The author is half correct in saying that we've forgotten how to build towns. It's better to say, the creation of new towns have become economically obsolete. Their niche is gone. Historically, towns formed organically around sources of value, such as farmland or rivers or mines or whatever, where many people making a living in the same region benefited from being in walking proximity, which enabled commerce. That concern just doesn't exist today, due to cars.
You don't need a town with an inn when the truckers stay at motels and rest stops. You don't need a town square when people shop at the big box store on the highway and local producers are part of a complex global supply chain.
"A desirable place to live / visit" is its own economic engine. See (also mentioned in that article) Seaside, Florida.
https://www.themanual.com/culture/marfa-texas/
https://www.npr.org/2012/08/02/156980469/marfa-texas-an-unli...
Sounds more like a touristy set of rich estates at this point, I expect the laborers live in the surrounding area and drive into town just like a large city. I did some labor during HS and in the summer it was driving 20-40 miles from our small town in nowhere Texas for the jobs we did.
During the early 80's oil boom there were several small towns in Texas that kinda looked like OP's model, but once the boom went to bust they started dying and never recovered. Probably around the Austin area in the 60's a lot of places looked more idyllic (there were no stoplights between downtown Austin and I think Lampasas at that point), but it's all sprawled out and become a Metropolis at this point.
Not clear that any sufficiently attractive area would not end up being encompassed in suburbia or a high-end enclave (Westlake by Austin comes to mind).
Even terralingua has a restaurant with a two hour wait now. Tourism is the only real driver of a small town booming imo.
Marfa also does not have a lot of services that are needed for anyone older than 50, like a hospital.
Alpine is a much more scenic town and it's just up the road. I'd probably buy a house there instead.
I've never heard of Marfa but wikipedia suggests it was originally built around the 1880s as a Railroad Water Stop. The analogue today would be a "town" around a highway rest stop, which is generally not going to be built at human scale or with pre-war zoning and architecture.
> "A desirable place to live / visit" is its own economic engine
Absolutely. The major issue here is that if you're building a small town from scratch, it's not a desirable place to live / visit until it is built. And it's not "built" until you have several hundred people, at least, living there. But those people aren't going to want to build houses and live there if it's not a desirable place to live. It's a chicken-and-egg problem.
But I don't see how that is repeatable. Trying to build a new town from scratch can't realistically have the plan of UFO sightings and cult-status house-size art installations to get people to want to live there.
There are plenty of recent examples of development on the scale that this article suggests. The area just to the west of Warm Springs BART station in Fremont, California is 90 acres. The New Urbanist polestar of Hercules, California is about 150 acres.
So yes, it's still bigger geographically, but it still only takes 15-20 minutes to walk from one end to the other; I've visited a few times. I'm not very familiar with either location you mentioned, but I would say for Marfa to be 3 hours away from the next-largest town (El Paso), have no commercial airport or passenger train line, and still be a self-sustaining walkable town is impressive.
I'm possibly mistaken, but the first example you pointed out looks to be an apartment complex next to a train station within a larger city and Hercules, CA is a 20 square mile (maybe I'm looking at the wrong city?) suburb of SF; I don't think those are examples of what this article is saying?
There’s room in West Texas for one of them. Nobody’s gonna build a second Dairy Queen on US 90 in Marathon or Valentine. But even with a DQ, living there is only practical because there’s a Walmart in Van Horne. Dallas and El Paso are too far for underwear.
And of course Marfa is full of air conditioners. As is all of Texas…a place I suspect the article’s author has not spent much time…football ain’t played on pitches in Texas.
Basically most Americans want to live in a walkable city with charm and community, but the way we built America post 1950 makes it very difficult.
This isn't a matter of zoning, building codes and developers (thats mostly a problem for existing towns/cities), this is a matter of economics. It takes impetus to create a new town/city, and in the modern economy that impetus almost always involves automobiles.
Edit: updated my wording in the above post to make clear that existing towns aren't obsolete, just the creation of new ones
It's completely reasonable to plan a new city today with the goal of being walkable. Given the fact that so many of our most valuable cities are navigable without a car, it seems that there may be a strong economic incentive for such cities, just no one has really tried to capitalize on it.
