Plans For $400-billion New City In The American Desert Unveiled

[sentinel]

A waste of resources to build this and an additional waste of resources to sustain it. Breathtakingly stupid.

[mhays]

Why would someone move to a "new" city in its infant stage? Therefore how could it get beyond infancy?

It's playing mind games with me. So many if-thens and challenges.

Presumably we're talking about billions in infrastructure and a completed zone before the first permanent residents show up. If someone wants to make that bet and the state is lax with entitlements, well, it's not good but it could happen.

If it's not alongside an existing city, vast worker camps would be needed. They'd need to pay more to make it worthwhile, and would likely run into problems getting experienced staff and trades since those people tend to have families.

Alternatively, if they try to start as a town and build gradually, it would first have to attract people who like towns, then people who prefer cities. The town-preferers might lose out in the end.

Big employers would face the same challenge as the construction folks if it's a remote site -- importing workers who don't mind temporary situations, possibly with great difficulty. What about spouses not having something in their specific professions? Most pertinent: Why would any major employer locate in a place with challenges finding workers?

In most cities, affordable housing outside of a limited amount of non-profit and government housing tends to be the stuff that's aged, like apartments from the 50s and 70s. Would the food-service folks need subsidies or wages at least in the $20s for a couple decades? If the inner workings of life tend to cost more because of this, wouldn't that discourage other growth?

I suspect much of the answer is long-distance commuters, likely by car in most cases. That's not very sustainable.

And billions in ongoing financial support would be needed to kick-start the whole thing operationally, in addition to the initial infrastructure costs.

Even those billions won't draw a lot of types of service until it's financially worthwhile. How else would restaurants, airlines, and washing machine repair people show up before the population got big enough, even if billions were spent on facilities?

All that in a place that hasn't merited a city before.

[plinko]

Aside from the general desert city apathy on this forum in general, I'm surprised at how many of you can't seem to see this for what it is: an exercise in real thought.

LeCorbusier, Wright, Soleri, Harrison, etc, etc. The history of 20th Century architecture and planning is riddled with guys who wanted to solve the problem of growing cities and infrastructure. They put forth ideas and concepts thought of as crazy at the time. Some of those ideas were tried, to varying degrees of success. But who paid for those ideas? Architects and planners aren't exorbitantly wealthy people who just come up with huge ideas on a whim. Somewhere there is a money source, be it government or private.

This is just the latest attempt. And BIG may come up with something amazing that can be implemented by them or others. Or not. But they are playing the game to try and get their particular point of view across and maybe affect the way our towns and cities are designed in the future. An interesting and quite noble idea.

[mhays]

The article says BIG was hired by a Walmart billionnaire to help with his vision. That doesn't sound like your scenario.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by plinko

Aside from the general desert city apathy on this forum in general, I'm surprised at how many of you can't seem to see this for what it is: an exercise in real thought.

LeCorbusier, Wright, Soleri, Harrison, etc, etc. The history of 20th Century architecture and planning is riddled with guys who wanted to solve the problem of growing cities and infrastructure. They put forth ideas and concepts thought of as crazy at the time. Some of those ideas were tried, to varying degrees of success. But who paid for those ideas? Architects and planners aren't exorbitantly wealthy people who just come up with huge ideas on a whim. Somewhere there is a money source, be it government or private.

This is just the latest attempt. And BIG may come up with something amazing that can be implemented by them or others. Or not. But they are playing the game to try and get their particular point of view across and maybe affect the way our towns and cities are designed in the future. An interesting and quite noble idea.

But these never went anywhere. Arcosanti is just a curiosity in the Arizona desert and I think Paris dodged a huuuge bullet with Plan Voisin

[Dariusb]

https://www.cnn.com/style/amp/telosa...ity/index.html
What are your thoughts? What would be the point? Sounds like a waste of money.

[jd3189]

Pretty much sounds like an ego trip, but why not if you got the money?

[YourBuddy]

1. People don’t realize how little municipal water use accounts for. Arizona for example gets 2.8 million acre-feet of water from Lake Mead every year. 20% of that is municipal. 30% is used indoors(showers, bathroom, cooking), 70% is used outdoors(lawns, xericaping, washing cars, pools, etc.) That means 168,000 acre-feet of water used indoors, and 392,000 acre-feet used outdoors. That’s for all of Arizona and how they currently use water. Agriculture uses 70% of water in Califormia and Arizona, for a total of 5 million acre-feet of water every year.

Yuma is the top producer of lettuce in the county during winter months, here is an expert I found on water use.

Within those total acres, over 8,800 acres were double cropped using a total of 60,555 acre-feet of water for an average of approximately 5.7 acre-feet of water per acre.

https://www.yumairrigation.com/crops.html

They mention in the original article for the development that it wants to use aeroponic or hydroponic farming, which uses 90% water and land. So if this replaced 150k of farm land at 5.7 acre-feet of water would be almost 900,000 acre-feet of water. I doubt they would replace all that farming with aeroponic or hydroponic farming, but just for discussion sake that would still be roughly 800,000 acre feet of water saved. So if the 7 million people living in AZ use 560,000 acre-feet of water, so this would add roughly 400,000 acre-feet of municipal water use for another 5 million people. So just under 1 million acre-feet of municipal water us for the current population of AZ plus the residents of this new city. Those are incredible numbers. Not to mention the Lake Mead only accounts for 30% of Arizona water sources. Only adding roughly 200k acre-feet of water while keeping the same amount of farms with these types of farms and adding 5 million people would be amazing. Even if they don’t replace every farm with aeroponic or hydroponic farming it will just save more water. This just shows how much water is used to farm compared to municipal use. The low water levels at Lake Mead could be completely solved with conservation in agriculture. I have a feeling the corporate agriculture lobby is behind a lot of the pro desalination talk. Like it could obviously be beneficial to some degree, but it clearly benefits that lobby to not invest in water efficient farming, while pushing subsidized desalination by the states.

