A Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Can we imagine cities as physical software? Kanye West gives us a clue.
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”– William Shakespeare, As You Like It
Shakespeare popularized the notion that everyone is an actor; we portray different characters in each phase of our lives. Society tells us that our roles are defined through the ‘seven ages’ – the helpless infant, the whining schoolboy, the emotional lover, the devoted soldier, the wise judge, the senescent old man, and the elderly, forced into sheer helplessness – and our imperative is to act them out like good citizens. However, the internet has permitted certain will-to-power types the means to flip society’s script upon its head. One individual “playing many parts” in our time is Kanye West and not in the way one would expect.
I’m not referring to his hot-take about how slavery is a mindset, rather what I find infinitely more interesting are his visions of building a charter city in Wyoming. Just as many direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands are crafting physical presences (Allbirds, Casper, etc), celebrities are landscaping their own mini-Mt.Olympi from which they’ll reign over their screaming fans. Kanye West is merely the first igniting this trend across America by turning Cody, Wyoming into his fiefdom.
“We’re standing on my first property. So I’m going to be one of the biggest real-estate developers of all time—what Howard Hughes was to aircrafts and what Henry Ford was to cars. Just the relationships I have with architects, my understanding of space and sacred proportions, just this new vibe, this new energy…We gonna develop cities.”
To give the proper context, commercial aerospace and cars were both around before Hughes and Ford respectively. Neither engineered the first prototypes; yet West’s vision is to be the first to make cities in the same way as the pioneers above: rapidly and manufactured with precision. This is less crazy than it seems on first glance. Hughes had no idea of the complexity behind America’s burgeoning aerospace industry as a young man – he started off as a film director, later becoming a pilot, and lastly the infamous provocateur and recluse we remember him by. Nevertheless, Hughes succeeded because he had a perfectionist’s eye and a killer work ethic. These appear to be traits West has in spades; from apparel, to music, and now architecture, he undoubtedly has polymath tendencies and an undying ambition to be the greatest artist of all time.
Do we need more cities?
One theme of this blog is to tackle complicated systems (like cities) and unravel their mysteries. We seem to be at an inflection point in the cultural zeitgeist because so many cities in America are run inefficiently: they’re the best examples of knowledge agglomeration economies, meaning that the high density of living increases productivity. Having your friends, a neighborhood watering hole, and a nice-enough cafe in a 2-block radius makes friendly discussion really easy.
On this topic, I wrote a piece with Auren Hoffman recently about how even high earners ($300k/yr) are feeling the brunt of the skyrocketing costs in American coastal cities. As someone who has lived all over, this is egregious. Families on the median annual salary ($62k) wouldn’t believe this is possible, but the exponential cost of core goods like healthcare, infrastructure, and education make this nightmare a reality (along with keeping up with the Joneses).
The classic case those Ivy League graduates moving to SF or NY as that’s where all the high-salaried jobs are and have been for the last few decades. Therefore interstate migration is at an all-time low: why bother moving once you’ve made a network? Yet this is disastrous for the rest of the country. We need people to move around more and spread the wealth as how else do people think we’re going to fix our political chasm? Empathy only comes with constant contact and understanding the lives of others.
Moreover, there’s an old saying among veteran programmers that: “ideas move at the speed of beer.” In the early days of Silicon Valley (SV), semiconductor engineers would be drinking and chatting about chip design (no NDAs!) at the famous Wagon Wheel bar in Mountain View. Can we imagine the potential productivity boost if we had more excellent cities (and many more Wagon Wheels) connecting people and ideas? One staggers thinking about the amount of Intels that could be created in the midwest.
Walker’s Wagon Wheel: where the first semiconductor engineers delved into their dreams of the future
Silicon Valley’s growing years and pains were a reflection of this idea. The fight to stay true to its culture and harbor unique thought is not something that happens easily – one has to fight to make sure that this spirit of egalitarian innovation prospers. I think that this spirit is slowly leaving the valley: all good things come to an end at one point or another and success has a bad habit of turning the victors weak. Now that doesn’t imply that SV cannot reinvent itself; it certainly has the power to do so. And the strong way to do it might be enabling individuals to build their own cities to continue this spirit in and even outside the valley.
Cities are labor markets
The author of Order Without Design, Alain Bertaud makes the case that cities are actually labor markets first and cultural hubs second; people make the move to New York, Shanghai, and Sydney largely for their diverse array of jobs. This is even the case when we consider how specialized the economy has become: if you’re a Mongolian interior designer with an interest in Dutch architecture, I doubt you’ll find a job that you want in a rural town.
This drive to the city is happening in parallel all over the world.
“In 2014 the United Nations estimated that some four billion people on earth lived in cities, and it predicted that by 2045 the world’s urban population would surpass six billion. The UN believes the largest urban growth will take place in India, China and Nigeria: these three countries will account for 37% of the projected urban population growth to 2050, creating huge demand for public transportation, housing, electricity, water and sanitation. UN Habitat also estimates that urban areas generate 70% of global GDP.”
The trick is creating these cities at scale and rendering them as efficiently as possible. Both of these are unsolved challenges – simply step outside in San Francisco’s SOMA district and you’ll see what I mean.
Cities as ‘physical software’
I sketched out my idea for how a city’s layers, once unraveled, might be similar to that of the internet.
