Master-planned communities often don’t work out even with a strong government building them (ex. Chinese ghost cities). This proposal from a private investment group to create one is faintly ridiculous.
China has built and continues to build numerous city-scale projects. Don't be fooled by western media ghost city reporting. Sure, they exist but to argue that their presence indicates a failure of city-scale projects is not correlated.
It seems like there are some good intentions here but spending time/money with this company to design a city feels like a vanity project for Uber-rich people.. seriously wondering is this proposal actually helping / likely to help literally anybody like city planners etc? Or just a bunch of pictures? It’s like if somebody sent you a PowerPoint presentation that showed how to build a tech stack for a thing but that person had no intention of building it, you would probably glance at it and scoff I would imagine..
I'm very interested in exactly who would live here.
Chicago ( aside from the crime which is almost absent from Lakeview/Wigglyvile) is pretty much the perfect city. Cheapish housing + affordable high quality public transit.
Rather than move to your magic theme park, I can go to Chicago. Apart from tech bros and their families I can't imagine anyone liking this.
We already have a ton of rusted out near ghost towns. Why not invest money in one of those ?
There is a ton of room to improve on the best existing cities. Innovation in terms of the tax structure, regulatory codes, transportation grid, policing, healthcare, pandemic preparedness, and many other areas.
Poverty is still rampant in most US cities. That seems like the most pressing matter.
Just because existing conditions are adequate for those with resources doesn't mean we can't do better.
Housing supply and housing quality should be a key area of focus.
Considering my home state of California, where homeless encampments have reached the level where they are arguably towns with functional postal service, a good long winter isn't a bad thing.
Why do these billionaires have the civilizational 'vision' of video game designers?
These cities are visually stunning in the era the designer made them, but they age about as well as 'Disney Futureland'.
'Culture' is the fabric of any worthwhile city and it seems to be not even an afterthought of these futurists.
It looks like Dubai - which is in real life, a city-sized shopping mall, an unwalkable concrete and steel jungle with upper middle class American brands never more than an arms reach.
The only tiny bit of redeeming quality there is actually the culture of the tribes themselves - the Arabs make it interesting - everything else is ridiculous.
Oddly, even Monaco which has at least some kind of aesthetic foundation, when they built out the newer areas ... they look about as 'glamorous' and
'Mediterranean' as a Starbucks in a remote suburb of Toronto.
It's really not an abstract concept and yet when you try to discuss these terms to some people, it's as though the language doesn't even exist for some people to grasp.
It's really weird.
Some planned cities are successful in a civic sense, but almost zero planned cities are successful in the greater cultural sense.
That said 'Diversity of City Types' is always nice, and the world can't go entirely wrong with an American Dubai.
My first prediction is that the Latino-American and Undocumented labour force that will do 'All Of The Work' will be at serious odds with the mostly White and Asian residents, who will be forever at odds with the social quagmire that very few African Americans will ever be able to afford to live there. Kind of like the unspoken 'Social Elephant In The Room' walking around Google campus. In Dubai, nobody cares a bit about the labourers locked into contracts with absolutely no rights, in America, it will be a thing.
Describing Marc Lore as "Former Walmart executive" is true but selling him short. He founded diapers.com (sold to Amazon), and later Jet (sold to Walmart).
Being known as the guy who got steamrolled by Bezos might not inspire a positive reaction in potential investors. Then again, he's got a history of success, he just got tangled up with one of the biggest and most aggressive egos on the planet. Diapers.com was a crazy scenario - corporate fuckery at its worst.
This would be a great border city project. The only visa you need is that you are able to go back to the country of exit. Free from immigration laws and any other interference.
