Exploring the attempts to build new cities around the globe, warts and all.
Building a new city is the loftiest, craziest, and most ambitious real estate project imaginable. But that doesn’t stop people from trying it, and it’s our job here at Thesis Driven to track them.
Today’s letter is our third annual edition of our guide to the new cities being built around the world. They range from futuristic pet projects of autocrats to cryptocurrency hubs to utopian endeavors and everything in between.
For each city we’ll tackle:
- The basics of the project;
- Our standard metrics (🧠s, 🚇s, 🪚s, and 🏗️s, measuring innovativeness, quality of urbanism, oppression, and feasibility, respectively)
- How it’s progressing (or not), measured in 📈s;
- Any updates to our ratings.
Category I: Autocratic Ambition
The most surefire way to build a new city is to rule a country by fiat and command that a new city be built. Easy! So it’s no surprise that some of the most rapidly-progressing new city projects out there come from countries that are less-than-full democracies.
- Neom | Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia’s hyper-ambitious metropolis under development along the country’s Red Sea coast is perhaps the best-known example of a new city under development today.
It’s worth noting that Neom is more of a region than a city; it spans everything from the futuristic “Line” to the comparatively modest resort island of Sindalah.
While it’s not hard to find aspirational forecasts of Neom’s eventual scale—nine million residents by 2045, five million tourists by 2030—concrete updates of Neom’s progress are somewhat more scarce. Without a doubt, construction work is happening, and Sindalah’s opening party last October was the lede for the Wall Street Journal’s recent deep dive into the project’s struggles—specifically, cost overruns and delays driven by fanciful plans, grifting consultants, and the complete inability of anyone to say no or deliver bad news.
Those struggles are, in many ways, unsurprising. There’s a reason Neom is in this section rather than “Capitalism at Work” below: it clearly prioritized individual ambition over a desire to make money.
If anyone has the cash and time horizon to pull this kind of project together, it’s MBS and the government of Saudi Arabia. But the things they’d need to do to make it happen successfully—take engineers’ advice seriously, fire McKinsey and the rest of the grifters, and embrace a more organic model of urban development—might have to be hard-learned lessons.
- Ambition: 🧠🧠🧠🧠
- Urbanism: 🚇🚇
- Oppression: 🪚🪚🪚
- Probability: 🏗️🏗️🏗️
- Progress: 📈📈📈 (-1 from 2024)
- Probability: 🏗️🏗️🏗️
- Progress: 📈📈📈 (-1 from 2024)
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- New Administrative Capital | Egypt
In case you missed it, Egypt is building a massive new city in the desert 45 kilometers east of Cairo. In addition to eventually being home to 6.5 million people and the Egyptian government, the new city will be substantially more revolution-proof than densely-packed Cairo.
On the surface, Egypt’s yet-to-be-named new capital has a lot in common with Neom: it’s a big new master-planned city being built in the desert by an autocratic ruler. But that’s where the similarities end. For example, Egypt’s new capital is significantly less ambitious—in a good way—than Neom. The new capital’s tallest tower, for instance, is ‘only’ 1,300 feet tall with a footprint that is can be measured in square feet rather than kilometers. Unlike Neom, Egypt’s new city also has tens of thousands of real people living there today.
On the other hand, Egypt has a fraction of Saudi Arabia’s resources, and even with vastly scaled-down ambitions—and a mere $45 billion price tag—the new city threatens to bankrupt the entire country.
- Ambition: 🧠🧠🧠
- Urbanism: 🚇
- Oppression: 🪚🪚🪚🪚
- Probability: 🏗️🏗️🏗️
- Progress: 📈📈📈
- Nusantara | Indonesia
Indonesia’s current capital, Jakarta, is sinking into the ocean—which is as good of a reason as any to build a totally new one over 1,000 kilometers away.
Like Neom, Nusantara is suffering from delays and cost overruns as the Indonesian government attempts to carve a new city out of the Bornean jungle. But the Indonesian government has neither MBS’s resources nor al-Sisi’s level of autocratic control—Indonesia is vaguely a democracy, and its leaders are at least nominally accountable to voters, which makes building a new city from scratch much harder.
