How to build a city from scratch: the handy stepby-step DIY guide

Adapted from an article found on The Guardian

From Songdo, South Korea to Lavasa, India via Egypts unnamed new capital, everywhere you
look it seems someones building a brand-new city. How hard could it be?
Building a real city from scratch isnt like playing Minecraft, Civilization or SimCity. Well, it is a
little. But problems arise in reality that dont 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, weve mastered
the step-by-step process of how to build your very own real city.

Part 1: steps one to five

Step 1: Choose a location

Before you begin, you need a spot. Deserts,
undeveloped jungles and uninhabited islands
are popular: you dont 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.
Tajikistans president, Emomali Rahmon,

recently laid the foundation stone for Saihoon, a new city for 250,000 people on a 14,000hectare (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. Egypts 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 dont have a desert or uninhabited island to hand, build one. Songdo, the new city near
Seoul in South Korea, is built on land reclaimed from the Yellow Sea. In the early 1960s,
Buckminster Fuller dreamed up a giant floating pyramid in Tokyo Bay which would have housed
1 million people in part as a response to the problem of acquiring building land in Japan.
Perhaps sadly, it never got built.
Step 2: Ensure a reliable water supply
This may sound elementary, but consider what happened to the city of Fatehpur Sikri. The
Mughal emperor Akbar commenced the construction of this walled city in 1569, to serve as the
Mughal capital. Over the next 15 years, he and his lackeys built royal palaces, courts, mosques
and private quarters, all from locally available red sandstone. Shortly after completion, however,
Akbar abandoned Fatehpur in part because of inadequate water supplies.
Today, Rawabi the first Israeli city built for Palestinians has a similar problem. Work started
in 2011 and, when complete, it will have homes for 40,000 residents, as well as cinemas,
shopping malls, schools, landscaped walkways, office blocks, a conference centre, restaurants
and cafes. But, until as recently as this spring, apartments stood empty because negotiations
failed with Israeli authorities over connecting the city to the countrys water grid.
Step 3: Ensure a reliable money supply
Again this may sound elementary, but you dont want to run out of liquidity halfway through
building the high-speed train link to the financial quarter. There are various options available to
you when it comes to securing the cash. Rawabi, denounced by some Palestinians for
normalising Israeli occupation and by some Israelis for the possibility of providing a base for
terrorists, has drawn a third of its $1bn (640m) investment from the private Palestinian
conglomerate Massar International, and the rest from Qatar.
Oyala has been described as a multibillion-dollar [project] for Africas longest-serving dictator
and is funded chiefly by oil, timber and gas revenues. Equatorial Guinea is the third largest subSaharan oil producer, and much of that money is being lavished on the new capital, which will
have a championship golf course, the Library of Central Africa (which looks like a spaceship
docked in a jungle clearing), a luxury hotel and a presidential villa. Meanwhile, according to the
International Business Times, the people are starving.
In Egypt, the nameless 700 sq km city that is set to replace Cairo as the countrys capital will be
partly funded by Emirati businessman Mostafa Madbouly, who recently unveiled the 30bn
projects plans. He told Guardian Cities that he already has the money to build at least 100 sq
km of the new capital, including a new parliament. But he needs more: which is why he invited
kings, presidents, 30 visiting emirs and hundreds of would-be investors to the March launch at
Sharm el-Sheikh.
Step 4: Think about jobs
If your city is to be economically sustainable, it needs jobs. Herbert Girardet, author of Creating
Sustainable Cities, argues that Egypts planned new capital has a better chance of success than

other purpose-built Egyptian cities, mainly because the vast government will be relocated there.
Indeed, many of the most famous planned cities were new capitals Brasilia, Canberra, Abuja,
Canberra, Ottawa, New Delhi that, whatever their other shortcomings, benefited from the
employment opportunities and economic uplift of being a national administrative hub.
Step 5: Do not alienate locals
Dont do what they did in Lavasa. The first three of 100 smart cities that prime minister Narendra
Modi is planning in India will be built as part of the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor, which the
government aims will be a global manufacturing and trading hub. Theyre planning animation
and film studios, software-development companies, biotech labs, and law and architectural
firms, focusing the knowledge industries at the heart of the new India.
However, the 12,500-acre site has been controversial, upsetting some locals and environmental
groups. In 2010, the Indian Environment and Forests ministry ordered that construction on
Lavasa cease temporarily, saying the developers had failed to obtain the mandatory
environmental clearances.

