Header Ads

The greatest (unbuilt) city in the world

Today's top tech stories:

  • Apple's next Watch has run into production snags with its new design
  • Google and Apple would be forced under a proposed law to open their App Stores in South Korea to allow payments outside the platforms 
  • Misbehavior on Zoom calls leads to firings, 1 in 4 bosses say

A Shining City on a Hill

Marc Lore, who has amassed a fortune by building e-commerce websites, now wants to invest that money into building something much different — a 5 million-person, from-the-ground-up city called Telosa that can serve both as a showcase for new technologies and a new form of private-public governance. "The size of the prize is to change the world," he told me.

This is only the latest example of a long-running temptation of people from the U.S. tech industry to try reinvent the basic formulas of urban life by building new cities. There are no big successes so far, and there are a lot of things that Lore has to figure out if his project, which I wrote about in the cover story of this week's Businessweek magazine, is going to be the first. 

The most immediate may be actually finding a place to build the thing. Lore's team is looking for about 200,000 acres -- about the size of New York City -- and says they've narrowed the sites down to about a half-dozen states, mostly in the West. They've even identified a few 50,000-100,000-acre parcels that might be worth buying to start out. Until they actually secure some land, they're just dreaming.

RCLCO Real Estate Consulting, the firm conducting Lore's search for a site, says a major factor will be cooperation from the government. The desire for pliant government partners has led other city-builders to look outside the U.S. to countries such as Honduras, whose government has set up a controversial program to enable the creation of privately governed cities within its borders. Nothing like that exists within the U.S., but Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak has been promoting a plan to give a lot of leeway to private developers involved in certain technologies to take on some traditional government functions within their own "innovation zones." 

The amount of open land, proximity to California and the presence of international airports work in Nevada's favor, too. But Sisolak's plan is helping Nevada become a focal point for private city developers. Lore's team is clearly excited about it, although it's trying to keep its options open for now. When Telosa's architects presented some hypothetical sites to Lore to discuss design ideas in July, they were all in the state. Another developer, Jeffrey Berns, has acquired 60,000 acres near Reno to build "a world transformed by blockchain technology, in which the distinct line between digital- and real-world interactions no longer exists."

Still, Sisolak's rules haven't yet passed, and not everyone wants them to. The Storey County government, where Berns bought his land, is opposing them. County officials say they are eager to have new high-tech development, but the master plan already allows for that, and creating private governments is going to cause new problems. "Separating the county into a different type of government system altogether, where the county is going to pay into their services but have no control, that's not going to work," Austin Osborne, Storey County manager, told me. "And it's not necessary."

This kind of conflict is likely to dog Telosa if it gets off the ground, too. Lore says he wants to build new kinds of institutions because people have lost faith in government, but people don't necessarily have much faith in private city-builders, either. Silicon Valley's most prominent city-building project to date, a proposal for a 12-acre development by Alphabet Inc.-affiliated Sidewalk Labs, inspired immense public opposition and collapsed this spring (though the company said the reason it was giving up was the pandemic, not local controversy.)

The more any plan relies on concessions from government, the trickier the politics are going to get, and Storey County's opposition to handing power to private developers foreshadows other likely controversies over issues such as water rights. Aspiring city builders argue that politics get in the way of solving issues that wouldn't be so hard if they had a blank slate. Unfortunately for them, there's no such thing.Joshua Brustein in New York.

If you read one thing

Hurricane Ida spurs calls for wireless networks to buttress their systems against natural disasters after services including New Orleans 911 dispatch failed in the storm.

Here's what else you need to know

Google joins fellow tech giants in once again delaying return-to-office plans, this time until January.

Pinterest is a rare loser among social media stocks.

No comments