An American case for building new cities

ities are platforms for prosperity. They’re what happens when people come together, foster economic opportunity, and build everything else good about human life on top. Suffice it to say, I have opinions on the matter and they’re resoundingly pro-urban.

A question was posed to me, though. Namely, should we be building new cities?

My short answer is yes.

Cities are good and we need more good things.

My longer answer is that no existing city is perfect and many of the challenges that need to be addressed through reform could be avoided entirely if we were starting over with perfect hindsight. What’s more, properly executed, building new cities could add energy to already active urban reform movements. They’re a chance to prove what’s possible to normal people and rally them to the cause of creating the better versions of the cities we have today.

The most obvious way to make the case for city-building is to simply point out that existing cities aren’t perfect and reforming them is hard.

In the US, San Francisco has been the poster child for urban dysfunction for several years now. The city famously took 27 years to build bus rapid transit. It also takes longer than any other city in California to do the paperwork to allow new housing.

How is it that the epicenter of global tech can be so bad at seemingly basic functions?

Well, in the case of the Van Ness BRT, the city suffered from poor planning and disputes with contractors. It also ran into a slew of unmapped underground infrastructure including a long-lost (but definitely still in-use) water pipe that workers accidentally ruptured, flooding a major intersection and costing the project month’s worth of time.

As for the box-checking necessary for building permits, a gauntlet of mandatory public hearings and a presumption that the answer will be “No”, until proven otherwise creates a sieve through which only a scant few projects ever emerge to become actual housing.

That said, San Francisco, unfortunately, isn’t actually that special. Cities across the US are uniformly incapable of executing on major public works projects. They all also run permitting processes similar to San Francisco’s highly “participatory” system, each born of the post-war urban consensus that growth was suspect and cities themselves might actually be bad.

All that is just political and organizational infrastructure, though. As hard as it is to rework social systems, reshaping atoms in the built environment might be even harder.

Post-war urban development in the US has been decidedly car-centric.

We reshaped the built environment to make cars make sense but, in many places, we’ve reached the point where personal automobile use no longer scales. Shifting back to higher capacity forms of transit, however, is hard. There’s no magic wand we can wave to instantly replace 27 lanes with a multi-modal transit system built around commuter rail as its backbone.

In existing cities, we struggle against the dead hand of the past. In new cities, perhaps we wouldn’t have to.

California Forever, a proposed new city project in the outer reaches of the San Francisco Bay Area, is a great example of how that could play out. From day 0, the entrepreneurs behind the project have made it clear that they want to build a place where people can walk their kids to school, safely bike to work, and actually afford the house they’ll return home to in the evening.

Achieving those goals will require design choices like mixed-use zoning, dedicated transit lanes, protected bike lanes, and levels of density sufficient to maintain affordability.1 While reformers in cities across the US have been working on making these changes to existing cities, a project like California Forever could bypass those challenges completely.

That’s both because there are no stroads to unmake and because there’s no ossified political system to wrestle. Starting from scratch can free us from the decisions of dead men.2

Up to now we’ve been talking about avoiding the past’s mistakes. But new cities offer another type of opportunity and that’s to get to the future faster.

Once upon a time, everyone in the professional development community was enamoured of something called M-Pesa. The mobile-based payment system allowed people in places like Kenya or Mozambique to transact digitally using nothing but their cell phones.3

What’s this have to do with anything? Well, it’s a great example of people being able to leapfrog legacy tech. In the absence of branch banking, consumer credit cards, or land line telephones, people in places all over Africa jumped straight to a mobile payment system. Deploying technology in new cities might allow us to do much the same thing.

With technology, there’s no evolutionary path society is obliged to tread or tech tree we have to climb. If we’re starting from scratch, we can skip outdated urban infrastructure and go straight to what works. For a more urbanist-relevant example, though, let’s consider the power grid.

Electrical systems in existing North American cities were built with certain assumptions which did not include the complete electrification of the economy (or even electricity as the main power source for personal automobiles). Neither did it assume the massive increase in electrical demand from modern data centers, especially since the advent of the LLM.

A new grid for a new city, however, could deploy the most up to date technology, built for what we now know modern energy demands will be. Again, starting from scratch can not only unburden us of the past, it can also help us speed run our way into the future.

For all the good that can come from building alternatives, there’s another angle here as well. Fast-forward fifty years and I suspect most Americans who live in cities will be doing so in ones that already exist today. Even under the most supportive conditions imaginable, city building is as capital intensive as it is time consuming, and that’s even if we can get the underlying economics right. There’s only so much that we can do in the span of decades.

That said, building new cities that exemplify everything we want existing cities to become could help further the project of reform. If we can demonstrate what’s possible — and how good urban life can be — we can accelerate the reform movements already underway.

There’s a certain subset of human beings that will read a white paper or blog post series and come out the other side with strong convictions about things like nuclear energy, high-speed rail, or ranked-choice voting.

In this regard, we are not normal.4

Most people decide they like something on the basis of personal experience.

Want to turn an American on to urbanism as a lifestyle (or just get them excited about commuter rail)? Send them to Barcelona or Tokyo for a week. Or have them be born a New Yorker. Lived experience is the strongest basis for individual opinion.

The best way to demonstrate to people what we could and should demand from existing cities is to create the version of the world we want to see. Building these examples in the US would be significant as well.

Even the most pro-urban American vacationers often return from abroad convinced that what works in Spain or Japan could never work here. It's as if people believe there’s some ineffable element of Spanish or Japanese society that makes them preternaturally good at trains (there is not).

But the sense that we’ve somehow lost the ability to do new things is a real and pervasive sentiment in our culture. In some ways, I think that was a self inflicted wound.

For over half a century, we’ve told ourselves that the places we live have to be built a certain way. Car-centric sprawl with nothing but single-family homes as far as the eye can see has physically separated us from both each other and everywhere else we might want to be.

Further, we’ve convinced ourselves that once laid out, nothing should ever change. Ever. So of course we believe we’re incapable of doing anything new or building anything better; we’ve literally bound ourselves in rules designed to prevent exactly that for over three generations.

If we want to change the minds of Americans across the country, we need to build the change we want to see. And in so doing, provide Americans a positive vision of what they can demand in and from the places they choose to call their home.

So, once again, I say yes — let’s build some new cities.

If we can create better urbanism for more people sooner, I’m all for it. The easiest freeway to tear down is the one you never built. Much the same goes for tech—sometimes, starting fresh is better than upgrading.

On a deeper level, though, we stand to reclaim something that we seem to have lost. We need to believe that we can still build something new, that we can still get something right. My hope would be that building new cities might not only provide immediate material benefits, but cultural ones as well. And, in so doing, put us back on a path to not just creating new, but also improving old.

This essay is by Jeff Fong, author of Urban Proxima. It is part of CITY STATE, a collection of seven writers exploring autonomous governance through an online series and print pamphlet.