Germania, Albert Speer’s architectural plan for a new Berlin, never came to fruition. Commissioned by Adolf Hitler to be constructed following the assumed Nazi victory in WWII, it was to be a grand, empiric vision. The centerpiece of this new city was the Volkshalle, a monumental domed building that acted as a symbol of power, design, and the future. The thousand-year Reich was to be crystallized and honored in the legacy of the buildings, the widening of the streets, and the strict, sheer columns reminiscent of ancient Rome. Aryan cultural memory was baked into every corner.
History’s march ended that.
Like many grand visions, architectural and otherwise, it wasn’t meant to be. The Nazis were defeated. Speer was imprisoned for twenty years for crimes against humanity. Germany progressed into a humanist, democratic republic free of a new Reich and a eugenically-sanitized populace. It hasn’t forgotten its history. Neither should we.
Part of the failure of Germania is simply materials and supply problems. Germany was spread too thin by the time the plans for the new city were underway. The Soviets were closing in from the east, the Allies from the west. Men and materiel were in short supply; building a new city on such a flimsy pretext as supposed victory was a waste of time and resources. No one doubted the designs. It was the execution that couldn’t happen. Germania collapsed simultaneously with the Third Reich.
Creating new cities and communities from nothing is part of the collective imagination of human settlement. The pharaohs and their great pyramids, which showed a reign of power unmatched in the architectural imagination. Disney’s EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) was to fulfill Walt’s vision for a classic, distilled Americana in township form. Smart, perfectly controlled, and regulated by sharp values meant to instill a sense of pride in the country that had given him everything. Shiny mid-century consumerism.
Levittown and the prefab suburban housing communities of the postwar world gave rise to manufactured living as a commodity worth buying, comparable in price to a car. Toyota’s Woven City project is a new attempt to create a smart city from the ground up, every possible convenience built in. Larry Page and others have advocated for geographic zones for open technical experimentation, free of normal regulation. Facebook is currently pursuing its own city, designed for its employees—a central hub in Mark Zuckerberg’s planned metaverse.
Urban geographers, engineers, and architects could be busy for centuries crafting every permutation of human living imaginable. Frank Lloyd Wright, perhaps the most famous architect in history, even had his own design: Broadacre City, a city of agrarian principles mixed with urban development. It was strongly influenced by Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City movement, emphasizing a flattening and mingling of the rural-urban divide. It became, lamentably, another grandiose utopia that wasn’t meant to be, at least in his lifetime.
Jane Jacobs made her career writing about cities and how people live in them. She emphasized, above all, the human networks and relations between people in cities. Democracy blossomed in cities; problems could be self-correcting in the communities. Interactions created necessity, and social physics, as Alex Pentland puts it, give rise to massive networks of idea flow. This open exchange of ideas and values emerging as a natural consequence of human interaction networks gives cities the developmental and ideological edge. The big ideas come from cities because there is more there to spring from. The people make the city lively, vibrant, evolving. We actively change our cities.
Prefab cities have always had a problem: they don’t feel human. Sure, they’re human spaces dominated by interactions. They have markets, houses, pets. But look at most of the thriving cities of the world today and you’ll see a common trait: they often seem haphazard. They seem like they were built one way, changed, redone, destroyed, built again, and converted and changed. Graffiti, leftovers. Most of the buildings we interact with haven’t always been what they are now. We see old buildings right next to banks, bricks and lumber mingling with concrete or slabs of modernism. Cities, on closer inspection, look to be thrown together things, piecemeal and patchwork.
Urban and regional gentrification efforts have dominated our thinking about renewal these last few years. A greater focus on rebuilding and renewing dead, bombed-out areas of economic decay has turned dilapidated shacks and sheds into schools or hospitals. Where once junkyards of ruined cars dotted the landscape, we now have gardens, bike lanes, parks, and accrued networks of Jacobs’ human interactions. Gentrification may fail from time to time, depending on circumstance. After all, fixing up a building isn’t the same as fixing an economic zone. Location is still vital in city design, no matter how much localized efforts try.
The notion of gentrifying or “fixing” neighborhoods, taken to an extreme, can lead to situations like Robert Moses and the reshaping of entire boroughs and areas of land to suit the political mandates and visions of a single designer. Land is power, and consolidated architecture over that owned land, in combination with singular, guiding visions of economics for a controlled area, can take us to places where we indeed have “tech zones” cut off from the world—and cut off from everything else.
Let’s talk about what this might mean.
Billionaires have made going to space a reality. In our time, individuals like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg control a disproportionate amount of wealth and influence over the rest of the populace. Musk has proposed designing his own cities. Zuckerberg is at work upon it now. When not looking to space, reshaping the planet in a suitable image to one individual is a worthy pastime. They’re simply following in the footsteps of Walt Disney, or Wright, had he had the money to make his dream real. In my home state (Nebraska), the largest owners of land are Ted Turner and Bill Gates. The Woven City is a Toyota property; you’ll be able to see all their products on constant display there.
