Can Technology-Backed Planners Revive the Lost Art of City-Building in California’s Big Cities?

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As we were chopping garlic and herbs at Burning Man, we met Gabriel Metcalf, an urban planner hired to design a new city in California with the backing of a tech billionaire.
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The mystery of who was secretly buying up more than 50,000 acres of farmland in Solano County, about 80 miles northeast of San Francisco, has just been uncovered.

The buyers included Silicon Valley investors who were committed to ambitious plans for a new “California Dream” city with walkable neighborhoods, climate-friendly infrastructure, green energy jobs, and affordable housing. It turns out that the list includes celebrities.

Many people are deeply suspicious of tech elites throwing money around thinking they can solve everything. And the way California Forever, an investor-backed company, secretly bought up nearly $1 billion worth of land without the knowledge of local residents or officials, also discouraged people from getting excited about the project. In the months since the project was announced, residents, officials and environmentalists have raised serious questions about the feasibility of turning rural land into a bustling city.

I followed up with Metcalfe to see if what sounded like a bold vision when shared in a pop-up city in the Nevada desert actually makes sense in the real world. . Metcalf, who comes across as more of a pragmatic urban design geek than a Silicon Valley techie, admits he understands where the skeptics are coming from.

“This has never been done before, at least not in this way or on this scale. There's a lot of work to do to get people on board and understand the vision,” he said over coffee in San Francisco's Dogpatch district. he said while drinking. “We're not proposing a utopia. We're just proposing a city. We're not claiming that this will solve all your problems. But this is another tool. I would argue that it can be helpful.”

California faces difficult housing issues that Metcalf, a respected urban planner, believes can only be addressed through bold action.

Metcalf ran Spar, a San Francisco-based urban planning think tank, for a decade and a half, where he advocated for building more cities.
public housingways to address the region's housing crisis include increasing public transportation and increasing the minimum wage.

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