Look at the Saudi’s quixotic quest to build their supercity of Neom.
For some reason the answer is never to fix existing towns that actually have people in them for a variety of reasons (resource availability, locations adjacent to ports, etc.) but to build a new city with no infrastructure or reason for being in the middle of nowhere.
I think it’s because with existing areas you can’t be ideologically pure…homeless people are already there, inequality is already evident, decay is already visible…but when you build a new “utopian city” and it’ll just be empty so you can pretend that the same societal ills that plague everything else will not show up somehow magically when (or if) the people arrive.
For some reason the answer is never to fix existing towns that actually have people in them for a variety of reasons (resource availability, locations adjacent to ports, etc.) but to build a new city with no infrastructure or reason for being in the middle of nowhere.
I think it’s because with existing areas you can’t be ideologically pure…homeless people are already there, inequality is already evident, decay is already visible…but when you build a new “utopian city” and it’ll just be empty so you can pretend that the same societal ills that plague everything else will not show up somehow magically when (or if) the people arrive.
The whole point of them is that anyone with a net worth of <X million would never be allowed within 50 miles of the place.