We are seeing a lot of walkable microtowns popping up around the USA, but these are more centered around renters than owners. Which might be due to zoning issues than market forces.
> Basically most Americans want to live in a walkable city with charm and community, but the way we built America post 1950 makes it very difficult.
How do you know that this means Americans want to live in that style, versus that high concentration fosters today's thriving companies and job markets, and so the people follow the jobs at the expense of cheaper and more desirable housing? Single family homes reduce walkability for everyone else, but are more valuable than a condo next door in those thriving American cities. The ultimate desire is to have your cake and eat it too.
And that economic value and company presence aspect argues against forming new small towns - the $$$ shows that all the desire and demand is in bigger metro areas, right now.
-modern multi-storey buildings; -public transit. Which requires similar infra to cars.
Economically, a town this size supports a train station to other towns, which is... huge. I've gone to after-work drinks in a different, similar-sized town. So has my partner.
And environmentally, there's no real objection to building up a bit (it might be a net positive, by shoring up aforementioned train station). Adding a whole new town anywhere in the region would be a nightmare. And frankly, for all the current (deserved) bad press on flats and the romanticism of single-family homes, an awful lot of the latter are terrible. Leaking, creaking, cold, subsiding, dangerous wiring and something else rhyming.
I'm not meaningfully further from nature, either.
I think as income has become more concentrated in certain industries it hurts. Even if your agricultural town had very little poor people - if is has virtually no one making about 70k then it is going to be tricky to build and maintain.
They rely on federal loans, indirectly.
You've also got a town structure which is based on a single identifiable economic centre, which doesn't generally rely on heavy industry or ag within that centre (information, knowledge, and people, as well as the support strucutures for them), and so your principle transportation problem is how to move a fair-to-middlin' mostly younger and healthier population around. Bikes and walking fit this mode well, the small population of elderly and disabled can be accomodated as edge cases.
Keep in mind that in many small college towns, there's still a sizable commuter population. Some of that are students priced out of local housing, though the workforce is a much larger component, and may have commute patterns comparable to that of a large city (driving in from an hour or more away). The centralised nature of employment makes even rural mass transit or commuter shuttles viable.
ADDED: But, as others have noted, once you drive somewhere at least relatively close to where you're going, at least small to mid-sized campuses and associated towns are generally designed to let you walk to stores/restaurants/etc. fairly easily.
It's only a short train ride away from Vienna's center, but so are many other small towns and those are decidedly separate.
Believe me, you're preaching to the choir here. My comment is really just to offer a counterpoint to the justifiable desire to create a "new world" without the troubles of the old one - most people aren't shopping for new lives, so these sorts of plans don't emerge organically in the way that towns did originally. And when "start over" towns built around some ideological principle do arise, they often fail comically[0].
[0] A fun read https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-...
Is this the kind of bad scenario that NIMBY activists organize to prevent (despite the issues created by their zoning policies not letting people move in)?
But obviously a mountain resort town has to be somewhere that outsiders want to vacation in and everyone who lives there is either in or supporting in some way the tourist industry.
Seaside is an unincorporated master-planned community on the Florida Panhandle in Walton County, between Panama City Beach and Destin.[2] One of the first communities in America designed on the principles of New Urbanism, the town has become the topic of slide lectures in architectural schools and in housing-industry magazines, and is visited by design professionals from all over the United States. The town rose to global fame as being the main filming location of the movie The Truman Show. On April 18, 2012, the American Institute of Architects's Florida Chapter placed the community on its list of Florida Architecture: 100 Years. 100 Places as the Seaside – New Urbanism Township.
So far I have only made it through half of this, but it is clear this person has not ever spent any amount of time on a farm or a ranch or in any part of Texas (west or not).
Food production is smelly and dirty. You don't want to live upwind of a gin or feed lot. In west Texas you don't build high because of wind. For such an arid place they sure are banking on having access to a shit ton of water.
There is a huge aquifer that most of the places out on the High Plains of Texas pump from. It's use is contentious, but your not going to be surviving off of a 3 acre playa lake.
Upon reaching the following line, I laughed out loud. This is utopian social planning at its least realistic:
“There will be an urge to build each home optimized for air conditioning. Don’t. All buildings must be useful and livable even with the power cut. Hence, natural ventilation, strategically designed windows that open, etc. is necessary. Obviously you can add AC (Air conditioner) on top of that, but in no way should the town be dependent on AC.”
