The Future of Urban Living: A Look at the Ambitious Plans to Build Utopian Cities

Billionaire Marc Lore has fleshed out a plan to build an utopian city called Telosa for 5 million people in the American desert, while a dozen projects worldwide aim to create sustainable, hypermodern cities from scratch.

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Whether these cities will be built may be only a dream, but the proposals themselves hint at what the city of the future might look like.

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Telosa is to be built on 150,000 acres in either Nevada, Utah, or Arizona, and 50,000 "diverse" people will call it home by 2030.

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The city of Lore will have electric and autonomous vehicles, and streets won’t have curbs that could hinder differently-abled people, or on-street parking.

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Every building in Telosa will be "green," with rooftop panels producing renewable energy, and a "diverse and efficient water system that is resistant to drought" will be created.

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The land will be purchased by a nonprofit foundation called Telosa Community to build the city, and development will increase the land’s value, investing the proceeds in an endowment-style vehicle that would fund education, job training, healthcare, housing, and more.

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A megacity named The Line, part of a larger development called Neom, is being constructed in Saudi Arabia, and the project claims that water will be plentiful through desalination, wastewater and seawater processing, and smart metering.

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Bill Gates wants to build a "smart city" called Belmont in the Arizona desert, while Elon Musk has discussed creating a city called Starbase in southernmost Texas, on Earth as a hub for space exploration.

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The promise of smart cities has been a consistent disappointment in the real world, and the road to Utopia is littered with shattered dreams.

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