It’s debatable the extent to which oligarchy has become the default mode of the United States. There is no question billionaires wield an outside influence on politics. Though the tide against conventional tech industry overreach has begun to turn, we’ve been here before. I don’t believe the United States will now, or ever, overturn and abandon capitalism. I think the conventional formulation of massive wealth accrued by certain individuals will remain the norm for at least the first half of the 21st century. I think billionaire projects will go on, and I think the government will cede more to them than they already have.
Odd as it may sound, I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. I support Musk, Bezos, and the private space industry. I support space tourism. I support planetary and space colonization fully. I think creating unique, separate cities is a potentially wonderful idea. I’ve long dreamed of doing it myself, and would do the same if I were in their shoes. I’d love the chance to make a world in my own design and see how it functions. We’ve all, from time to time, been gripped with the libertarian impulse to start anew and set our own laws and controls. We can’t pretend that we don’t lack the desire to reformulate how we want.
This human instinct is what concerns me.
For all the good of reshaping the world and creating new cities, distinct pitfalls await if we lack restraint or realistic oversight. Though experimental or prefab built cities may have designs or styles in common, they have something else in common: control. They rely on control of every block, every street, all the circumstances to be successful. Hitler’s Germania would look beautiful and strong to the visitor—and it came at the cost of strict ethnic cleansing and rigid control of the economy and every feature of culture. His was a sterile, eugenic city, the buildings culled and bred based on artificial selection. Walt Disney’s EPCOT would strictly enforce the creator’s sense of family values and particular breed of Americanism. To break those rules meant expulsion.
Cities are already locations of control and surveillance. They can be formulated as traps based on need. They can collect and ransack from the citizens as the chieftains decide. Corruption can rot away from the inside until there is nothing left but generational abandonment. Black Americans fear the police in their cities more than they fear criminals. Tammany Hall and boss control have been reliable clannish traits of many metropolises since the beginning of the country. Yet, control is not total in our American cities. There are many sparrows that fall without being counted. If control were absolute, we’d have a different world.
We could have a genuine authoritarian city, made from the ground up.
New Story is a wonderful charity that uses a sophisticated 3D printer called the Vulcan II to print homes and make communities for people in need. I highly recommend donating to them. They’re not alone in using 3D printing technology to make homes and communities. 3D printers have also been proposed to land on the Moon and create pre-made shelters for future astronauts and potential colonists. It may be in the future that before we humans go anywhere, our cities are first printed and made on an assembly like Henry Ford’s cars. Our buildings precede us.
I see a propensity for misuse in all human technology. It’s just the other side of the coin. I don’t lament that by itself—how could I? it’s human nature itself. In 3D printing communities, I see the ability for an authoritarian type, be it a leader or a mega-rich oligarch, to make the city of their wildest imagination happen quicker, cheaper, and from harvested materials of the earth’s substrate, like a von Neumann probe on an industrial, urban scale. The city, already self-evolving, could expand exponentially in its ability to spread, and thusly, spread its values. The land itself can be used to make the bricks and blocks of a world sterile, cleansed, and authoritarian. Germania could be made before the war ended this time.
We do wrong when we put limits on human technology and ingenuity. My personal philosophy is, if it isn’t forbidden by physics, then it can and likely will happen one day. The strict, imposing cityscapes of Hugh Ferriss and the jagged edges of Italian futurist architecture, higher than the eye can see, may seem out of reach to 3D printing and mass manufacture. But we’ve said that before, time and again, and we see industries dominated by technological wonders which we couldn’t previously imagine. Clarke’s Third Law reliably holds up.
In the broader conception, I can imagine websites themselves turning into cities or blocks. Perhaps a 3D printer can one day be deeply intelligent, able to learn. You can insert an ecommerce site architecture into it, and it automatically generates blueprints from the architecture most closely matching it, building an entire city based on the precepts of consumerism and the interconnections between products and listings. Amazon City (a different one than these) would be unfathomably large, with buildings that relate to one another by product and category listings. If products or pages disappear, so does the block or the building. It isn’t hard to build new ones in its place. We’ve made it easy.
A country ruled by a despot or a group of despots (and we have no shortage in this world) could use massive 3D printing arrays to create cities designed to control and coerce, their power built from the ground up, resources controlled precisely for this purpose. With enough land and enough control, this can lead to country-sized computation in the form of a giant, interconnected city of fascist or authoritarian design. Perhaps it will be a group of connected cities, like network nodes, feeding one another. To live in the country is to live in one of these cities. You aren’t a citizen, but a user.
You are a hyperlinked being, connected to the smart city to track you at all times via Benjamin Bratton’s concept of deep address. For some countries, failure to adhere to terms of service means you’re deplatformed (aka exiled beyond the sovereignty). For other countries, you might simply be executed, a failed link in a massive web, human and individual genome as defunct website. No truly smart city can abide link rot.