Anyone who has never been to West Texas should check the weather today in some subset of {Amarillo, Lubbock, Midland, Pecos, San Angelo, El Paso, Alpine}. (Some are nice and some are not!) If you can work inside all day with your house that temperature... good for you, but I cannot. And nearly every house in all of those places is air conditioned.
Better yet! Visit the Great State of Texas and take a walk of three blocks or more outside in a city during the heat of the day in June, July or August and report back on how much you liked it...
Some historic cities (e.g. Marrakech and Ures) have designed the entire urban landscape to improve the outdoor situation as well. Dense corridors of high thermal mass buildings create shade, fountains and other water sources provide active cooling, and so on.
Lot's of adobe buildings were made by the indigenous people as that's about all they had, mud and clay. Mud and clay are terrible insulators, they retain heat extremely well, which is why they are great for pizza ovens.
In the arid parts of Texas evaporative cooling works really really well but requires a decent supply of water. I've never seen people use solar chimneys in these parts but those older generations could have done it with their technology, as long as they had a source of cool air to pull from.
One of them has had the property in their family for generations. They say that it stays relatively cool during the summertime and warm in the winter.
Why no AC? He says they can’t produce enough power. But all it takes is one powerwall and 4K or 8k solar panel per house.
There's nothing wrong with doing that, although if you really wanted to design a realistically successful small town, you'd start by asking "where will we put the chemical plant/oil refinery/paper mill?"
Cities are built where there are demands for cities to be built. They grow around nexus points of travel, gold rushes, or other places that invite entrepreneurs to build them.
Entrepreneurs might create the need for the city, but there has to be some means of sustenance for the city not to become what is called a "Ghost Town".
Forms of evaporative + stored thermal mass cooling (rooftop sprinkler systems, perhaps combined with a rooftop garden and an underground irrigation + cooling mass water system) could provide the basis for an indirect cooling system that isn't reliant on electrical power, though it would still have fairly high evaporative losses.
"All buildings must be useful and livable even with the power cut. Hence, natural ventilation, strategically designed windows that open, etc. is necessary. Obviously you can add AC (Air conditioner) on top of that, but in no way should the town be dependent on AC."
East Texas has a huge logging and tree farming industry, so if you're building in East Texas, you'll probably want to leverage the natural resources; rammed earth doesn't quite make sense there.
Also, and this is my personal opinion, I do not believe it is possible to create a successful, large town without vehicles or air conditioning here, it isn't practical, and it isn't in the culture. If you look at the history of success of Texas towns, many further West and South/South East did not become successful until the advent of the vehicle and the air conditioner. The idea of lugging groceries for even a 150m walk in this weather sounds miserable. I recommend the author looks more local to find out what makes Texas towns tick rather than global, because while there's great ideas from around the world that could be imported, you shouldn't discount the local maxima.
In a village, you don’t go to HEB once every two weeks and get $400 in groceries. You walk to the market every day or two and shop. One tote bag. You send the kid to the butcher, fishmonger or for something you forgot. Completely different from sub/exurb lifestyle.
Smaller hand trucks/carts would also be a norm, very common to see those in Europe with the elderly, delivery or tradesfolks.
One aspect of the covid era was that many stopped walking to urban stores every day and made it a weekly thing or got delivieries. Kind of eye opening to see a city like SF return to crowded markets.
Spain also had 12,963 excess deaths in the 2003 heatwave.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave#Spain
You can absolutely have a city without air conditioning. Humans have done it for thousands of years. The well-known tradeoff is that you are going to lose some elderly people during the summer.
The extreme climate there is hard to describe.
A tree-lined one, though, can be quite nice: https://twitter.com/brent_bellamy/status/1411133447062441990
Also, Texas is a big place. It spans multiple climate zones. The author seems to be describing West Texas but other parts of the state are completely different.