In the beginning of any settlement, land and sea set the initial boundary for a city, country, nation, etc. People fight over this land and whoever claims victory earns the right to develop it with infrastructure (roads, bridges, bars, etc). Everything you need for a town. However in England, to become a city, historically a town would need a cathedral. Religion was a huge mainstay of any up and coming city, especially in the early days of America: it was the main mode of community bonding.
Still, religion isn’t enough. At that point, a clear leadership structure needs to form beyond the ad-hoc government that newcomers would have formed. Lastly, the highest form of Maslow’s hierarchy is the cultural attractions that attract more people into the flywheel. While today they may take the form of hipster cafes or nightclubs, back then it was probably a bar or two.
I believe we can think about these like the layers of internet as shown below. Today, each stack of the city is often set in stone and the rules are tough or near impossible to change (zoning laws with respect to land). It doesn’t have to stay that way; every part of the stack is becoming malleable as charter cities have shown.
General state law is much like the base TCP/IP protocol of the internet – it sets the standard within the state. Indeed, no two cities are alike, so a city’s charter is like an additional software layer above the main protocol – you can measure and tailor it to to your liking. This is why projects like culdesac are born: they aim to build cities around people, not cars, in Tempe, Arizona and they’re a small team which moves quickly. We should take a software mindset in making cities, prioritizing tempo and iteration.
In the United States, charter cities vary from regular cities in that they’re made possible by a charter agreement rather than federal law; this makes certain novel arrangements possible whereby citizens in local communities can demand more power than the state legislature generally permits. In California, for example, 121 out of 482 (25%) are charter cities, including San Francisco and Palo Alto.
I imagine that the question of what defines a ‘municipal’ or city affair gets a bit murky; thankfully, there are some set guidelines on their rules:
Municipal election matters.
Land use and zoning decisions (with some exceptions).
How a city spends its tax dollars.
Municipal contracts, provided the charter or a city ordinance exempts the city from the Public Contract Code, and the subject matter of the bid constitutes a municipal affair. Thus, a charter may exempt a city from the State’s competitive bidding statutes.
However, state jurisdiction extends to:
Traffic and vehicle regulation
Tort claims against a governmental entity
Regulation of school systems
What’s the difference? I see that general law applies when the consequences clearly affect public goods. Sadly, I think school systems should be under the charter cities column but alas.
We can see that the important matters are under charter jurisdiction (spending of tax dollars), so what’s really stopping West from gathering his friends, family, and fans and making a brand new city? Nothing much. Consequently, he’s bought 2 estates for a total of $30 million, nearly 10,000 acres, and has even bought property in California where he built Star Wars-esque domes that could potentially be used for the homeless (they were later demolished later in 2019 for being “too permanent”).
He also owns a church and does pop-up Sunday services; one of his estates, the Bighorn Mountain Ranch, will turn into a permanent home for his Christian gospels. Evidently, there is a substantial community forming behind his brand and there are many who would move to his town in an instant if they could. The question is when can they?
“How successful would an $890 million revenue-generating company like Yeezy be at boosting the local Cody economy and bringing more tourists to town?
West's business model does appear to be similar to that of Brunello Cucinelli, who turned a ruined castle in a depopulated Medieval Italian village called Solomeo into his business headquarters 37 years ago. By 2000, he had built facilities all around Solomeo which created jobs for the local residents, and reinvested his profits back into the town (a practice the designer calls "humanistic capitalism").”
It starts off as an extension of his business only to then branch off into community building; why else would one buy a church? Bringing people together is the foundation of any great network people know, learn, and become friends with each other. The downside of the internet’s pervasiveness is that it has removed much of the human need for physical connection and it seems as though people are yearning for this again. The pendulum is swinging back as it should.
West is the harbinger of this movement, others like Justin Timberlake and Akon are copying his mentality and have been swept away by the tide. Timberlake is trying to turn Nashville into a global music hub, but Akon is going a step further: he wants to make his city entirely renewable and operated with his own cryptocurrency, Akoin; audacious to say the least. It’s clear that new cities are coming and the only question remaining is what price West and others are willing pay to forge their visions into reality. Unlike Howard Hughes, West recovered from his breakdowns and returned a stronger personality, defying the act he was supposed to play as a wealthy, African-American male. Maybe that’s what it takes to build a city – an undying belief that you’re on the right side of history.
🌆 Links
The charter cities canon: From governance, land value taxes, special economic zones, and political philosophy this reading list has it all. When I chat with people interested in the topic of cities, I find that they’ve mostly read the same material: The Power Broker, Order Without Design, and The Death and Life of Great American Cities. These are classics, but they don’t give you a broad-scope of how cities function: the devil’s in the details. As an analogy from math, you’d have a tough time going from counting numbers to taking derivatives, but people are doing just that when it comes to understanding cities. Spend the time and learn the fundamentals. Link.
Paul Romer, Nobel Prize winner in economics, on why we need charter cities: “Picture how the United States looked in 1800. One might have argued then that no major new cities could emerge and compete with the ones like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia that already occupied the best locations. This kind of reasoning would have completely missed the emergence of cities like Atlanta, Dallas, Seattle, Miami, and Los Angeles.” Link.
Should we even build more cities? “The sad thing is that we’re going to develop more urban area in the next 100 years than currently exists on Earth…If we stick to business as usual most of it is going to be disorderly and less functional than the stuff we already have.” Link
Charter 👏 city 👏 energy 👏
Thanks to Alex for the initial feedback.
If you missed out on last week’s issue, I discussed the creation of the first venture capitalists. I always enjoy the conversations that arise from these posts, don’t hesitate to send me a message!