You are given orders and commission and authority to build two new cities in the United States from the ground up if necessary. Both will be metropolises that will start out at more than 1 million inhabitants and grow to several times that. You can choose pasture and farmland if you like or you can expand a current much smaller city, but you will be renaming the new cities.
Where would you build the new cities and what would you name them?
I would choose a city I currently live in and a city I formerly lived in:
I’d enlarge the city of Montgomery and rename it Kingsburg after MLK (which I will admit is as much to piss off the racist element here as it is to honor MLK himself). I would purchase through eminent domain thousands of acres of farmland across the river and keep it as close to nature as possible as a public park.
Another I’d choose is Milledgeville, Georgia, the reason being that it’s a pretty old town that has zillions of acres that could be developed into a metropolis, has adequate water supply, and the old area of town would be a good nucleus to add tradition. I’d call it Alexandria to honor one of the most intriguing yet mostly unknown characters in U.S. history and who was instrumental in the history of the town (though it was not built until a few years after his death).
Jules Verne did this in his novel The Begum’s Fortune. He put them both in the Pacific Northwest.
that was in the 1870s. I don’t know where I’d put them now.
And the population, do they have to live there, or can they move out if they want? What type of employment is going to be there, or are you building it and hoping that employers will show up?
The other advantage an existing city has is the infrastructure that’s expensive and time-consuming to build. So instead of building a city from scratch, I’d add the million plus inhabitants to it.
So one option is a decaying older city, like Buffalo or Detroit. Even better though is a city like Boston, which already has an extensive subway system. And I’ve never been there, but I think St Louis might work as well.
But it’s much cheaper to build where there is no infrastructure. For example to extend a subway line in Chicago, would cost an millions in just defending a lawsuits. The Chicago Tranist Authority estimates an extension to a subway line on the Brown or Orange would take ten years in lawsuits, rather defending against them.
With a new city you can simply dig the ground and put in a subway. This is way cheaper than digging underneath someone’s house or place of business.
Also you can lay down the cable for Cable TV, High Speed Internet, Phones and all sorts of things right from the start. All much cheaper than adding to an already existing city.
The most important things in locating a new city would, near to fresh water and also having a mild climate. You probably would have to pick something along the lines of Atlanta for climate. Americans don’t want to live in the cold anymore. That’s why they keep moving to TX, FL, AZ and CA over the last few decades.
But those places need water. So you have cities like Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland and Pittsburgh all flush with water and losing population.
I convert Rhode Island into one big city. Architecture is all Art Deco Streamline. I shall name it Colossus (sp?)
I shall re-build Baltimore. Googie/Atomic Age/Mid-Century Modern. Emphasis on alternative energy. Perhaps tidal generators. I shall name it New Athens.