My advice * It's hot! (And often very very humid depending on local. ) You need AC. * The worst part of Texas towns are 4 lane highways bisecting most of them. Avoid that... * But you still have to plan to allow people to use cars. That has to be incorporated into the design. As does pedestrian and cycling life. All need to be facilitated to some degree. * Sidewalks, please. I've lived in FL, OR and now TX in the past 5 years. Far to many residential streets in all these places completely lack sidewalks. It makes taking an evening stroll with the family stressful when you are sharing the space with cars. * Parks. Can't have enough of them.
Agreed. Also behaviorally. So many people would tell me I was crazy for living without A/C while they were standing in their house with the blinds open, windows closed, dishwasher and stove on in the middle of the day. If you make your home into a greenhouse with a heater in the middle, yeah it's gonna be hot - maybe don't do that.
But I think my last phrase is the issue. People really hate having to not do what they want, when they want. Like not cooking or whatever until the cool part of the day, when the heat can be managed by ventilation.
You just described a typical suburban 'smart development', which is not dense at all by european standards, and really it is just like a typical strip mall area eveloved a bit, but still way behind.
Fredericksburg & New Braunfels have major German culture and German buildings from the 1800s, but they are larger cities now as they have expanded, but the downtown areas reflect what you guys want, but ya' know, connected to the world via roads.
Most of Texas small towns have co-ops, communities of 3000 give or take, and it's all walkable and drivable (usually one road going through them linking towns via backroads)
Usually they are pretty self sufficient because they are isolated, but you still need roads to connect the outer farms and other towns for supplies to reach downtown, and when you want to travel to bigger cities for larger hospitals, cinemas, family, clubs, etc. In West Texas you need it especially because good luck growing anything there.
This author is just ignoring existing culture and trying to apply direct European culture ignoring the fact that immigrants from those cultures have already merged and influenced small towns across Texas.
My advice, take a road trip through the backroads that connect Texas, you'll get a large dose of many cultures, nice people, great food, and massive highschool football games for entertainment on Friday nights.
In West Texas? Which has no trees? "Sustainable", right.
What this guy is missing is that small towns were originally service centers for surrounding farms. When 60% of the population worked in agriculture, towns were needed as distribution points for goods and services. With under 2% of the US population working in agriculture, that function is gone. Plus, between WalMart and Amazon, distribution no longer requires a town.
They produce basically no smoke, and run unattended for ~ 24 hours.
[1] people will pay you to take it away.
Gas is cleaner, safer, and easier, so why use wood for a built-from-scratch model town?
[1] https://www.epa.gov/burnwise/frequent-questions-about-wood-b... [2] https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2014-4-july-august/ask-mr-...
Great: the burning of solid fuels (coal in the past, but nowadays mostly wood at least in the US) is the source of one of the most damaging forms of pollution (particulate) these years, which is the reason that for example fireplaces and wood stoves have been banned in new construction in the Bay Area since 2005.
Vehicles in countries with good air quality simply avoid producing carbon-rich particles (the kind of pollution produced by burning wood or coal) in the first place: their catalytic converters are for other types of pollution (gases).
EDIT (as I feel I was overly snarky): I don't think there's anything wrong with thought experiments like this, and I've wondered to myself what a brand-new city or town might look like. I do think the no-car thing would be an incredibly hard sell in rural Texas though. The reality is that most modern towns aren't self-sufficient. Maybe there's a dentist, or maybe you have to drive to the next town over for one. Maybe there's a used sporting goods store, or maybe you have to drive an hour to one when the kids grow out of their cleats, etc. I think something like this would stand a better chance if it were right outside of a city. Maybe an old farm in what is now the suburbs - you could build a dense, walkable town that also connects to the big city via mass transit.
But you'd need the public transit links and I'm guessing many would still want to own a car on the outskirts (as in a college/corporate campus) and provide access of some sort for the disabled, etc.
As part of the plan he specifically says "save an excellent spot in the town center to offer at low cost to whomever decides to practice dentistry there"
There's a reason most car-less Americans live in NYC, DC, SF, etc. You can get everything you need there without a car. Small-town America does not offer the same and I doubt this idea would change that.
How will you legally be allowed to build this car-free town?
Even in Texas you can't just build whatever you want wherever you want. Every city and most counties have minimum lot sizes, road, sewer, power, and fire code requirements that would completely defeat any effort to build a medieval european village in the US.