As of now, the new Indonesian government elected last year is promising not to abandon Nusantara in the face of estimates that the capital won’t be ready to host the government until the 2040s. But the fact that giving up is even a topic of conversation—unthinkable in Saudi or Egypt—is a bearish sign. And just last month, the new Indonesian leaders froze all new capital expenditures, effectively putting the project on ice.
- Ambition: 🧠🧠
- Urbanism: 🚇🚇🚇
- Oppression: 🪚🪚
- Probability: 🏗️🏗️ (-2 from 2024)
- Progress: 📈📈 (-2 from 2024)
Category II: Utopianism Writ Large
- Praxis | TBD
Written off by many as yet another techno-optimist fever dream, Praxis just keeps on chugging. The “network state” planned city now features over 87,000 “steel visa” holders and a commitment of $525 million in milestone-based financing from some big-name investors.
The Praxis story has hardly been all sunshine and rainbows. The team was close to signing a term sheet with a national government in late 2023 before the deal was apparently upended by a New York Times hit piece.
The bad press has not stopped Praxis and founder Dryden Brown from being, in a word, weird. While other aspiring new city founders talk about walkability, transit, and economic opportunity, Brown regales his followers with discussions of sovereign intelligence, ascension, civilization, and the construction of the “Eternal City”.
Brown’s approach is not a bit, nor is it—as far as I can tell—an endorsement of outright fascism despite sharing some aesthetics with it. Rather, he has tapped into a vein of discontent among techno-optimist young people who long for a return to the frontier. Brown went to Greenland last summer in an attempt to buy the Arctic island—a good six months before Trump made buying Greenland cool (or terrifying, depending on your perspective).
It remains to be seen how Trump’s election impacts Praxis’s fortunes. On one hand, Trump is clearly aligned with elements of Brown’s mission as well as a number of Praxis’s Silicon Valley backers. But reframing Praxis in the context of resurgent American state-led imperialism—versus a plucky band of upstarts battling stagnation—seems unlikely to win converts among foreign governments.
Brown may or may not succeed at building his city, but Praxis should not be ruled out.
- Ambition: 🧠🧠🧠🧠
- Urbanism: ?
- Oppression: ?
- Probability: 🏗️🏗️
- Progress: 📈📈📈
- Kiryas Joel (“KJ”) | New York, United States
The most successful new city built in the United States over the past 30 years isn’t a Silicon Valley dream or some developer’s master plan but the little-known community of Kiryas Joel, New York. Initially founded by the Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism, in 2019 Kiryas Joel became the first official new town in New York State in almost half a century.
Since gaining its own charter—and control of zoning—Kiryas Joel has ballooned to over 40,000 residents in multi-story buildings in an otherwise sleepy corner of the foothills of the Catskills. It helps, of course, that Kiryas Joel has a total fertility rate of almost 8 children per woman, a rate higher than any nation on earth.
- Ambition: 🧠🧠🧠🧠
- Urbanism: 🚇🚇
- Oppression: 🪚🪚🪚
- Probability: 🏗️🏗️🏗️🏗️
- Progress: 📈📈📈📈
Category III: Capitalism at Work
- California Forever | Solano County, CA
With more than 50,000 acres and almost a billion dollars from Silicon Valley’s elite, California Forever is the most serious attempt to build a significant new city in the US today. We also hosted an in-depth interview with city founder Jan Sramek earlier this year on the Thesis Driven Leader Series.
But Sramek’s new metropolis is not coming any time soon. Solano County’s slow growth rules ostensibly require the company to win a county-wide referendum to pursue the development. While a referendum was planned for last year’s ballot, the company withdrew it in July citing a desire to pursue a full EIR and development agreement prior to the referendum.
Since then, California Forever has entered into negotiations with two neighboring cities—Rio Vista and Suisun City—about annexing California Forever’s land, which would sidestep the need for a referendum while potentially limiting the new city’s flexibility and autonomy.
- Ambition: 🧠🧠🧠
- Urbanism: 🚇🚇🚇🚇
- Oppression: 🪚
- Probability: 🏗️🏗️
- Progress: 📈 (-2 from 2024)
- West Valley | Arizona
The past two years have seen several announcements of major master-planned communities in Maricopa County’s West Valley area 30 to 40 miles west of Phoenix.
