> They dont really seem too, though. Theres a lot of examples of rich people building towns even in these comments. Is there any evidence tech moguls do it any more frequently?
The OP didn't really establish it (e.g. take an inventory of all Americans building utopian cities, and see if tech moguls are over-represented), but I wouldn't be surprised if it was true. The combination of experience with disruptive innovation, engineer's syndrome, and power would seem like a recipe for these kinds of cities, though a less productive one than near-absolute power over some polity.
Also, a lot of the towns mentioned in the comments pre-date tech moguls.
> Towns are an interesting case where the free market system breaks.
What you're observing isn't the output of a free market; for that, see towns built primarily up until about the 1930s; these are traditional, walkable towns, with a coherent downtowns and organic patterns of settlement.
Since then, zoning laws and land-use planning have drastically altered the common patterns of development and led to the rise of master-planned subdivisions that are all too common today.
If not for the artificial segregation of residential and commercial uses and for equally artificial restrictions on density of development, modern suburbs would likely be smaller satellite towns, each with its own coherent walkable core, instead of megatowns with purely residential sprawl extending great distances away from the only urban core permitted to be developed.
> I am no Luddite, but I think that perhaps taking a step backwards in time could be an interesting experiment - create more towns that are self-sufficient, grow their own crops, build their own houses, etc. It seems like much of the wealth is getting boiled down into the hands of fewer and fewer big companies.
Maybe it would be different now, what with communications technology like the internet making proximity to major city centers less important. But to me, this doesn't sound like a practical solution
> Maybe there is some type of awful natural law to be found even?
Maybe. You've got two examples so far. Can you go even further back? Which cities were industrial hubs prior to Silicon Valley and Detroit, and what became of them?
Mill towns from the industrial revolution come to mind. Factories and boarding houses created such thriving industry that towns literally spawned around them, but within decades they transformed into abandoned buildings in towns devoid of any economic opportunity.
> An interesting question to ask is why do we always seem to grow by increasing density rather than establishing new small towns?
That would be increasing the density of the rural area the new small town springs up in. New towns do spring up in places where they can, but it's usually either some company drops a facility there and then housing pops up to support the facility as people decide they'd like a shorter commute, etc; or it's in the outskirts of built up areas, but then people complain about sprawl.
> Unfortunately wealthy established homeowners don't want more people to near to them so they vote against any and all change.
Sometimes poor established renters also don't want change.
In the 20th century a lot of cities grew practically 'out of nowhere'. Why has that stopped? That's a great pressure relief valve and gets new buyers/renters out of a vicious feedback loop caused by the tendency of already cash-or-property-rich people to concentrate resources.
"The opportunity/jobs are there" is historically the answer, for millennia of cities. But does it have to be that forever? In the 20th century US, there were a lot of explicit government interventions and such that caused things like the defense industry to sprawl across countless different states and counterbalance it. What would that look like in a post-2020 world?
> a neighborhood would be gigantic pyramidal buildings of capable of being self-sustaining in terms of labor, housing, recreation, food production, etc. but then the economy tanked and pop growth flatlined and we have relative slow decline and forgotten are those grand dreams of the future.
Those were a fantasy, though, surely. I doubt we could make such structures (I think sometimes called arcologies?) work with todays technology, even if we had the resources and no regulatory hurdles. Maybe in a hundred years...
>Also, a lot of the towns mentioned in the comments pre-date tech moguls.
That's kind of what I'm saying. Rich people making their own dream cities is probably as old as rich people and cities. Ig I could see an explosion of home automation tech giving more people a reason to try, though
Anything car-centric is worse designed. That does not mean we have to ban cars 100%, but simply design things so the car is an option rather than a necessity.
> Eventually Silicon Valley will end up like Detroit, with abandoned 4-over-1 condo complexes and empty office parks where the software industry once stood.
What if the secular demand for living in Silicon Valley is higher than Detroit? What if Detroit was desirable due to the economics and infrastructure constraints of that time, but what if people like the other aspects, such as location and weather,of living somewhere?
Not that it’s not possible for that to change either, but my point is different pieces of land may be more or less desirable than others outside of economic conditions.
> The only reason my town is dense and walkable is due to geography. It was settled 250 years ago and it is nestled on a river between two "mountains" (really just big hills) so once all the available space filled up 100 years ago it just stopped growing (my house is on the outskirts of town and was built 115 years ago).
It's not geography, it's history. The only nice places in the US are places that were built before cars.
> Factories usually push down the value of land. Who wants to be next to a smokestack?
Factory workers. Then service workers who sell their food and cut their hair. Then doctors and nurses and police and firefighters and so on who are needed wherever people are concentrated. How do you think places go from being an empty field to a town?
> Which is all very well, except there basically isn't anybody who doesn't care about location and attracts investment. Location is important for everybody.
Then why do Boeing and Ford and GE build their factories in rural areas instead of in Manhattan?
They weren't first. Low density agricultural settlements are not suburbs, which are by definition an extension of the urban area, populated primarily by people not engaged in the agricultural economy, but rather the industrial economy.
To this day, suburbs are frequently built on top what were previously agricultural settlements, with somewhat similar densities but completely different functions.
> The alternate future would have seen everyone living in dense urban areas paying most of their wages as rent to the descendants of gilded age land owners.
Which is what is happening now anyway. The suburban sprawl merely delayed it by a few decades (okay, maybe half a century, to be generous), but all the underlying issues with it are still there.
>Not every town can simply cluster everything in one place
Of course they can. Why can't they? They have chosen not to. We can agree on that. But you think they can't? Why not? What do you think people did before cars?
> How did we slip away so far from this being fairly obvious? Cities have worked well this way for hundreds of years.
Capitalism. Economies of scale. Taxpayer subsidies for car infrastructure. Nowadays Amazon, Uber Eats, etc.
Try actually running a local dairy or restaurant or electronics store and see how long it takes for you to be crushed out of existence by people driving to the supermarket 5 km away, or just ordering from VC funded loss-making delivery companies, or the like.
> why do we always seem to grow by increasing density rather than establishing new small towns
We result don't expand by increasing density, this has been generally banned by zoning over the past 60 years.
We mostly expand with sprawl, which causes long commutes, massive pollution, social isolation, bad health, and all sorts of other things. Which for people who want it, great, enjoy! But we ban density, and don't ban sprawl.
As for expanding other towns, this must be done by those with the capital to buy a house, or start a business to offer jobs, etc. Young people starting our do not have these things, and we need to accommodate them somewhere. To everyone who suggests building in a different small town, I suggest that they be the change they wish to see and move out to make room for somebody else.
And how do the vast majority of those end up? Utopian?
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