2. I agree with everyone who would prefer they do these in already built cities. As well as I don’t buy that something like this will happen. Zero proof of concept for even a miniature scale of a development like this. Best way to get investors is proof of concept and there is none.

3. Bill Gates purchased a little over 20k acres west of Phoenix a few years ago and not an inch of dirt has been moved.

[Dariusb]

I made a thread about this before checking to see if one had already been made. Anyway, that money could be put to better use improving the cities we already have instead of building a new one. Such a waste.

[pj3000]

Originally Posted by plinko

Aside from the general desert city apathy on this forum in general, I'm surprised at how many of you can't seem to see this for what it is: an exercise in real thought.

LeCorbusier, Wright, Soleri, Harrison, etc, etc. The history of 20th Century architecture and planning is riddled with guys who wanted to solve the problem of growing cities and infrastructure. They put forth ideas and concepts thought of as crazy at the time. Some of those ideas were tried, to varying degrees of success. But who paid for those ideas? Architects and planners aren't exorbitantly wealthy people who just come up with huge ideas on a whim. Somewhere there is a money source, be it government or private.

This is just the latest attempt. And BIG may come up with something amazing that can be implemented by them or others. Or not. But they are playing the game to try and get their particular point of view across and maybe affect the way our towns and cities are designed in the future. An interesting and quite noble idea.

While I’m a fan of these types of big, bold visions for the “city of the future”, the problem with these utopian dreams is that architects and urban planners generally do a pretty shitty job at executing viable designs… because they’re not scientists nor engineers.

For all the eye-catching renderings with trees plopped atop high-rises and claims of being fully sustainable, economically equitable, cutting-edge technological marvels that will change the way we live, there always seem to be rather basic infrastructure impossibilities and financial realities which are overlooked and doom the creative visions to failure.

BIG does not inspire much confidence that they can somehow make it work, based on their failed “visions” for even small master-planned developments.

[isaidso]

Why build a city from scratch when there are hordes of pre-existing cities that could do with the investment? I'd rather they just poured the money into Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit, St. Louis, etc.

[Metro-One]

Don’t even need to look beyond the headline and image, not going to happen.

Just like the underground city in UAE (or was it Saudi Arabia?) and the 3000 story pyramid outside of Tokyo etc…

Just fluff engineering exercises.

[Camelback]

If this master planned city from scratch were to somehow get off the ground and become a reality, wouldn't there be people that settle outside the gates so to speak, that would organize their own new settlements with different development patterns, land use and zoning?

Washington DC had a grand plan north of the Potomac River at it's founding. Now look at the rest of Metro DC.

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by plinko

Aside from the general desert city apathy on this forum in general, I'm surprised at how many of you can't seem to see this for what it is: an exercise in real thought.

LeCorbusier, Wright, Soleri, Harrison, etc, etc. The history of 20th Century architecture and planning is riddled with guys who wanted to solve the problem of growing cities and infrastructure. They put forth ideas and concepts thought of as crazy at the time. Some of those ideas were tried, to varying degrees of success. But who paid for those ideas? Architects and planners aren't exorbitantly wealthy people who just come up with huge ideas on a whim. Somewhere there is a money source, be it government or private.

This is just the latest attempt. And BIG may come up with something amazing that can be implemented by them or others. Or not. But they are playing the game to try and get their particular point of view across and maybe affect the way our towns and cities are designed in the future. An interesting and quite noble idea.

Those architects came up with horrible plans such as Brasília and inspired the infamous projects in the US cities.

[sentinel]

Originally Posted by isaidso

Why build a city from scratch when there are hordes of pre-existing cities that could do with the investment? I'd rather they just poured the money into Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit, St. Louis, etc.

Yes, pretty much this and only this as the correct answer.

[DCReid]

Originally Posted by sentinel

Yes, pretty much this and only this as the correct answer.

And since they claim they want to consider the Appalachia region as an option, it seems that they have plenty of cities to consider and would greatly benefit that area. Other states that they are considering, such as Idaho, Nevada, AZ and TX, are doing just fine.

[wwmiv]

Originally Posted by DCReid

And since they claim they want to consider the Appalachia region as an option, it seems that they have plenty of cities to consider and would greatly benefit that area. Other states that they are considering, such as Idaho, Nevada, AZ and TX, are doing just fine.

I am sure Charleston, WV would love to become the more famous Charleston.

[Via Chicago]

its some impressive hubris that these hacks think the state/feds are going to fund their vanity project

[Manitopiaaa]

This smells like another Brasilia, and we all know how that experiment turned out.

[N90]

150,000 acres is 234 square miles for those that want some context on the physical boundaries that they're trying to attain. About the physical size of Chicago, if memory serves. With 5 million people, it'll be in a space the size of Chicago with the density of San Francisco.

It's probably a pipe dream.