The Guardian looks at a billionaire’s plan to build a $400 billion “city of the future” in a U.S. desert.
The city — to be named Telosa — “doesn’t exist yet, nor is it clear which state will house the experiment, but the architects of the proposed 150,000-acre project are scouting the American south-west.”
They’re already predicting the first residents can move in by 2030. Telosa will eventually house 5 million people, according to its website, and benefit from a halo of utopian promises: avant-garde architecture, drought resistance, minimal environmental impact, communal resources. This hypothetical metropolis promises to take some of the most cutting-edge ideas about sustainability and urban design and make them reality. The plan combines ideas about urban farming (the “beacon” tower of the project will house aeroponic farms) and quality of life (a city where everyone can live and work and play within a 15-minute commute) alongside new green technologies and a model of land ownership proposed, but never executed, by the 19th-century economist Henry George. These are ideas that have remained in the abstract or only attempted on a small scale; now they will have a whole American metropolis to experiment with, brought to life by the creative ambitions of one very rich man.

Telosa certainly is a city of the future, but not in, like, a great way. Yes, it probably will have a very shiny public transportation system, but it seems futuristic more in the sense that, as the world deteriorates, the ultra-rich seem increasingly interested in telling the rest of us how to live. No longer content to just sneer down at us from their private jets, they take over our homes, our towns, our society… As anyone who has an adult relative who rules over their basement miniature train set with an iron fist, or who has spent any time on social media listening to 22-year-old leftists talk about what life will be like after “the revolution”, knows, a lot of people have ideas about the way cities, countries and societies should work. We are usually protected from seeing those ideas realized, and dealing with the consequences of their megalomania, simply by preventing any one person from building enough wealth or power. But I have something to tell you about the tax policy of the last couple decades and the way a small number of people have benefited, and you’re not going to like it…

The ideas of this fake little town are grand! Green architecture, environmental technology, “transparent governance”, innovative urban planning ideas — if this works, it could advance our thinking on how humans can exist in a changing world and live harmonious lives during the coming environmental and economic calamities. But it won’t work. It won’t work because one guy doesn’t get to decide how the world, or even a city, should work. Even if he’s collaborating with the greatest “thinkers” and architects and scientists of our time, just a glance through Lore’s portfolio will reveal that all of his …read more

Source:: Slashdot