....

The escapist urge to build cities from scratch is nothing new. At the turn of the 19th century, the Garden City movement saw a generation of bucolic communities planned in reaction to the grime and overcrowding of rapidly industrialising cities, driven by a powerful campaign for social reform. Half a century later, the New Town movement developed these ideas, promising a brave new world of modern, self-sufficient municipalities rising from the ruins of the second world war, and focused on building an inclusive, democratic society.

Now, in the first decades of a new millennium, a surge in global population growth and a sense of impending environmental armageddon have spurred an epidemic of planned cities of a very different kind. This time they are being conceived by private multinational corporations as gilt-edged gated communities and tax-exempt free-trade hubs, each branded as the ultimate techno-eco-utopia.

The need for urban expansion is clear: the United Nations calculates that 68% of the world population will live in cities by 2050, adding another 2.5 billion people to urban areas, the vast majority in Asia and Africa. All these newly minted urbanites will need somewhere to live and work. Yet the vast majority of the newly planned cities are not being designed to house the coming tidal wave of rural-urban migrants. They are instruments to attract international investment and make the urban rich even richer, at a time when property has become the ultimate global currency.

According to research from Savills, real estate is now a more valuable asset class than all stocks, shares and securitised debt combined, with a total value of around $228tn. That represents three and a half times global GDP, or 40 times the value of all the gold ever mined. While once we dug down to extract value from the earth, the bristling glass towers of these new urban enclaves are the inverted mineshafts of today – complete with equally damaging side effects.

This new breed of city takes various different forms, from government initiatives, to public-private partnerships, to entirely private enterprises. Many are being used to jump-start economies in the developing world, with masterplans carefully calibrated to attract foreign investors and treasuries looking to sink their funds into something concrete.

....