In terms of location, you need to be 5-7 miles away from any existing city to be outside of it's ETJ. Any closer and you're probably going to be subject to the zoning laws of that city.
In theory you could pull this off if you could get a critical mass in an unincorporated area and then incorporate a town so that the new town sets the development laws to allow this pattern of development, but you normally need anywhere from 200 to 2000 people to get that started, and until that time the county rules dictate.
One potential hack is to build the town as a condominium complex, so the entire thing is considered one apartment/condo building, even though the design is nothing like a normal apartment/condo. Another is to treat it as a trailer park, but you probably have to do a phase of development where the buildings are small pier-and-beam structures that can pass as "not permanently attached" to the land.
In short: At this point the design principles of historic and modern urbanism are generally well understood and not that interesting. The primary obstacle to these practices being brought back is that they're utterly illegal in North America, and the plausible routes around that illegality make the economics - which would already be challenging - substantially more difficult.
Things like ADA and OSHA are federal laws that Texas builders can't just ignore.
You can probably avoid building permits if you own enough property to be your own county government, but good luck getting a construction loan.
Let's Build A Traditional City (And Make A Profit) (2013)
https://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20130330.php
...which was also discussed on the HN front page:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8111406
There is also a sequel post:
Let's Build A Village From A Parking Lot (2015)
Lubbock and it's surrounding communities built up during the latter half of the 19th Century, with the small communities forming as the farmers and ranchers needed them.
Pretty amusing to leave whatever the correct word for "Anglo-American-colonial" is out of this list.
> It should look like it was founded and laid down in 1667 or 1746, not 2022.
Large parts of West Texas were not settled until after the Civil War (with gridded streets of course), making "historical authenticity" a bit of a challenge. But building a "new" horse-compatible late 19th century Texas town with wide streets and big lots would be hard enough already, so I definitely respect the gusto here.
Empresarios and land grants seem to have led to different settlement patterns at the start for the Anglos than the rigid early Spanish or hilariously insular hill country Germans.
“Spanish colonists came organized once the missions and presidios were already built, Anglos posted up stick houses by themselves on land they ostensibly owned and tried not to get slaughtered by comanche” is the vibe I usually get.
Utopian communities were part and parcel of 19th C America, and there was a flutter of activity around communes and intentional communities in the 1960s and 1970s. We have the infrastructure and technology nowadays to do better.
The long term success rate today would probably still be low, but the value in the exercise is in the personal growth experience for the young themselves and the prototyping of new ideas, some of which migrate to the general culture. Lots of lessons learned are available from books written about these past communities to prevent making the same mistakes.
Perhaps the risks are just too high these days for the young…
The main reason I haven't done it is money. If I had even 100k I'd have probably bought some 40k lot and started building on it myself.
The article mentions solar panels and wifi technicians. Naturally, the town would be equipped with a kind of mesh net for local communication in cases of outages, etc.
But also, the town librarian could maintain something like community resources hosted on the mesh network. Design documents, etc.
Of course, the town would provide a Pleroma or Matrix server to all residents too :)
Are there any legal requirements from the State of Texas which need to be followed?
The hardest state is Hawaii, which only recognizes Federal and County governments. Next up is Delaware, which has no process by which to form a new city, but also has almost no unincorporated land left. Most other states require an act of the legislature.
Easiest is probably Nevada, where you need only 5 "qualified electors" (18+ and having lived in the state 6 months), a professional land survey/mapping, and a written plan on how you'll provide police/fire and bring in revenue. Assuming only your five electors live in the town and will vote for incorporation, there is really nobody who can stop you.
Oddest is by far Wyoming, which requires you to find a source of water not claimed by another town and a minimum population density of 70 people per square mile.
(Yeah, I've really dug into starting my own city)
In Texas. Everything sounded somewhat reasonable up to this’d topography non withstanding. Why not make sure to build near caves to store ice from the winter.
And then it gets into batkeeping and eating pidgeons. When does a modern sustainable town end and a medieval fantasy begin.
> The account has also shown a preference for cultural conservatives in its “likes”, which these include ... Roger Scruton, a man known for making a career out of his prejudice; and Leon Krier, a disciple of Hitler’s chief architect Albert Speer.
