"New" Cities? An Old Idea
This image depicts one kind of neighborhood being considered for the proposed California Forever planned city development in eastern Solano County in California. It looks great -- yet it also looks like dozens of neighborhoods that line Chicago's boulevards today. Source: californiaforever.com
As a kid I used to draw imaginary cities all the time. I was inspired by a trip to Disney World when I was 11 years old and I saw the Magic Kingdom’s Main Street USA and EPCOT. Without even knowing the truth I realized they were designed environments, meant to evoke certain feelings from visitors. It was something that brought many people into the field of planning. It brought me into it.
As I got older and understood more about the inequalities of cities, I shifted from wanting to create new cities to wanting to make existing cities better. Growing up in Detroit in the ‘70s, I saw an inner city that did not stoke the passions of people but had the potential to do so. I saw suburbs that were also less than inspiring in the public realm, mostly because they were inwardly focused, private environments. I viewed cities as being closer to realizing that potential.
But honestly, the desire to create imaginary cities never completely went away. It’s a desire that urbanists have been trying to fulfill for centuries. The proposed effort to create a new city in California’s eastern Solano County, between Sacramento and San Francisco, is but the latest effort to reimagine cities.
Quote from the New York Times article:
“In 2017, Michael Moritz, the billionaire venture capitalist, sent a note to a potential investor about what he described as an unusual opportunity: a chance to invest in the creation of a new California city.
The site was in a corner of the San Francisco Bay Area where land was cheap. Mr. Moritz and others had dreams of transforming tens of thousands of acres into a bustling metropolis that, according to the pitch, could generate thousands of jobs and be as walkable as Paris or the West Village in New York.
He painted a kind of urban blank slate where everything from design to construction methods and new forms of governance could be rethought. And it would all be a short distance from San Francisco and Silicon Valley. “Let me know if this tickles your fancy,” he said in the note, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times.”
Moritz was able to get the buy-in of many of Silicon Valley’s tech elite, and they began buying up every piece of eastern Solano County that they could, currently totaling more than 50,000 acres. That’s more land area than the entirety of San Francisco today.
The company that was buying properties had the benign name of Flannery Associates. However, since the New York Times article came out, California Forever has been revealed as the parent company of Flannery Associates and the thrust behind the new city movement.
The eastern Solano County site is indeed a good location for development, particularly for a part of California that struggles with housing affordability. Only an hour’s drive from Sacramento and San Francisco, the site is lightly populated, unincorporated ranchland situated just north of where the Sacramento and San Juaquin rivers come together before emptying into San Francisco Bay. Perhaps its perceived isolation kept it from being developed earlier? It’s not served by an interstate highway; California’s State Route 12 travels through the area, but is mostly a low-capacity two-lane highway.
The California Forever proposal is just the latest in a long line of planned “new” cities designed to reimagine urban living in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution. Most were conceptual, but a few did become real. These planned cities and concepts come to mind:
o The Savannah, GA grid plan implemented by Savannah founder James Oglethorpe in the 1730’s;
o The Washington, DC diagonal plan developed by Pierre Charles L’Enfant and Andrew Ellicott in the 1790’s;
o Paris’ grand renovation over nearly a century led by Georges-Eugene Hausmann, starting in 1853;
o Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City Movement that sought the creation of satellite settlements on the outskirts of cities, beginning in the 1890’s; and
o The Plan of Chicago published by Daniel Burnham in 1909.
The planned cities or concepts above all created walkable, human-scaled environments in tune with the pre-auto era, whether majestic (Washington, DC, Paris, Chicago) or unpretentious (Savannah, garden cities). The widespread use of the automobile in the 20th century, however, prompted new versions of new cities:
o The expansive, decentralized, auto-oriented vision of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, which he began developing in the 1920’s;
o The General Motors-produced Futurama presented at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City, designed by Norman Bel Geddes; and
o The original plans for Walt Disney’s Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT).
But if you think the idea of creating new cities from scratch has disappeared, think again. Today they’re more commonly known as master planned communities. They often start in the same way that the California Forever project has started, where plenty of land is available. Three examples:
o Summerlin in Las Vegas, a 35 square-mile area with more than 100,000 residents at the western edge of the Las Vegas Valley, developed over the last 30 years;
o The Woodlands north of Houston, a 43 square-mile area with more than 115,000 residents, developed over the last 40 years; and
o Irvine, the southern Orange County community in California that’s grown from just a few thousand residents in the 1950’s to more than 300,000 today – and planned at every step.
So what makes the California Forever/eastern Solano County project different? Nothing, really. It’s just the latest iteration of humanity’s attempt to construct utopia.
I see three important lessons that can be learned from planned cities. First, the planned cities that actually come closest to full development are the ones that are fairly top-down in their orientation. L’Enfant and Ellicott were given wide latitude to plan a grand Washington, DC. Hausmann was granted the royal authority of France’s Napoleon III to radically remake Paris. Cities that don’t have a leader to champion the concept (for example, Chicago’s Burnham Plan after its release) will only see bits and pieces of its plans implemented.
Second, I’d say that attempts to employ the latest technologies into the fabric of a planned city will likely lead to a very short shelf life. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City and GM’s Futurama are both examples of going all-in on auto-centered development. They were designed when there was little thought given to the impact of sprawling development on the environment, or on society. Auto-oriented societies expand the world of those who can afford cars, and constrict the world of those who can’t.
Thirdly, more than anything, planned cities speak to the human fascination of new things over old. I think this is a trait most evident in the United States, a nation built on reinvention. Americans are drawn to the newest places and will happily ditch the old places they came from. And honestly, I view this as a flaw. More people are identifying as urbanists today because walkability, mixed use and transit accessibility have been rediscovered after nearly a century of suburban sprawl. Suburbs are struggling to adapt because they haven’t adapted to the changing lifestyles, work environments and household types that characterize modern living. Americans prefer to shed the old and embrace the new.
But in my mind, places aren’t disposable. There’s something to be learned from every type of place, something that’s worth saving – and building on – nearly every place ever built. I’d much rather see more people working on making existing places better than creating more new ones.