Metropolis
Building Utopia
Creating a city for 5 million people isn’t utopian, but building it in the desert might be
Utopias are easily dismissed. Part of this is in the name. Definitionally, utopia means “no place.” Coined by Thomas More in his 1516 classic, utopias aren’t meant to exist in the real world. They are the (sometimes) well-intentioned dreams of fallible people trying to create infallible places, wholly encompassing the interpersonal relationships, politics, economy, and day-to-day life of the imagined residents.
Biases and personal experience make it such that what may be utopian for the visionary may not be for others. Perhaps such a vision could even be dystopian. More’s imagined Utopia, after all, was a strictly regimented society that frowned on idleness and relied on slave labor, despite many of the society’s enlightened ideals. Self-determination, personal autonomy, and private property rights, hallmarks of our current world, are conspicuously absent. A utopia created and controlled by the mind of one person can never truly be enjoyed by all who are meant to live there, as their motivations, interests and priorities are varied and can’t all be captured in one simplistic ideology. Those places that come closest to meeting the mark of an idealized community are just called good places. And even the best places have many things they can improve on.
So, within this context, I want to be mindful not to dismiss the biggest news this past week from the world of urban planning as utopian, or to swat it away as the fever dream of a billionaire with too much money lying around. It’s much too important of an idea, with a greater than non-zero chance of being realized, to treat with such flippant behavior.
This week, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Joshua Brustein detailed entrepreneur Marc Lore’s ambitions to create a 5-million person city somewhere in the Southwest. At first blush, I was in awe. For several years, I’ve been a passionate student of city-building. One of the first projects that got me interested in real estate and urban planning was an eco-friendly master-planned city outside of Tianjin, China. The idea that an entirely new place could be conceived and created within a decade or two was revelatory. I wasn’t yet in high school…
