. California's highly aggressive species of NIMBYs share with rich would-be homeowners from Silicon Valley an affinity for traditionalism — artisanal neighborhood character, but with higher R-value on the insulation. Hence the renders: Euro-style houses on a hillside angled out over the water, a bucolic row of two- and three-story rowhouses from the 19th century on a tree-lined street full of kids playing, a verdant plaza surrounded by cafes and restaurants with plenty of outdoor seating. You know: nice.

From that description, it does sound pretty nice. The article also mentions earlier attempts in the late-19th and early-20th centuries to create "garden cities" in contrast to the dirty and mucky urban centers.

A few places actually tried to build them — England and Japan had a few, and some sprung up around New York and Philadelphia. They didn't work at all. In reality, builders left too much room between houses. Industry moved to rural areas, and big-ticket jobs moved to urban downtowns. Commuter railways and then the automobile turned garden cities into bedroom communities, which then used zoning, banking, and a bunch of other sneaky tricks to make sure only rich, white people could afford to live in them. In other words: suburbs. Think of the hours-long commutes as cosmic justice.

In the images of Foreverville I see the following types of transportation: bicycles, kayaks and canoes, and a train that appears to stop next to the sidewalks of a downtown where ten- or 12-story buildings snuggle shoulder-to-shoulder.

I get that these are just renderings in a proposal, so I forgive the fact that the train arrives through some kind of tunnel and doesn't seem to have a power source — no locomotive, no overhead power lines. I'll tell you, in municipal politics, putting an electrified third rail through downtown is a real third rail. As far as I can tell the only rail track running through the land in question is a largely abandoned spur that the nearby Western Railway Museum sometimes runs restored cars on for visitors. (This is a goddamn delight, by the way.)

So, it's a city planned out in the middle of nowhere, with everything supposedly within walking distance or by some kind of light rail system - and no cars or any roads to drive them on.

The only thing that really connects Foreverville's footprint to the rest of the world is California State Route 12, a narrow asphalt ribbon that the locals sometimes call "Blood Alley." California Forever's plan promises to improve and widen the 12 so that the new population doesn't clog the thing up. (Spoiler: Widening a highway literally never reduces congestion.) So how will people get to and from Foreverville? How will people get around once there? How will the walkable neighborhoods connect to each other? Robot buses? The lack of cars seem like an implicit promise that Foreverville can't keep.

Another issue is whether there will be anything to support the local economy and jobs.

What commercial work will go on, besides latte art, yoga studios, and bike shops? Will the city have lawyers? Banks? Cabinetmakers? Welders? Hardware stores? Artist studios? Comic book stores? The only job anyone seems to be doing in the California Forever renders is installing solar panels, which I fully support, but I do wonder where those hard-hatted solar installers park their F-150s, or live.

California Forever isn't pitching a city. It's pitching houses. Now, look, California needs those. The state's housing shortage is egregious. But building new homes on greenfield land, far from jobs or services, is terrible, too. And while the website promises "new employers" and "thousands of permanent, good-paying local jobs," it does not specify where those things will be relative to the hillside homes or the rowhouses, or if those working-class amenities will even be in the new town at all.

The article makes a few references to Disney, citing Disney's attempt to build a city which never happened. It's a new city built to look like an old city.

The same goes for the plaza. It's uncanny. If one of the cafes serves Italian or Korean food, it won't be because that part of town used to be where the Italian or Korean families lived. There was no town; it has no used-to-be. Somewhere in the presumably libertarian homeowner's agreement, the plaza is going to be listed as a Mandatory Enjoyment Zone, with rules for what kinds of signage a Starbucks is allowed to have (instead of keeping rents low enough for a local coffee entrepreneur to pull a latte). The idealized shopping districts of the mid-20th century planned communities mutated into basic malls; that's what's going on here, decades later. This is generative placemaking, the urban design equivalent of a large language model cribbing from all the existing ideas about cities and running them through the tautologitron. Make a city that looks like cities look like!

"Make a city that looks like cities look like!"

As cheesy as this sounds, it appears that this could signify a trend where the well-to-do will move further away from the cities. This has already been happening to a large extent, as more and more people move out into the "ex-urbs," clogging up more and more highways on their long commute into the cities. California is a perfect example of this, as most of the population growth occurred after the invention of the automobile. The location appears to be halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento.

What do you think about this idea? Is this just some glorified real estate gimmick?

It got me to thinking, though. If you could build your own city, what would it be like?

 

[Twilight Hue]

It seems like another corporate town to me albeit they call it a city.

The steel mills had made towns like that

 

[Stevicus]

It seems like another corporate town to me albeit they call it a city.

The steel mills had made towns like that

I don't think those steel towns were quite so fancy.