Kyle Harrison
concept

City Building

City Building

The practice of founding new cities from scratch — master-planned communities, charter cities, seasteads, and network-state “exits” — rather than reforming existing ones. The thesis: as the opportunity cost of living in legacy hubs like SF and NYC falls (loss of community, poor city management, broken infrastructure, the rise of the cloud labor market), the timing improves for building governance and infrastructure greenfield on the frontier. It draws on a lineage running through Paul Romer’s charter-cities idea, Patri Friedman and the Seasteading movement, and Balaji Srinivasan-style network-state “exit.”

Sources from the “City building” Apple Note

Processed 2026-09-01 from Apple Note p1501. The note’s Paul Graham tweet was wired to the City Building portfolio feed separately; this is the non-tweet material, which per CLAUDE.md rule 18b belongs here rather than on the feed.

Noah Smith, “The California Forever project is a great idea” (Jan 21, 2024)

Noahpinion, https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-california-forever-project-is. Fetched and read 2026-09-01 — the note held only a bare URL.

Noah Smith argues the California Forever plan for a new city in Solano County is a genuine shot at breaking California’s development stasis: dense housing, public transit, mixed-use development and walkable streets, explicitly rejecting the state’s default “overpriced low-density sprawl.” His strongest framing is that the value is demonstrative rather than local — the city would show “what other cities will look like if they reform their zoning laws.”

He is cautiously optimistic, not a booster, and the objections he raises are the useful part:

  • Water supply and external transit connections are the two hard constraints.
  • “Agglomeration shadow” — a nearby larger city drains the economic activity a new one needs. For a site between San Francisco and Sacramento this is the central risk, and it is the failure mode most charter-city arguments skip.
  • Cultural blandness — a planned city can get the physical form right and still produce nowhere anyone wants to be.
  • His practical suggestion: cultivate UC Davis, to attract graduates who want proximity to both the university and the Bay Area.

He calls the task “extremely daunting” while believing the team has shown serious planning capability.

Why it belongs on this page. This concept’s thesis is that building greenfield beats reforming legacy hubs. Smith is the sympathetic critic version of that thesis, and agglomeration shadow is the best single objection to it in the corpus — it says the frontier bet fails not because governance is hard but because proximity to an existing hub is simultaneously why the site is valuable and why it cannot become a hub itself. Any City Building argument has to answer that. Connects to Charter Cities, The Housing Theory of Everything (the demand-side case for why this matters) and Paul Romer.

Sources from the second “City building” Apple Note

Processed 2026-09-13 from Apple Note p1328. Neither link is a tweet, so nothing here goes to the portfolio feed.

Stephen Jennings on Conversations with Tyler (2023-11-01)

https://open.spotify.com/episode/53zUOzzYPhpahAysMXJhNj · ~54 minutes. Sent to Kyle with the line “You’re interested in city building. I think you’ll find this interesting.”

Tyler Cowen interviews Stephen Jennings, founder and CEO of Rendeavour, recorded inside Tatu City, its special economic zone outside Nairobi. Full write-up: Stephen Jennings on Conversations with Tyler (from the transcript Kyle supplied, 2026-09-13).

The two points that matter most for this page: Jennings calls Tatu a “first cousin to a charter city” — a private municipality with devolved authority rather than a zone with its own sovereignty, which he regards as politically intractable. And Cowen presses the risk that the more valuable a private city becomes, the bigger a target it is for expropriation; Jennings’ only answer is to keep adding visible value until the city is indispensable. He also says the binding constraint is talent, not land or capital.

The operating counterpart to this page’s thesis: a builder actually doing greenfield cities, on a continent where the Charter Cities argument is usually theoretical.

Venkatesh Rao — A Map for AI Town Planners, 2024-29

https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/a-map-for-ai-town-planners-2024-29

⚠️ About AI, not cities — filed here for the metaphor. Rao argues AI “has already speedrun through pioneer/settler phases to the town-planner phase,” using Simon Wardley’s pioneers / settlers / town-planners model (paired with his own Labatutian → Lovecraftian → Ballardian milieus). He dates the epoch from the 2012 ImageNet moment, contrasts crypto as “stuck in a late Settler/Lovecraftian phase,” and attributes AI’s speed to what it feeds on: training data and GPU capital put it in contact with capital markets, legacy media and copyright regulation far earlier than a technology normally meets them.

What transfers to city building is the shape, not the subject — town-planning is the phase where the frontier gets banal infrastructure, which is exactly the transition charter cities are trying to skip to.

One-line

Founding new cities — charter cities, seasteads, network-state exits — instead of reforming old ones, on the bet that frontier governance can be built greenfield.

Case study — Bluebook Cities (Dryden Brown & Charlie Callinan, 2019–2020)

Source: a 2020-09-23 tweet thread by Dryden Brown (@drydenwtbrown) recounting how he and Charlie Callinan tried to build a charter city in West Africa, eventually meeting the Vice President of Ghana.

