#model cities

The Justice Department just rolled out its “Model Cities Initiative,” a $300M pot cities must compete for by pledging to cut violent crime and “restore law and order.” Any city over 100,000 people has until Sept. 1 to apply, with winners picked later this year.

Read More: https://thefreethoughtproject.com/cop-watch/trumps-model-cities-creates-a-brutality-contest-for-police

Telosa, USA

Bloomberg: The Diapers.com Guy Wants To Build A Utopian Megalopolis

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I like Georgism as much as anyone else, but I’m not sure a new city in the desert is the right place to try it. Land in the desert is already really cheap. You’d have to really succeed at building a pretty big and desirable city before landlords started capturing a lot of value.

Also, model cities are a weird match for Georgism, because a big part of Georgism is that landowners don’t deserve credit for their land becoming valuable; the land is valuable because it’s in a big desirable city. But in model cities, the landowner (usually the model city founder) is responsible for the city being big and desirable. Usually the founder would keep the land and use the rent to recoup their investment in making the city.

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But let’s not think of depressing things like that! Let’s focus on how innovative and diverse and inclusive Telosa is going to be!

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There’s a lot of stuff like this. Concerned about education? Telosa will have an innovative diverse inclusive educational system where every student is above average. Concerned about unemployment? Telosa will have lots of innovative diverse inclusive jobs for everybody! How? Usually some bullshit answer like “by fostering a culture of innovative diverse inclusiveness” or something.

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I’m more skeptical of Telosa than some other projects for two reasons. First is that the other projects are libertarian, and libertarianism is easy; if you want to avoid taxes, and you find a jurisdiction that won’t tax you too much, congrats, you’ve achieved your dream. But if you want to build the innovative diverse inclusive city of the future, you have to ask yourself what advantage you have over all the other cities that wish they could do this, but are currently failing (ie all of them). And second, the other projects contain a little bit of an authoritarian element, so that there’s a clear path between the founders wanting something and it being likely to happen - and if there’s any of this in Telosa, they’re hiding it pretty well.

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Prospera, Honduras

The latest from Prospera is some kind of drama with the neighboring community of Crawfish Rock over water rights.

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I’m probably biased here, but I trust Devon more than I trust some anti-tech e-zine. Other sources confirm that Crawfish Rock citizens have had big problems getting water for a long time. Rest Of World wasn’t really able to deny that Prospera gave Crawfish Rock water when they really needed it, try as they might to make it sound sinister. And they weren’t able to deny that their only condition was that the city officially say they wanted it, which sounds like a pretty reasonable demand with the news coverage being what it is.

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Auroville, India

I recently learned about this place, and it’s pretty crazy:

The story is: in the 1910s, a nice Jewish girl moved to India to find herself and fell in with a guru named Sri Aurobindo. Fast forward twenty years and she is calling herself “The Mother” and running what an uncharitable observer might consider maybe sort of kind of a cult.

Fast forward another twenty years and she has a vision of a city built for all humanity. A city where mankind can complete its spiritual transformation into a higher being. A city with a giant gold golf ball in the middle.

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Auroville was originally planned for 50,000 people, but has about 2,500 official citizens, and about another 10,000 squatters. It seems like an, ahem, highly selected population. From a great Slate article on the town:

Another woman I met from America told me that she’d moved to Auroville because everything in the States “just feels really fake.” She was on the waiting list to become an Aurovilian, a two-year process that requires applicants to prove they are self-sustainable and dedicated to the cause. Applicants are not allowed to leave Auroville for two years and must work for free as a contribution to the township. After two years they face the Entry Services, a small group that reviews applications and ultimately decides who can become an Aurovilian. An Aurovilian from Germany who worked for Entry Services told me her primary job was to weed out what she called “the cuckoos.” I didn’t ask what that meant.

Despite housing the remnants of the Mother’s cult and getting large subsidies from the Indian government (which apparently has some kind of sentimental attachment to it), Auroville currently seems kind of anarchic.

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There’s supposed to be some sort of moneyless card-based gift economy, but:

When I arrived I was forced to buy (with cash) an Aurocard, and told to use it in shops and restaurants around the township. It was a bit like a meal card in college: If I lost it, I would have to pay a $10 fine (in cash). But the idea hadn’t quite caught on. The first shop where I tried my Aurocard asked for cash instead. As did the second. When the third asked for cash, I asked why the Aurocard existed. The shopkeeper shrugged uninterestedly.

And the voluntary consensus-based utopian governing structures don’t really seem to work and nobody really knows who is in charge of fixing it. Problems include "robbery, sexual harassment, rape, suicide, and even murder".

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Honestly the only part of this story which surprises me at all is that the Mother was a Sephardic Jew; usually it’s us Ashkenazi who end up in these kinds of situations.

Elsewhere In Model Cities

— An attempt to turn a cruise ship into a cryptocurrency-themed seastead has failed.

— The Charter Cities Institute has created a Governance Handbook. If you just remembered that you have to govern a charter city tomorrow and forgot to study, this is your cram sheet.

Model Cities Rally, 1971

Children gathered around a park model at the Model Cities rally, 1971.

  City of Portland (OR) Archives, A2010-003.8477.

  View this image in Efiles by clicking here.

Bill and Hugh, together again

Here is my July 20, 1995, column from The Providence Journal about my father and his best friend, who both were city planners. The images are photographed from an old copy of the column, so I apologize if the expressions of their faces are not entirely clear.

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Pictured above are two men at their desks. The man on the left does not have the same “let’s get this over with” look evident in the…

Para ver en español, haz clíc aquí. 

‘Model cities’, a radical libertarian social and development experiment, is getting a trial run in the Central American country of Honduras. The model cities idea, now re-branded in Honduras as ZEDEs (Zonas de Empleo y Desarrollo Económico, Zones for Employment and Economic Development), is simple: privatise everything within a specific territory the size of a small city, including social services, the justice system, and the government itself, and all your problems will be solved! Reality is not that simple, of course, and it seems that ZEDEs will simply exacerbate Honduras’ existing problems, which include rampant corruption, suspension of the rule of law, a democratic deficit, land grabbing, and widespread poverty. In this video, we visit two communities who are threatened by the prospect of ZEDEs. On Honduras’ north coast, the Garifuna, an Afro-indigenous people, have seen tourism developments eat away at their communal lands over the years thanks to illegal land sales facilitated by corrupt notaries and land registrars. On the Pacific coast, we visit a campesino community whose access to fishing and farming has been cut off by rich Honduran elites scrambling to grab beachfront property. In both cases, communities fear that the creation of a ZEDE will accelerate land grabbing as investors, both foreign and national, rush to empty the territories of their native populations and clear the way for development mega-projects.

The Vancouver Model versus El Modelo Barcelona: Trevor Boddy talks, Francesc Muñoz responds.

The Canadian port city of Vancouver has entered centre stage of the global debate about future directions for cities in the sustainability era. Impressed with how increased residential density is used to create developer-funded public amenities there, American architects and urbanists first started speaking a decade ago of “Vancouverizing” their downtowns to make them more lively, sustainable…