While it’s fair to argue that this is just more Phoenix metro sprawl, the size and scope of some of these communities make them worthy of inclusion in the aggregate. The most notable are Howard Hughes’s 37,000 acre Teravalis and Lemmon Holdings’s 25,000 acre Belmont, both of which are anchored near the town of Buckeye, Arizona. (MREG’s TSMC fab-anchored Halo Vista is also notable but a bit too far away to be lumped in here.)
While the West Valley’s developers have clear ambition in scope, they appear unlikely to push any boundaries of good urbanism or design. Their announcement of the community’s first homebuilders included the usual who’s who of sprawl.
- Ambition: 🧠
- Urbanism: 🚇
- Oppression: 🪚
- Probability: 🏗️🏗️🏗️🏗️
- Progress: 📈📈
- Highland Rim | Tennessee and Kentucky, USA
Highland Rim is a new concept from the people behind New Founding, the right-leaning venture firm led by Nate Fischer and Josh Abbotoy. And they’re looking to build not a new city but a network of “charter communities” in the Highland Rim region of Tennessee and Kentucky. The team is already selling land in the area through Ridge Runner, their real estate affiliate.
The Highland Rim team is riding a wave of people resettling not just for affordability and economic opportunity but to be surrounded by others who share their political views. Feeling alienated from blue cities, Americans with conservative views are moving to places such as Tennessee’s river valleys—and buying land from Ridge Runner.
In describing the new community, New Founding has flirted with overt Christian nationalism. And while readers may have questions about Highland Rim’s ability to enforce the community’s principles while adhering to fair housing rules, such motivations are certainly not out of line with the history of American utopianism and city building.
- Ambition: 🧠🧠
- Urbanism: 🚇🚇
- Oppression: 🪚🪚🪚
- Probability: 🏗️🏗️🏗️
- Progress: 📈📈
The Dearly Departed
Building new cities is hard.
Not every planned city is going to make it. The vast majority will, in fact, not make it. To make room for some new inclusions (Highland Rim, West Valley), we gave a few others the boot.
- Telosa | Undetermined Location, United States
With no identifiable activity for at least the past two years, I’m moving entrepreneur Marc Lore’s new planned metropolis out of the active section. I’ll keep watching it and will happily move it back if anything changes.
- Próspera | Honduras
I debated putting Próspera here given it’s still very much active—and unlike some of the cities listed above, actually has real people living there today.
But—practically speaking—I don’t see how the charter city survives its existential battle with Honduras’s leftist government. The current government considers the charter agreement that established Próspera’s special economic zone to be illegitimate since it was signed with a government installed in a coup. While a $10 billion lawsuit—which could bankrupt Honduras—winds its way through international courts, the uncertainty is likely too much for the new city to handle.
- Bitcoin City | El Salvador
Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele has shaken up the small Central American nation since taking power in 2019—mostly good ways, dramatically cutting gang crime and restarting economic growth.
One of Bukele’s more fanciful aspirations, however, was to create a “Bitcoin city” on a remote stretch of the country’s southeastern coast. Plans called for Bitcoin as the official currency and zero income, capital gains, or sales taxes. But thus far the city has yet to materialize; an intrepid Coindesk reporter went so far as to visit a remote nearby village in an attempt to get a sense of progress. There was none to be found.
And any future plans for the city are in serious jeopardy after the IMF forced El Salvador to abandon Bitcoin as legal tender in exchange for $1.4 billion in new loans to the heavily indebted nation which has been on the brink of default several times in the past decade. So we’re moving Bukele’s Bitcoin Borough into the dead pile.
Most mainstream media articles about new cities fall into one of three buckets:
- Look at these silly people doing this silly thing;
- “Ozymandias, King of Kings!” Surely this example of unconstrained ambition will come crashing down at any moment;
- This is scary; someone should stop them.
But humans have been building new cities for tens of thousands of years; there are few things more natural and inherent to the human condition. While there are clearly good and bad methods—and good and bad motivations—for building new cities, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong about it.
And in a world in which spiraling housing costs are crippling economies and limiting economic potential—while existing cities are stuck in bureaucratic morass—building new places seems as necessary as ever.
This article was originally published in Thesis Driven and is republished here with permission.