  • Background. In March 2019, Brown and Callinan were working together at a hedge fund in NYC, both having just left athletics and school to learn investing — Brown did surf contests and philosophy; Callinan played football at Boston College and was briefly signed to the Buffalo Bills. They loved public-markets investing but missed the physicality of sports and wanted “to do something heroic” on the frontier.
  • Intellectual roots. Brown had followed Paul Romer, Patri Friedman, and the Seasteading movement since high school and was obsessed with building a new city. They saw the opportunity cost of living in SF and NYC falling, but judged the market for a Balaji Srinivasan-style “exit” still too small — so they set out to find existing new-city projects and learn the industry’s nuts and bolts first.
  • April 2019 — quit. They left the fund to “build the next great city.”
  • May–July 2019 — research mode. Read every book they could find on ancient, modern, and future cities; met the top master-planned-community developers (Howard Hughes, Tavistock, Brookfield); and spoke with the new-cities crowd in Silicon Valley — Mark Lutter and Tamara Winter (then at CCI), Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, Patri Friedman, Mike Solana, Jason Crawford, and others.
  • July 2019 — Nigeria thesis. Became convinced Nigeria was the best market in the world for a new city (projects like Eko Atlantic already underway, but room for more given population growth). They couldn’t afford the flights — until Callinan won $2,000 at a golf tournament (taking their balance to $2,047) and CCI gave them a small grant, funding tickets to Nigeria. Before leaving, a DC think tank connected Brown to a host in Nigeria (@ThisisChale), and he met @alex_dimcevski at a YC Summer School party.
  • August 2019 — Lagos. Found Lagos “way more chaotic than anything in the US or EU,” ~3x NYC’s population. Their host took them to Grailland (a private religious town) and Ondo State; via relentless cold outreach they met top developers like Ronald Chagoury. They built a thesis for a city near Callinan’s university (Elizade) and landed a meeting with the Ondo State Government.
  • The Ghana thread. Alex from the party had mentioned the project to someone who worked on construction in Ghana; that person offered to connect them to friends in the Ghanaian government. After Callinan flew home, Brown flew to Ghana with their last ~$1,000 (“hoping I wouldn’t be kidnapped”), met Ed and Joyce — who really did work for the government — and toured sites pitching colleagues on a charter city.
  • Funding the next leg. Back in NYC (Callinan at his parents’, Brown on his aunt’s couch), Brown cold-DM’d Byrne Hobart, got coffee, and Hobart wrote Bluebook Cities its first check.
  • The Vice President. Back in Accra for a meeting with the Finance Minister, the minister cancelled (the President of South Africa had flown in for an urgent meeting). Then a call: “Be in front of the Parliament building in 20 minutes. You are meeting with the Vice President.” The Presidential Motorcade picked them up and sped them to Jubilee House (Ghana’s “White House”). Vice President Bawumia was enthusiastic about the benefits charter cities could bring to Ghana.
  • Seed round. They raised a small round from Patri Friedman, Tyler Cowen, @jwmares, @sbm367, @dfmerin and others to develop legislation enabling a charter city in Ghana.
  • COVID. Ghana shut its borders in February 2020 with no clear reopening date. Out of runway for a year-long delay, they “did what made the most sense” — booked a flight to Alaska to plan their next move from the mountains.

Lessons embedded in the story

  • Networking from zero. “No connections” → cold emails, cold calls, and LinkedIn messages to the upper echelons of multiple African governments. A party introduction (Alex) became the entire Ghana thread.
  • Capital on a shoestring. A golf-tournament prize and a small grant funded the first flights; a cold DM to a writer funded the second trip. Frontier city-building was bootstrapped on hundreds of dollars at a time.
  • Frontier > reform. The motivating bet was that the opportunity cost of legacy cities is falling and the cloud labor market makes new locations viable — so build greenfield rather than fix the old.

Quick Capture links — June 18, 2026

Links Kyle saved to this topic on June 18, 2026 (manual capture batch).

Quick Capture links — April 30th, 2020

Saved in Kyle’s April 30th, 2020 Roam “Quick Capture” log.

  • Figure out Sidewalk Labs and all spinouts (e.g. Cityblock). — a to-do to map Alphabet’s urban-innovation arm and the companies it spun out.
  • Charter Cities — the governance model at the core of the Bluebook Cities effort and this page’s frontier-greenfield thesis.
  • Mark Lutter — founder of the Charter Cities Institute (CCI); part of the Silicon Valley new-cities crowd Brown and Callinan met, and CCI provided their first small grant.
  • Tamara Winter — then at the Charter Cities Institute alongside Mark Lutter when the founders consulted the new-cities community.
  • Mike Solana — among the Silicon Valley new-cities figures the founders spoke with during their 2019 research phase.
  • Byrne Hobart — wrote Bluebook Cities its first check after a cold DM from Brown.
  • Tyler Cowen — participated in the Bluebook Cities seed round funding charter-city legislation in Ghana.
  • Progress Studies — adjacent movement framing new-city building as a vehicle for civilizational progress; surfaced via the saved Mark Lutter podcast.

Where it shows up

(auto-populated by lint)

Saved from Roam

Saved tweets

Captured from Kyle’s Apple Notes on 2026-08-21 against link rot. The raw note text is held privately in the wiki.

  • Chris Arnade May Know More… (tweet)

Referenced in