It’s been a rough few years for American cities. Rent skyrocketed to all-time highs in 2022, along with homelessness. A slight uptick in crime has propelled a hysterical, nationwide panic and subsequent brutal crackdown. Climate change is increasingly putting homes underwater, depriving them of water, or setting them on fire. Public transit is underfunded, under attack, or nonexistent. A proliferation of impersonal service apps designed to make life frictionless only serves to alienate users and subjugate precarious workers. And somehow everything looks so boring, with sterile five-over-ones and Blank Street coffee shops homogenizing the country’s urban landscape. What is to be done about this sorry state of affairs?
A number of ambitious visionaries have come forward with a bold solution: building new, high-tech cities from scratch. The idea is hardly without precedent. As Adrian Shirk writes in Heaven Is a Place on Earth, “Utopia-making emerges in force especially during times of economic and social precarity, after wars, depressions, natural disasters, sexual revolutions.” The aftermath of the acute phase of the Covid-19 pandemic surely qualifies. But while the sentiment is appropriately timed, the sponsors of these would-be utopias might come as a surprise. Rather than free-loving hippies or left-wing radicals seeking to resurrect experiments in collective living, these highly publicized schemes for urban paradises have been hatched, by and large, by conservative billionaires.
In March of this year, former president Donald Trump suggested constructing futuristic “Freedom Cities” on federal land; the start-up Praxis Society, known for hosting tedious salons in downtown Manhattan and backed by major Silicon Valley VC powers like Peter Thiel and the Winklevoss twins, is conspiring to create a “city-cryptostate” in the Mediterranean; and Elon Musk recently released plans for Snailbrook, a “Texas utopia” for employees of The Boring Company and SpaceX. Not to be outdone, at least one liberal billionaire has also entered the fray. Marc Lore—the diapers.com founder, former Walmart executive, current Minnesota Timberwolves co-owner, and, in 2020, Mayor Pete max donor—has proposed “Telosa,” an ultra-modern green city to be built in the American Southwest, or possibly Appalachia, and governed under the invented ideology of “equitism,” a yet-to-be-explained mélange of democracy, capitalism and socialism. (If that sounds underbaked, Lore once copped to not reading books because it “takes time away from thinking.”)
In his 1972 speculative travelogue Invisible Cities, the novelist Italo Calvino writes, “With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear.” So what do these cities desire, and what do they fear? The answer, of course, lies within the feverish unconscious of their dreamers.
Castles in the Sky
Most palpable in the quixotic promotional materials for each of these projects is a yearning for scale. These are not proposals for a new waterfront skyscraper or an upzoned industrial neighborhood but an entire centrally planned ecosystem, a reclamation of infrastructural ambition not seen since the postwar period, when cities were hollowed out and suburbs swelled. This is Robert Moses, not Hudson Yards.
Moses, the master planner, reshaped the entire landscape of New York City and its surrounding areas. From a bevy of unelected perches, he imposed a unilateral vision of modernity, raising countless bridges, tunnels, parks, housing projects, and highways while razing the homes of thousands of the urban poor and restricting their ability to escape to the region’s natural splendor. Obsessively focused on choking New York with commuter highways, his decades-long career in many ways reshaped urban space toward the wants and needs of white suburbanites.
While these billionaire projects share that goal, as well as Moses’s scale of aspiration and scorn for democracy, their blank-slate settings harken back to something even earlier. Both Trump and Praxis have spoken of reopening the frontier, with Praxis citing the God-given drive of America’s and Israel’s founders (plus the Dutch East India Company) as inspiration. Meanwhile, Telosa borrows its name from the ancient Greek word for “highest purpose.” It is difficult, apparently, when proposing to build life where once there was none, not to get a little religious—at least when it comes to branding.
With the ambition to invent a new world, or take over an old one, comes appropriately lofty technological goals. Evoking The Jetsons, Trump spoke of flying cars for his Freedom Cities. Praxis founder Dryden Brown has called for “modern transportation. Modular construction. . . . Decentralized currency,” adding that “the next Apple might be a city.” Animated renderings of Telosa, courtesy of the Danish starchitect and Bolsonaro buddy Bjarke Ingels, show gleaming eco-modernist towers, a sleek elevated monorail, and a sky buzzing with drones. Curiously, the plans claim that, somehow, the desert city will be a net exporter of water.
This agglomeration of old and new is best captured in the confused aesthetic vision of each project. Trump positioned his Freedom Cities as a challenge for governors to mount a “modernization and beautification campaign,” but if his December 2020 executive order that new federal buildings be designed in classical styles is any indication, Freedom Cities will likely ban anything modern in favor of a Greco-Roman McMansion hodge-podge alongside “towering monuments to our true American heroes.” While the blueprints for Musk’s fantasy town seem to resemble a standard Levittown-lite suburban tract, the stylistically non-conservative artists Grimes and Ye have been tapped to plan Snailbrook’s look. Praxis’s artistic vision is similarly muddled; on Twitter, their countless
