A road sign near land recently purchased by Flannery Associates near Rio Vista, California. JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images
FOR the past six years, a mysterious group called Flannery Associates bought up swathes of farmland north of San Francisco in Solano county. Now that it has amassed over 200 square kilometres, it has gone public with plans to build a city and revealed the name of the project, California Forever.
Jan Sramek, CEO of the operation, said he has been working with investors including venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. They aim to build an instant community that will house nearly half a million people. This news dispelled years of rumours that the land grab was part of a secret military project, due to its proximity to an air force base. But none of this has made Solano county residents happy because they worry Sramek – a former finance industry superstar and self-help influencer – will create a haven for the rich that drains resources from the region without giving anything back.
Sramek and a few colleagues have been holding town hall meetings around Solano county to talk to residents and pitch their still-vague plans. Reports from these events are full of comments from attendees who express frustration that Sramek won’t divulge details of exactly where and how the city will be built. Instead of reassuring concerned citizens, he referred cryptically in a recent meeting to knowing things about regulations his detractors don’t.
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At one session, in the city of Vallejo, he spoke to KQED reporter Adhiti Bandlamudi. “Before we ever started investing, we did a lot of research on the county,” he said. “And so, actually, we do know more about the county than almost any other developer that would come in here.” When residents asked how the proposed city would get water and manage traffic on the already congested highway nearby, he said California Forever was working on figuring it out. It was more of a deflection than a full answer, and mirrored talking points from the firm’s online FAQs, which make a lot of vague promises to work with the county.
Sramek framed negative responses as sour grapes from people who couldn’t solve problems on their own. “Every time someone says, ‘I don’t like your project’, we say, ‘OK, what’s your proposal for fixing these issues?’ Because it’s really easy to be a critic. It’s really hard to build something in the world today,” he argued. The thing is, nobody in Solano county was asking for solutions like California Forever.
Certainly the county needs help with problems like water access, infrastructure maintenance and police corruption. But nobody expressed a desire for a sprawling luxury city for thousands of residents who don’t live there yet. Ill-feeling includes a dispute with some property owners. Indeed, locals are so resistant to the development plans that California Forever’s Flannery Associates has filed lawsuits over land acquisition, suing several people who didn’t sell, accusing them of conspiring to drive up land prices.
Perhaps one of the most curious claims made by Sramek is that his city will not be “utopian”. And yet the closest analogue to California Forever might be the city imagined by Ayn Rand in her novel Atlas Shrugged, in which industrialists led by John Galt flee to an urban utopia in rural Colorado to escape the horror of labour strikes. Sramek’s plans also have elements of the garden city imagined by British urban planner Ebenezer Howard, which, in turn, inspired architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic suburbs in the US. Unfortunately, those suburbs were dependent on cars and wound up contributing to the kinds of unsustainable, resource-depleting developments that California Forever claims to reject.
Perhaps what Sramek means is that California Forever isn’t a utopia because it will be real, and not just a dream. After all, the word utopia is a reference to the Greek for “no place”. However, as long as California Forever remains a vaguely-defined, unbuilt project, it is, in fact, no place. California Forever is, by the strictest definition, utopian.
For the many Solano county residents whose lives are about to be turned upside down by this new development, though, it might be more like dystopia. To them, it is as if strangers from Silicon Valley have plonked themselves down in a land where they don’t belong and are trying to copy-paste a city onto farmland, as if they were playing Minecraft.
This approach has faint echoes in the history of California settlement itself, where strangers from Europe violently pushed out the local Indigenous peoples for hundreds of years, often in the name of building a better world.
In this state, where we build futuristic dreams and tech that supplies the world with wonder, it is all too easy to forget the past. But it haunts us anyway.
Annalee’s week
What I’m reading
The recently launched neuroscience magazine The Transmitter.
What I’m watching
New Doctor Who!
What I’m working on
Making pad kee mao, aka the Thai dish drunken noodles.
Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest novel is The Terraformers and they are the co-host of the Hugo-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. You can follow them @annaleen and their website is techsploitation.com
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