Roger Scruton was knighted for his contributions to public education [0] and helped establish an underground academic network in Soviet-occupied Europe. He was also one of the best contributors to the New Statesman which I suppose is now cancelling him?
Leon Krier was in no way a disciple of Albert Speer. Speer's only mentioned in the footnotes of Krier's Wikipedia article [1] because Krier wrote a book about Speer where he asked, “Can a war criminal be a great artist?” [2]
It seems that the problem to this writer is conservatism as a whole, and of course these accounts are conservative! The whole point of the Twitter accounts is pro-conservation!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Scruton [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9on_Krier [2] https://www.monacellipress.com/book/albert-speer/
I don't know whether to be relieved or disappointed that we'll never learn all the fun, new problems that his grand plan would introduce.
Of course going through the process of trying to get a permit for a small home remodel will destroy any enthusiasm one would have to work with any bureaucracy made me quickly forget of the ambition. During that brief period though, I did learn about different efforts out there (some now defunct, ex Google's) of re-imaging the modern city. I do hope some desolate plots of land now become economically viable post-covid and become experimental zones for new ideas and small communities.
I can think of several examples in Texas, the mueller neighborhood in austin. Steiner ranch outside of austin ( built on an old ranch ) . The woodlands outside of Houston built up in the 80s and 90s by an oil baron
It's kind of a mix of general ideas floating around urbanist circles and specific suggestions for this question asked of them with specific proposed parameters. In some cases, I can kind of see the logic and see that it was just not really explained. In other cases, I think it's basically fantasy, as a lot of such proposals tend to be.
Some of the talking points are rooted in the reality that water is a big issue in the world and getting worse, climate change is a big issue, there was a really major power outage in Texas not hugely long ago, some of our global problems are rooted in being too car dependent and too dependent on food imports, etc.
The actual situation: Four guys have purchased real estate somewhere in Texas and want to build a town. This piece likely will fail to serve them well as a recipe for developing a town.
"Build it and they will come" has a long history of failing. Planned towns have a long history of failing. See Fordlandia and California City as historic examples of planned cities that failed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/california-city-unbuilt-...
A notable exception to this general rule is the unincorporated community of Hershey, Pennsylvania which was built as a company town to provide homes and amenities for workers at the Hershey factory that was built there, iirc. It currently has about 14k residents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey,_Pennsylvania
This is Texas and the author seems to not know much about the state. It has a lot of quirks that set it apart from other states.
You don't need a public school system for your planned community. Texas has the most liberal homeschooling laws of any state. If I were a paid consultant working on this town, I would put together some information on online education, homeschooling, where the nearest physical college is, etc. I would target childless couples, retirees, etc and make it clear that "if you have children, you should plan to homeschool and here are some resources to help support that."
I would target remote workers and make sure the town had excellent internet. This would be a hack to get around the fact that the real estate these four guys bought was probably not bought with an economic purpose in mind -- eg the development of a local mine. Towns tends to spring up where geography fosters economic development and the modern world can get around some of the historic constraints that forced towns into specific locales, but no one can get around the need for the town to be economically sustainable. If you want a real town to happen here, you need to answer the question of "How will people support themselves?" and you have three basic options: It's a retirement community or enclave of independently wealthy jet setters bored with jet setting for some reason; you can develop a local business there that somehow is related to that physical place because of the resources that exist there; you can plan for remote workers as your hack for not defaulting to trying to attract people so rich they can live anywhere (so why would they live there?) or developing a significant business on the ground to attract workers to live in the town.
Even in dry West Texas, average rainfall is plenty adequate to support off-grid, self-sustaining homes if that's your thing, eg Earth Ships, which can work with as little as 10 inches of rainfall annually.
This piece is correct that reducing the energy load for some of the big things, like heating and cooling, is an essential first step in designing a community that has energy independence and energy security. Passive Solar design can go a long way, even in West Texas weather, towards reducing energy needs while keeping people comfortable. You could readily borrow ideas from Middle Eastern desert cultures as well, a source of wisdom largely overlooked these days.
Local character is not something you need to inject. It's something you need to allow. Historically, it was rooted in vernacular architecture and that is generally speaking local building styles made with local materials and designed to accommodate local weather.
