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Feb 17, 2023Liked by Brad Hargreaves

I'm sad by how short this list is. And how low probability the projects are (I generally agree with your assessments).

We seemed to have lost the ability to create new places. And therefore our ability to experiment on better ways of living, governing, and coordinating human activity has suffered.

None of the 10 most populous cities in the US were founded in the last 150 years. Our youngest city - Phoenix - was founded in 1868 and that was the same year as the first underground railroad and the French still occupied Mexico.

We've inherited our cities from a distant and unrecognizable past. We are governed by ghosts from a forgotten era.

I wonder if we can dispense with the utopian undertones here and set our sites on just creating new places that are moderately better along some dimensions for a specific group of people. The Villages seems like the project most in this spirit and I wouldn't want to live there personally, I like the intentionality and resident-centricity of the approach.

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