From Songdo, South Korea to Lavasa, India via Egypt’s unnamed new capital, everywhere you look it seems someone’s building a brand-new city. How hard could it be?

Building a real city from scratch isn’t like playing Minecraft, Civilization or SimCity. Well, it is a little. But problems arise in reality that don’t come up in cyberspace, including vainglorious dictators, pompous architects, bureaucratic impedimenta and the fact that much of the best land is already inhabited by those intractable objects: pesky humans.

Nevertheless, after studying several urban planning projects around the world, we’ve mastered the step-by-step process of how to build your very own real city.

Step 1: Choose a location

Before you begin, you need a spot. Deserts, undeveloped jungles and uninhabited islands are popular: you don’t want to sink your budget into detoxifying brownfield sites, bulldozing slums or fighting legal battles over ancestral land rights. Plus, very few camels attend planning meetings, still less are they capable of forming coherent objections to your masterplan for a desert metropolis.

Tajikistan’s president, Emomali Rahmon, recently laid the foundation stone for Saihoon, a new city for 250,000 people on a 14,000-hectare (34,580-acre) desert site. When complete, it will have 19 residential districts, 50 schools, 40 sports centres, shopping centres and bazaars – and, my favourite design feature, 7,000 hectares (17,290 acres) of orchards blooming in the former desert. Egypt’s new capital, too, is going to be built on sand – to the east of Cairo, its functionally inadequate predecessor. Meanwhile, President Teodoro Obiang is currently overseeing the creation of Oyala as his new capital deep in the jungle of Equatorial Guinea, remote from the seaborne assaults that have menaced the dictator and his government in the existing capital. Crystal Island was to be built on a river island near Moscow.

If you don’t have a desert or uninhabited island to hand, build one. ...