Articles like this typically focus on the built environment. This article tries to tell you how to build a town and there are cities across China and in other places that are modern ghost towns because someone with money and power built the buildings and the people never showed up, or at least not in large enough numbers. It may not be completely empty, but there are multiple cities today where they built it and the people did not come.
A real town is a place where people live and articles of this sort almost never address the question of "Why would anyone move there? Who do you want to attract and how will you get them there?"
And you would, really, need to sit down with the four men who bought this real estate and have a serious heart-to-heart with them about what kind of people they are, what activities they like, what kind of people do they like to hang with, how do they live their lives and what kind of social connections they currently have. This is not being addressed in this piece and the author seems unlikely to address it.
Placemaking is not just about the physical place. It's about the people who live there as well and the biggest challenge a planned town has is "How do you get people to move there? Why would they want to?" It's a question that tends to be given short shrift while people imagine some perfect built environment that lacks all the things they find aggravating in the world today and then don't think about the actual purpose of built environments, which is to serve the needs of the local population.
It was an interesting read with a lot of familiar ideas, but it's not very grounded. This is not a recipe for these four people to start a town. It's a thought experiment for the entertainment of the author, basically, which is fine but don't get confused. This is not a real recipe for how to develop a real town.
Edit: The footnote says part 2 will address the question of People. (crosses fingers)
Edit 2: I will add if the place gets big enough, sure, public school is a good thing to have and may be a necessity. But this piece is essentially aimed at attracting the first 100 residents and I think for that purpose, you don't need a school system nor any real plans to create one.
But for me it was the "soundscape" comments.
- caption quote: "imagine the fresh air, the invigorating call of roosters in the morning"
Rooster calls are not so much invigorating as annoying.
- "The loudest noise you will hear on a typical day will be children playing or a conversation between neighbors in the street. And so it should be."
Did stereos, consoles, movies just cease to exist too? Are we going to be crammed in next to our neighbours hearing everything they do through their "airflow enhanced" houses?
- "Keep the lots small, and all buildings aligned right to the edge of the lot facing the street, leaving backyards and courtyards, common or private, and walled gardens on unused space"
Apparently so. This town is for someone else, not me.
There's a history of "intentional communities". Many are thought of as utopian communities, and as largely (though not entirely) failed, though this misses some notable successes lurcking in plain view. There are a number of successful intentional community models.
The first is religious communities which have sustained themselves. In the US, notably Menonite, Amish, and Mormon communities, though there are numerous others. In the case of the Mormons, the community is the size of a state (and strongly influences most of its neighbours).
The second is the college town. For the past century colleges and universities, even comparably small ones, have proved robust self-perpetuating instutions, as both demand for an educated population and funding for education (and research, and sport) have been generous. That tide may be shifting, along with a potential trend to decentralised or remote education, though I suspect it's got life in it yet.
Several commercial motivations have proved workable at least in instances, notably tourist, retirement, vacation, and (as noted, viz Marfa, TX), art colonies. Odds may be longer here, though opportunities also more numerous. The key problem is that fads and fashions are fickle. Retirement populations, as with college students, tend to move on after a few years, if to different prospects. Many of the advantages of a student population: youth, health, vitality, openness to experience, credulity, are lacking in the older set.
Government projects are another option, with some outposts (Los Alamos National Laboratory and its impact on Santa Fe, NM, Macdonald Observatory and Ft. Davis, TX, Cape Canaveral and the Florida coast) having a profound local impact.
Otherwise, a town is generally reliant on what's at hand for economic initiative. In what I presume is West Texas, that's some highway travel, a current boomlette of oil and gas activity, cattle ranching, a few notable cultural outposts, and some degree of border activity. There's also wind and solar development in the area (there's a notable solar technician training centre across the stateline near Clovis, NM), as well as possible other activity I'm unaware.
But lacking that, "build it and they will come" seems rather unlikely. The remaining possibility is that the vision Wrath Of Gnon espouses will appeal to the specific niche they hope to attract, in which case there is limited likelihood of success.
That said: expressing the plan in terms of goal, economic basis, architecture, and design principles would help. The economic base element is conspicuously missing.
Regulatory, governance, and conflict-resolution elements should also be explored.
