In 2020, the rapper Akon declared he would build his own eponymous city on the site of the coastal village of Mbodiène, Senegal.
Akon envisioned Akon City as a real-life Wakanda, the Afrofuturist utopia from the film “Black Panther.” But his extensive plans — solar power, Africa’s most advanced hospital, high-tech university, an economy running on Akon’s personal cryptocurrency — omitted one crucial detail:
How Akon City would be governed.
Akon’s failure to plan for governance created questions he could never answer. Last month, the Senegalese government confirmed the project no longer exists.
The rapper’s combination of ambition and disinterest in governance is remarkably common.
With the world seeming stuck, more celebrities, oligarchs and governments want to create futuristic, paradigm-shifting new cities to advance new aesthetics, technologies, or sustainability standards. But for all their grandeur, these proposals offer no new ideas — and often no details at all — about city governance.
In this failure, the world’s rich, famous and powerful demonstrate a planetwide lack of imagination in local democracy and government.
This fundamental failure to think about governance is evident in California Forever, a proposed city on the Bay Area’s outskirts backed by venture capitalists who pride themselves on world-changing ideas — including Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen and Emerson Collective’s Laurene Powell Jobs.
California Forever’s founder-CEO promised a 21st-century city (population 400,000) to embody the California Dream — and prove that great things can still be built there. City plans include North America’s largest advanced manufacturing site, job centers integrated with housing, and energy-efficient neighborhoods and infrastructure
The plans don’t include any clear idea on how this city would be governed. At first, California Forever unsuccessfully sought voter approval for an unincorporated community. More recently, the project is looking at combining with existing cities.
To be fair, California Forever at least is operating in the democratic realm of local government. Other technology visionaries reject democratic governance as they pursue their own utopias.
Bill Gates’ cutting-edge tech city of Belmont, proposed for Arizona in 2017 and stalled since, is light on any governance plans that go beyond the billionaire’s personal beliefs. Peter Thiel — a Trump supporter who declared, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” — supports the building of cities in international waters, beyond democratic accountability. The San Francisco venture capital firm Pronomos, which invests in “prosperous cities that grow to empower entire nations,” has backed the network-state Praxis. Its plans call for “vitality” and opposition to “mediocrity,” but say little of governance.
To be fair, it isn’t just tech bros who foreswear democratic governments for their dream cities. National governments have shown a similar distaste for democracy.
Indonesia has declared that the country’s new capital, Nusantara, on Borneo, will have no local government at all. Saudi Arabia has said not a word about the governance structure of “The Line,” a planned city of two skyscrapers stretching 100 miles across the desert.
Not all visions of future cities exclude governance. Former Wal-Mart executive Marc Lore’s plans for the city of Telosa call for government transparency, participatory democracy, and an economic system in which residents would share in the city’s wealth. At smaller scales, new places have made advances in self-government. Mexico City’s award-winning “utopias” — experimental developments in Iztapalapa borough — are models of shared participatory governance, with authority divided between the mayor’s office and local residents.
But without clear governance, many visionary cities will never be anything more than dreams. Indeed, in Switzerland, the packaging mogul Daniel Model to let Avalon, the libertarian town-republic he declared within the rural village of Müllheim, to remain imaginary.
Akon’s city in Senegal is not a total fiction. But the rap star only built a welcome center and a basketball court, which is why the Senegalese government reclaimed most of Akon’s land. On a small remaining patch, Akon may build a resort.
Perhaps someone can hold a giant conference there, to think up new models of city governance.
Joe Mathews is columnist for Democracy Local and Zócalo Public Square.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Mathews: Ungoverned utopias, from California Forever to Nusantara
Reporting by Joe Mathews / Ventura County Star
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