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Silicon Valley elites revealed as buyers of $800m of land to build utopian city
(www.theguardian.com)
Thoughts on this?
I suppose I like the idea, but I am skeptical it will be executed properly. To some extent, cities need to be able to grow organically and the masterplan needs to be able to accommodate that.
Planned cities are not necessarily a new concept, either. The modernists of the early twentieth century had plenty of ideas for what they thought the city of the future should look like. Le Corbusier, for example, emphasized housing as a “machine for living” and placed such an emphasis on organization and order that one could argue his cities would have been almost lifeless (he hated farmer’s markets and was basically a car supremacist, for example).
Obviously, these guys want to emphasize public transit and walkability which are infinitely better than Corbusier’s car-oriented proposals. I only bring up Corbusier as an example of someone whose vision was so uncompromising that it couldn’t really be adjusted for how other people wanted to live.