In this scenario, your life is more or less free. You use resources the way you normally do, pay for things the way you normally do. But it is all hyperlinked down to its core, interconnected and addressable. Even your genotype is linkable. Metadata is the control of your race and ethnicity in a cybernetic database, and you’re linked to the buildings and vehicles the way a webpage is linked to an article now. Your data is the constant prize. Your vote secures power in the way ballots in banana republics currently do. Strict, efficient control means the designers of the city and the engineers of the 3D printing technology rule via computation.
China, for example, already has a highly connected world, one where social media has the power to ostracize individuals from collective society. To speak ill of the CCP invokes losing social credits, and to be a constant dissenter means you’re cut off from WeChat and your family. China relies on massive corporations backed by nationalistic interests to ensure their competitive prowess on the world stage. Baidu might well have their own corporate, smart-printed city backed in rule by the national government. Mention Falun Gong and be expelled, stripped of credits and digital citizenship. Foxconn, the electronics facility in China, employs enough people to almost be an active city itself. The people of the city might be required to constantly manufacture, create more like an anthill.
Of course, this is but one scenario. Maybe this occurs on another planet, those 3D printers again sent first to another world to pave our way to a controlled universe. But maybe it’s smaller. Maybe a single community for a massive corporation provides the same level of tracking and ambient intelligence for its populace. When Mark Zuckerberg refers to the metaverse, he means a concept beyond an internet of things. It’s closer to Web 4.0. It’s the idea that everyday objects are turned into SPIMEs, and blogs are blogjects. Ambient intelligence means even your clothes have sensors and give off data. His vision, I believe, is going to be achieved in my lifetime. We’re well on our way now. And, if history is any guide, the users will gladly surrender privacy for convenience. Is it cheaper this way? I get paid more? And all I have to do is check a box at the end of a long document agreeing to whatever it says? Checked. Where’s my stuff?
If you’ve read The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, then you’ve become accustomed to the notion of behavioral surplus, the framework that encourages massive tech companies to gather and use data on human behavior in order to influence and drive sales or adoption rates or any other conversion metric. Enough behavioral surplus data, and we can influence people to do what we want, BF Skinner’s dream come to life at last. It could be that excessive behavioral surplus data means human decision making and destiny is at last controllable, and the people in the 3D city don’t believe it’s authoritarian at all, but rather find it very agreeable. If people stand in the way of achieving a vision, then you change their minds by training them to accept the vision.
Carried to other areas, such a city could lead to the manufactured ethno-state, long the dream of supremacist organizations and strict racial segregationists. Many utopias through history shared the collective vision of society based on one race, thus depriving human settlements of the opportunity for racial division. Deep addressing, computational architecture, and hyperlinking genomes could ensure a controllable ethno-state where before eugenics failed. The fewest uncontrolled variables as possible are needed to measure and refine the power of an authoritarian city. Racial empathy is a problem for any strict society—it might breed empathy as a functioning organ in general. What if users (citizens) begin to feel empathy for those exiled or euthanized?
If it all seems spurious or little more than a thought experiment, just think about how many people you know who would happily segment themselves into filter bubbles, living amongst only those other individuals who agree with their viewpoints. Imagine how many would curate libraries, websites, and platforms to only express the views they agree with. Imagine the human impulse to decide how history, all of history, supports their individual viewpoints. Imagine the human desire, expressed constantly through history in the form of secession or revolution, to control their own destinies in their own image and break away from that which borne them. Imagine the Confederacy not only successful but its full vision thriving, the Jeffersonian agrarian society that expanded southward and took over Cuba, a slaveholder’s paradise.
The human impulse, at its worst, builds and prints the world it wants without regard for the effects. It acquiesces to its own designs. A single person granted control of all needs all the control to keep it. The hyper-control of the means of production of environments, links, and genes ensures an ISP-like monopolized control of human destiny and interaction networks. Jane Jacobs couldn’t have seen behavioral surplus coming along to reshape human destiny and change the way we interact. Her city would fall like the rest to it. There would be no city neutrality the way net neutrality once existed. Bottlenecks of unfavorable ideas are built by design, run through choke points that end them as threats.
So often, visions for a grand new society don’t begin with authoritarian motives. Utopia, and the dream of the perfected man, derives from culture and history being perfectable in the first place. This is the idea of evolution as a perfectionist rather than a satisficer. Biologically, it isn’t accurate. Utopias and their designs, be it socialistic or capitalistic, have always failed. Even the goals are measured in unrealistic ways. It isn’t necessarily that society proceeds inexorably toward entropy. Humans, in general, are just natural creatures, breaking free of those carefully designed choke points. Even in places like Belarus, authoritarian control of the internet has inspired citizens to use VPNs to circumvent power. Information may still want to be free.
Whether these individual dreams of authoritarian and printed cities ever becomes reality is a matter of waiting. We won’t know until it happens. We might not realize how to fix it until we’re there, if ever. But if the human past is any indication, then we’ll first have to experiment with it to see we shouldn’t have done it. I hope for new cities and new designs, and I hope we have the relative foresight to design peaceable motives in their very addresses. I hope we remember the more benevolent traits in our genes.