There was the near-total secrecy with which the investors bought up the land. There were the fears of locals that it would be a haven of high-tech intrusiveness, possibly a spying operation directed against them. And underlying all of this was the fact that the project was so improbably big — bigger than anything anybody in Solano County was able to comprehend.
The plan isn’t formally dead, merely deleted as a ballot measure that would have gone before county voters in November. It could come back in a couple of years. But the project’s critics are convinced it will never return. One of them, U.S. Rep. John Garamendi, declared to reporters that “the California Forever pipe dream is in a permanent deep freeze.” He’s probably right.
California Forever has its share of appealing elements: dense, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, local retail shopping, community-minded rowhouse architecture and lots of bike lanes. But none of those ideas were a match for the suspicions that the project had gradually stirred up.
In some ways, it was a reprise of what happened a few years earlier in Toronto, where Google and a group of innovative planners had sought to create a large new high-tech community on empty land within the city limits. Sidewalk Toronto was meant to “promote a new model of inclusive urban development.” It was to feature the latest environmental safeguards and experiments and include a light-rail transit system, 2,500 new housing units and a timber factory projected to create 4,000 jobs.
Sidewalk Toronto incorporated many of the ideas promoted by the creators of California Forever. And it fell victim to many of the same fears and objections — that it would be an invasion of local privacy, an encroachment of unknown new technology on everyday local life, and an overall dehumanizing of ordinary affairs that would not be in the interest of the citizens of Toronto.
If you like, you can view these two planning failures as a revolt against poorly understood 21st century technological change. But if you look back earlier in urban planning history, you can begin to see it as just the latest case of ambivalence about the whole idea of new towns, another round in a cycle of swirling sentiments that stretches back more than a hundred years. Most of us believe there is something profoundly absent in modern city life, and that trying something from scratch is a worthwhile idea. But we’re also scared of it.
NEW-TOWN VISIONS ARE A CONSTANT in American urban history and, remarkable as it may seem, they recur every 30 years or so, usually with initial excitement but eventually with modest or mixed results. In the early 1990s, at the start of the New Urbanism movement, much of the excitement was about Seaside, the planned community in north Florida that became a New Urbanist sensation with its dense neighborhoods, pedestrian friendliness, front porches, public gathering places, and reminiscence of communities that existed all over America in the decades before postwar suburban sprawl. Seaside seemed to suggest a neo-traditional future for other planned communities, and tourists and planners traveled great distances to see and appreciate it.
But Seaside turned out to be more of a resort town for the affluent than a model for middle-class families, and it attracted some of the same privacy concerns that have troubled the more recent projects. The Truman Show was a 1998 movie about a town based on Seaside, in which the town turns out to be a massive fraud at the expense of a single unknowing resident. More than three decades after Seaside’s debut, it’s a successful, affluent and pleasant community. But it did not spark the explosion in master-planned New Urbanism that some of its enthusiasts thought it might generate.
Thirty years before Seaside, the visionary planners James Rouse and Robert F. Simon Jr. attracted national attention with their commitment to building entire new towns that could serve as antidotes to sprawl and inspire a new communitarian style of life. Rouse developed Columbia, Md., on a large swath of land roughly 40 miles from the nation’s capital, and Simon built Reston, in the northern Virginia countryside outside Washington. Both towns featured attractive clusters of homes that challenged some of the anomie of conventional suburbia. But they were largely auto-dependent, which worked against their urbanist ambitions. Reston has solved some of this problem in recent years, sporting a vibrant central district and acquiring a new downtown transit station. But like Seaside, they exist today largely as stand-alone experiments, not as harbingers of a widespread communitarian urbanism.
(Library of Congress)
That didn’t happen. A fourth new town, in New Jersey, was left unfinished, and the entire project was abandoned. The other towns still exist, but they are primarily suburbs that bear little or no relation to Tugwell’s monumental ambitions.
NOW WE GO BACK THREE MORE DECADES to the turn of the 20th century and to the British urbanist philosopher Ebenezer Howard, whose book, Garden Cities of To-Morrow, published in 1902, provided a blueprint for the new towns that came to be launched or conceived over the century to come. Howard saw his built-from-scratch towns as green refuges from the dirt, noise and confusion of London, modest-size enclaves that could develop their own self-sufficient economies and provide a wholesome, community-minded style of life.
Two of Howard’s proposed towns, Welwyn and Letchworth, were eventually built out. Neither fulfilled his expectations: They were not economically self-sufficient and became enmeshed in the conventional suburban orbit of an expanding Greater London. But it would be a mistake to underestimate Howard’s influence: He is still read today, and in one way or another his work has inspired nearly all the experiments that have emerged at regular intervals in the last hundred years and more.
I have given short shrift to some of these experiments. Some of them have been, and remain, partial successes. I bring up all this history to make two points. One is that new towns find it very difficult to achieve what their creators set out to achieve. The other is that despite the difficulties, we never stop dreaming of what they might do for us.
If there is a practical lesson to draw from the history of new-town ambition, and particularly the recent experiences of California Forever and Sidewalk Toronto, it may be that it’s a mistake to think too big. While new-town dreams have come and gone, new neighborhoods have emerged in diverse areas of the United States that reflect some of the same ideas. Battery Park City in Manhattan in the 1980s; Harbor Town in Memphis, Tenn., in the 1990s; Stapleton (now called Central Park) in Denver in the 2000s — all have embodied the new-town principles, albeit on a much smaller scale. They have all been developed with dense housing, convenience for pedestrians, and a generous array of public gathering places to foster a spirit of community. Maybe California Forever is just too big to avoid the trap of citizen opposition. That’s no reason something similar but much smaller might not work.
Or maybe our current new-town skepticism is mostly an American phenomenon, not a global one. The most ambitious new town in the world in the last decade has been Songdo, a huge master-planned city built on 150,000 previously empty acres less than an hour by rail from Seoul. Songdo is a bastion of transit-focused New Urbanism and high-tech futurism. It has had its problems: Much of the commercial development meant to anchor it has not happened, and residents complain that it is sterile and uninviting. As of this year, it has 167,000 people living there, with much remaining to be built.
Just recently, in Britain, the newly elected Labour government announced a commitment to new towns as a solution to an acute housing shortage. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has promised to build “the next generation” of new towns, along with 1.5 million homes, as part of a “decade of renewal under Labour.” This revives a dream from the 1940s that, like many of its counterparts, proved to be mostly a flop. How much of this newest plan will actually be realized is very much an open question.
Perhaps the New Urbanists of Europe and Asia will ultimately fall into the trap that killed Sidewalk Toronto and is crippling California Forever. Or perhaps city dwellers on other continents will demonstrate a tolerance for New Urban ambition that seems to be faltering in the United States. But new-town enthusiasts in those places are not going to stop dreaming. And, it seems safe to predict, neither will we.
