On March 3, 2023, Donald Trump released a campaign video promising to charter up to ten new cities on federal land, chosen through a design competition and populated by young families, advanced factories and vertical takeoff vehicles. For about eighteen months the idea generated a cottage industry of think tank
Once India's Hottest New City, Gurgaon's Lack of Public Infrastructure Shows the Pitfalls of Privately Developed Cities For the better part of a decade, the dominant anxiety about city-building in the developing world was the ghost city. As China built entire cities that were never
Downtown Cleveland has an impressive skyline for a city its size. Key Tower, 200 Public Square, the old BP Building. It's all serious architecture, built to hold thousands of workers and still structurally sound. Many of those floors are empty and have been for years. Not temporarily empty,
Headquarters of the Renaissance, Florence, Italy is one of the most important and misunderstood cities ever built. While it is best known for its artists, architects, musicians, and humanist culture, its greatest lessons for the development of other cities come in its pioneering approach to all of the other core
Yanbu doesn't get the attention that NEOM gets, or the architectural splashiness of the Red Sea Project, or the sovereign wealth fund swagger of Diriyah. It was developed under humbler pretenses for unglamorous entry in Saudi Arabia's urban portfolio, and arguably has been more successful than
In 1979, Shenzhen was a fishing village. Today, it is a 17-million-strong megalopolis, a global tech hub, and one of the most mind-bending urban success stories in history. In Shenzhen, factories-turned dorm-room startups blossom into trillion-dollar tech giants, and a hyper-efficient transportation system
Fifteen years ago, Al Duqm was a fishing settlement on Oman's southeastern Arabian Sea coast with a population of around 6,000 people, a stretch of coastline and a geography that strategists had been quietly noting for years. Notably, it sat outside the Strait of Hormuz, on the
Cities for people or people for cities? An unlikely marriage between city planning and gene modification is reinventing the future city. It’s also pushing the technological edge of gene modification as a tool for good – potentially as a natural outgrowth of the legacy of city planning as a tool
In Milton Keynes, perhaps the most radical of Britain’s post-Second World War “New Towns,” the battle over Brexit and the culture war that it represents is raging hard a decade on. There, the consequences of EU immigration policy, of planning instituted by national authority, and of the grassroots
We’ve written about the vision for NEOM multiple times on Capital Frontiers. NEOM is the massive new city project Saudi Arabia launched in 2017 in the country’s northwest corner by Jordan, a priority project of the Crown Prince with the objective to create an unparalleled and unprecedented reinvention
As one of the most conservative countries on earth takes on the 21st century, a pair of government-initiated new cities are among its most groundbreaking and ambitious investments. With different histories and emerging trajectories, KAEC and NEOM are blazing the trail in the opportunities and pitfalls of cutting-edge
Core communities: Secaucus, Weehawken, Jersey City, Newark, Clifton, Piscataway, Carteret, and extending into Hudson, Essex, Union, and Middlesex Counties. The Northern New Jersey data center market functions as the primary digital edge of the New York metropolitan economy, anchoring one of the most important low-latency and interconnection ecosystems in