The New-City Playbook, Honestly Assessed
Separating the visionary from the vaporware.
Announcements of brand-new cities arrive with stunning renderings and enormous ambition. A sober look at the category reveals which approaches have any chance and which are perpetual press releases.
Demand Before Density
The new cities that progress start from a real demand driver — an industry, an institution, a migration pattern — not from a master plan in search of residents. Build it and they come is not a strategy.
Patience and phasing separate the serious from the speculative. City-building is a multi-decade act of capital discipline, not a launch event.
Get analysis like this weekly
One free issue a week. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Related news
Master-Planned Communities and the Anchor Problem
A master-planned community lives or dies on its anchor — the use that gives early residents a reason to be there before the rest exists. Choosing it wrong dooms everything downstream. The Cold-Start of Place Like any network, a new community faces a cold-start problem: amenities…
Can a City Be a Startup?
A wave of founders is approaching city-building with startup methods: iterate, scale, disrupt the permitting status quo. Some of that translates. Much of it collides with physics and politics. Atoms Don't Move at Software Speed You can A/B test a landing page; you cannot A/B…