The hottest newest coolest projects of utopian city planning is a city called Telos. The project is partly funded and ran on initiative by billionaire Marc Lore, famously known as the Lebron James of E-commerce. The city will be built in the desert from the ground up, as a resurrection of the idea of cities built from blank slates. The world Telos, meaning a higher meaning in Greek stems from the cities vision to be the most open, most fair, and most inclusive city in the world.
Telos as a vision will be reached partly through a economic concept coined equitism, describing how citizens have a stake in the city. All citizens will partly own the city they live in, meaning they will have a stake in the city. When the city does better, the residents do better and visa-verse. The city is setting out to be a form of inclusive growth to combat the increasing inequality that’s taking place in the US. An extension of this idea is to track the taxes of inhabitant. As a result, all inhabitants will be aware of exactly where their money is going.
Some of the downfalls of previous utopian projects have been the lack of human perspective, as I wrote in my previous post “Utopian Retrospect”. Marc Lore however tends to change that perspective into developing a city not only for the people, but with the people.
“Cities that have been built to date from scratch are more like real estate projects, they don’t start with people at the center.”
Marc Lore, said in a promotional video
Another emerging project that is settling to stretch the boundaries of city design is the so-called Woven city placed at the foot of mount Fuji. The city is powered by Toyota to be a space of testing innovative technologies in cities, such as autonomous vehicles, AI-health tracking and big-data surveillance for inhabitants wellbeing.
the Woven City will explore ways to stimulate human interaction in the urban space. After all, human connectivity is the kind of connectivity that triggers wellbeing and happiness, productivity and innovation.”
Bjarke Ingels, in an interview about the Woven City
Both projects are examples of new urbanism approaches, which I will cover in the next chapter of my blogs
https://nypost.com/2021/10/19/marc-lores-woke-city-will-screen-settlers-for-diversity/
https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/telosa-marc-lore-blake-ingels-new-city/index.html
https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/ces-toyota-big-smart-city/index.html
