What is it about those guys (always seemingly guys) who think they know better than 6,000 years of hard-won experience of living in cities, and tell the rest of us how they’re going to bring us a new Utopia?
The recently-revealed scheme to build a dream city from scratch, branded “California Forever”, might be the newest example, but it’s also the least inventive. Exposed by a reporter from the New York Times, a group calling itself Flannery Associates surreptitiously bought, over several years, more than 22,000 hectares of farmland in mostly-rural Solano County, situated in California’s inland Central Valley about 70 miles from San Francisco. Its nearly $1bn holding makes Flannery the county’s biggest landowner. Locals had been disturbed by the tide of unexplained, over-market value purchases by unknown straw buyers. And, since a US Air Force base is next door, amid rumours the secret buyers were Chinese, the FBI also got interested. Flannery Associates turned out to be made up of Silicon Valley tech titans and venture capitalists, a familiar who’s who of predatory billionaires from Google, Apple, and LinkedIn, led, unsurprisingly, by a former trader at Goldman Sachs – the firm that brought us the 2008 housing crash.
Utopia is the rich trying to get away from everyone else to a paradise where nothing ever happens, while still having their beds made
Unmasked, the company threw up a website claiming its goal was to save Solano County, and the state, by designing a community that would solve all of urban California’s ills, namely unaffordable housing, long commutes, failing schools, homelessness, crime, water scarcity and wildfire. It offered pretty, pastel images of an idealised Tuscan hill town surrounded by bucolic fields and hills dotted with cypresses and wind turbines, and sparsely peopled by a few fortunate cyclists, kayakers and anglers. Town squares lined with historic buildings had shaded sidewalk cafes, children on bicycles, smiling people boarding public transport and spotless pavements. Its population would evidently be 95 per cent White – though possibly not the workers building the Spanish-style houses and installing solar panels (the pastel in the renderings is indistinct).
Spoiler alert: we’ve been here before. “Forever” is nothing more than a rerun of the nineteenth-century fantasy of building an “American Riviera” in California, complete with faux-Mediterranean architecture, neat, green gardens (tended by others), and copious leisure time for a fortunate few. The necessary first step is grabbing the land, whether you’re a conquistador or a real-estate developer, justifying the grab by pretending that other people don’t already live there – whether Indians, Aboriginals or fifth-generation Solano farm families. To make way for a more-perfect world, their land has to be expropriated and their way of life destroyed. Despite the would-be founders’ protestations of good intentions, their tactics argue otherwise. A concerned local congressman said Flannery had “engaged in despicable, secretive, terrible practices.” It is manifestly a cabal, running essentially the same real-estate conspiracy Los Angeles did to steal water from the rural Owens Valley in 1913 – fictionalised in the 1973 movie Chinatown.
A remake of an old plot, “California Forever” is also retrograde and unoriginal as a fantasy. But it is a fantasy that has been successfully imposed all over California, America, and lately, the rest of the world: exclusive, fake, small-town suburbs for the well-to-do, which turn their backs on common responsibilities and common solutions. All of its investors live, or have lived, in Silicon Valley, which is the Ur-suburban postwar single-family residence sprawl-topia that, by refusing to become a real city – allowing denser, taller development to accommodate more and different kinds of people – has helped create contemporary California’s Gordian knot of problems: the same ones “California Forever” pretends to magically solve with one cut.
Reading between the lines, the scheme is clearly motivated by the investors’ loathing of real Californian cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles that struggle with the consequences of suburbia’s exclusion of other people – epitomised by the homeless apocalypse that California’s leaders seem unable or unwilling to squarely face. But they are also home to tens of millions of real people living productive lives, many of them putting their creative energies to work looking for real solutions to real problems where they live – not by running away to fantasy land.
Because that is, ultimately, what Utopias are, whether mere thought experiments or brick and mortar colonies. They’re attempts to run away from real cities as they exist – as we have made them. The most risible recent examples include Oceanix City, a scheme to build a sprawling city of hexagonal dwellings floating somewhere in the ocean, powered by waves and sunlight and fed by “regenerative” coral reefs. Danish wonderboy architect Bjarke Ingels, who is fond of working on Utopian commissions for the likes of Saudi Arabia and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, drew the renderings. On one level, it is a direct but poor copy of the floating, modular cities proposed by the Japanese Metabolism movement in the 1960s – conceived as a solution to postwar Japan’s runaway population growth and lack of flat dry land for development, and theoretically modelled on nature’s processes of renewal (never mind that none of it worked in the real world). But the model more obviously resembles the piers of luxury, thousand-pound a night, “over-water” bungalows that have proliferated in the Maldives and French Polynesia. In other words, more of the same ordure: the rich trying to get away from everyone else to a paradise where nothing ever happens, while still having their meals served and their beds made.
It is also no surprise that the backers (or floaters?) of Oceanix City are part of the so-called seasteading movement: peddling visions of autonomous floating havens that take advantage of the fact that “half the world’s surface is unclaimed” in the words of one booster – in effect, free space where nobody lives. But the “autonomy” the movement speaks of is all about not paying taxes, nor sharing the job of governance with other people. It talks of paying its way using cryptocurrencies, but is funded in the real world by the likes of Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire who funds much of the radical libertarian New Right.
More alarming is when Utopia’s sponsors have more resources to deploy in the service of their fantasies. The premier dystopian Utopia du jour is The Line, a 170 kilometre long, 500 metre high, mirrored “linear smart city” in the Saudi Arabian desert, projected to house nine million people – a quarter of the kingdom’s current population. Designed by a roster of starchitects including Rem Koolhaas, Wolf Prix, and Zaha Hadid’s office, it is spangled with the usual lies about carbon neutrality and claims of “smart” tech. Indeed, it will be ruled by AI, helped by residents paid to submit surveys – in other words, a radical surveillance state, beyond even what the Chinese government has achieved. The Line is now being excavated, after one local tribal member, protesting against being displaced, was shot dead; two more were sentenced to death.
The answer to my original question about what “those guys” have over us, is blind hubris. Overestimation of their own brilliance, confidence that they can rule better than the mere mortals who build, inhabit, and strive to improve real cities, and complete incomprehension of how real cities work – which is through different people agreeing to live together. The first such “smart” guy we know about was, unsurprisingly, Plato, who pitched the first recorded Utopia in his Republic, a rigidly class-stratified, authoritarian city state where “golden” people rule over “silver,” “bronze,” and “iron” people as benevolent philosopher kings. It was of course the same brutal aristocrat/slave society that Plato lived in, only improved so that self-styled smart guys like him could run the show. Among Plato’s most recent Utopia-building avatars are Elon Musk, who boasts of how he will colonise Mars (I hope the Martians send him packing), and, unsurprisingly, real-estate developer Donald Trump. The self-proclaimed “very, very smart” Trump has called for a contest to design ten new “Freedom Cities,” to be built on public land, featuring flying cars, humming factories (due to blocking all imports from China), and “baby bonuses” for breeder women – all but one being attributes the Chinese government would approve of.
Wade Graham is an author, environmentalist and academic. He lives in LA
