Building an entirely new city from scratch in Northern California: an environmentally friendly way of providing more housing, according to some silicon valley types
Building an entirely new city from scratch in Northern California: an environmentally friendly way of providing more housing, according to some silicon valley types
Flannery Associates, the California group behind the $800m effort, launched a website showcasing renderings
Sure, why attempt to improve the climate resilience or affordable housing in the cities where millions of people already live, when you can just buy land upstate and get a whole new toy to play with? And why tell local, state or national government anything - they'll only be supplying the land, water, sewerage, utilities & transport links. You pay your taxes, you deserve to get something back.
This is going to be one hell of a planning application. What's the land use code for "feudal stronghold"?
A sidenote: the brothers who made Stripe are involved. One of them (John I think?) was complaining on Twitter recently about all the unnecessary "environmental red tape" in Ireland.
17Classic Californian ideology. Get frustrated that an existing system isn't perfect, and decide that the only solution is to build an entirely new system separated from the old one. Promise lots of nice stuff (walkable cities yay!) but you can be sure it's only going to be available to the wealthy.
How are you going to make low-density med-style homes in CALIFORNIA cheap? 0% chance that the people doing this are in favour of rent controls. Once all the houses in the walkable areas get bought by the super rich, who's going to work in the shops? Workers will get bussed in and you'll be left with another rich person enclave that happens to have a street mall that you can walk to.
Also all of their promo-images were AI generated which bodes really well.
14Also all of their promo-images were AI generated which bodes really well.
God, I didn't even notice that. A pack of millionaires but they're too cheap to pay a concept artist.
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"Those Who Build Omelas"
10I particularly love the billionaires talking about space/Mars and colonizing it. Like that's somehow easier than lobbying for change and saving our already habitable planet.
10no irritating residents groups on Mars. And no need for an environmental impact report. It really is quite close to early colonialism
10I don't think they imagine themselves to be the ones living on Mars.
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Let's build utopia around one of the busiest air force bases in the country. The mission is air mobility command and huge cargo jets take off and land all day, every day. Used to live their. Not too bright.
7Doesn't the futurism/hopium idea of building an ideal city go back to Disney? Who does more or less have feudal stronghold rights over florida?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_(concept)
Because of these two modes of transportation, residents of EPCOT would not need cars. If a resident owned a car, it would be used "only for weekend pleasure trips."[citation needed] The streets for cars would be kept separate from the main pedestrian areas. The main roads for both cars and supply trucks would travel underneath the city core, eliminating the risk of pedestrian accidents. This was also based on the concept that Walt Disney devised for Disneyland. He did not want his guests to see behind-the-scenes activity, such as supply trucks delivering goods to the city. Like the Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World, all supplies are discreetly delivered via tunnels.
Or The Line in Saudi Arabia.
Definely Sneer-worthy, though it's sometimes worked. Napoleon redesigned Paris, which is probably a good thing. But they are stuck with that design to this day, which is probably bad.
7Way before Disney. Le Corbusier. The Garden City movement. It goes back to the Renaissance, really.
Napoleon III appointed Haussmann to redesign Paris, and he did a good job (although some aspects of the design were intended to prevent civil unrest). But Paris was already a major city. They didn't decide to build a totally new capital 60 miles from Paris. I guess St. Petersburg is a closer analogy?
12Part of the point of these ideal cities is you get you set up your own system of low taxes, privatized everything, and no democratic control of the city. Libertarian fever dream, like seasteading.
6imagine if you had taken even a moderate break from your bullshit and tried posting like this instead
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Silicon Valley elites who have been quietly buying up northern California farmland for several years have gone public with their vision for the utopian city they hope to build from scratch on 55,000 acres in Solano county.
This week the group behind the effort, Flannery Associates, launched a website for the initiative and released a series of sunny renderings showing Mediterranean-style homes and walkable and bikeable neighborhoods.
Last week, the New York Times revealed that Flannery Associates was backed by a group of prominent Silicon Valley investors and aimed to build a new city, operated using clean energy, that would create thousands of jobs while offering residents reliable public transportation and urban living.
The group of backers includes Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder; venture capitalist Michael Moritz; Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of the philanthropic group Emerson Collective and wife of the late Steve Jobs; Marc Andreessen, the investor and software developer; Patrick and John Collison, the sibling co-founders of the payment processor Stripe; and the entrepreneurs Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, the Times reported.
“People in my district are understandably alarmed at a shadowy investment group buying up large tracts of farmland, purportedly to build a new city,” Bill Dodd, a state senator, said in a statement.
“We are grateful to our elected officials for allowing us the chance to discuss our vision to deliver good-paying jobs, affordable housing, walkable communities, clean energy, sustainable infrastructure, open space, and a healthy environment,” said Brian Brokaw on behalf of California Forever.
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-1please don't.
2wtf
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