Part 2: steps six to 10

Step 6: Devise a masterplan
You dont even need to set foot in the country
where your plans will be realised. For
example, Garsdale Design, which specialises
in masterplans for war-ravaged cities in Iraq,
is a family practice operating out of a
converted barn in the Yorkshire Dales. Such
3D modelling applications as Esri CityEngine
make it possible to devise city masterplans
for homes, sewerage, water and electrical
systems and integrated public transport, and
then to amend these plans according to the
needs on the ground. Increasingly, too,
masterplans involve setting out Wi-Fi
hotspots, fibre-optic grids and sensors (more
on this below).
Step 7: Integrate transport
Narendra Modis 100 planned cities in India all involve integrated transport with bus rapid
transport (or BRT, a sort of overground metro system), suburban trains and cycle networks.
Smart transport might well mean digital parking meters that text you when a parking space
opens up, or real-time transport displays that give data about traffic jams, availability of buses
and train services. Helsinki admittedly not a planned city, but a good model to follow is going
so far in the integrated transport direction as to say that private cars may soon be obsolete.
Step 8: Consider banning cars
Speaking of private cars being obsolete, Masdar City designed by architects Fosters +
Partners and being built by the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company has banned cars within its
walls. Similarly, Dubais Ziggurat Pyramid, a metropolis planned in 2008 to house 1 million
people, would have made cars redundant its public transportation system, which would run
horizontally and vertically, would be more efficient than private vehicles. (Sadly, since 2008
weve heard little of this putatively carbon neutral pyramid.)

Step 9: Make rubbish clever

Forget bin lorries, fetid dumpsters and the . . . wheelie bin. At Lusail City in Qatar, theyre
planning a system of pneumatic tubes to transport rubbish to a central location for processing.
At Songdo in South Korea, similarly, there are no rubbish trucks or bins in the street: all
household waste is sucked into a vast underground network of tunnels and dispatched to wastetreatment centres where it is sorted and deodorised. Alternatively, information and
communications technology can involve sensors that detect when waste disposal pickups are
needed, or to measure energy consumption and emissions.
Step 10: Maximise connectivity
Broadband infrastructure that combines cable, optical fibre, and wireless networks is a basic
requirement in such hi-tech cities as Songdo. Whats more, if youre serious about creating a
smart city, then youll need so much fibreoptic cabling that its not even funny not enough just
to ensure high-speed access to the internet, but also so that the sensors that are key to the
development of intelligent solutions for the city can work properly. Otherwise youll have created
not so much a smart city as a stupid one.

Part 3: Steps 11 to 15
Step 11: Aspire to carbon neutrality
Destiny, the Florida city that developer
Anthony Pugilese wanted to be a Silicon
Valley of green technology, was, for a while,
held up as a model: it aimed to reduce
waste to close to zero and to meet its
energy needs entirely through renewable
sources including solar, wind, geothermal
and the worlds largest hydrogen power
plant. The city never got built: Florida
authorities nixed the development, arguing
that the ostensibly green and pleasant city
amounted to urban sprawl.
Step 12: Start again, clown, youve forgotten parks
Look at your masterplan. Is it all sprawl and mall, dazzling plate glass, and more cloverleaf
junctions than you can shake a stick at? Of course it is: most masterplans are. Humans cant
flourish in that environment, as good planners increasingly realise. Lavasa, for instance, is the
first Indian city to be planned according to the principles of New Urbanism, which advocates
walkable cities that commingle business and residential development, offer mixed-income
housing, and preserve green space. Songdo has been planned around a central park, and
designed so that every resident can walk to work in the business district a big draw for
attracting new residents. Sixty per cent of Great City, a high-density metropolis outside Chengdu
in China, will consist of buffer areas of gardens and greenery that are at most 10 minutes walk
from the city centre. And Egypts planned new capital will have a park double the size of New
Yorks Central Park.
Step 13: and culture
Abu Dhabi has splashed its oil cash on a cultural city called Saadiyat Island, a few miles off the
coast. It features a branch of the Louvre, due to open this year, and before 2020 will also see a
Guggenheim museum designed, like the one in Bilbao, by Frank Gehry and a Performing
Arts Centre by Zaha Hadid. Just along the coast in Dubai, theyre playing catchup with D3 (short
for Dubai Design District), in tacit recognition of the fact that shopping malls and gyms arent
enough to make a city a decent place to live. Wags are already comparing the industrial Al Quoz

area which now has more than 30 galleries among its 1970s and 80s warehouses to
Shoreditch or Williamsburg. Just dont expect any illegal raves or warehouse parties.
Meanwhile, in the Congolese jungle, the Dutch artist Renzo Martens is trying something similar
to create an arts scene in one of the most impoverished parts of the world and thereby gentrify
the jungle.
Step 14: Please, not another funny-shaped island
Does the world really need another state-of-the-art golf course? (At Lavasa they obviously think
so: along with the medical campus, luxury hotels, boarding schools and sports academies, there
is a Nick Faldodesigned golf course.) The worry about new cities built from scratch is that, as
anthropologist Nick Simcik Arese of the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities puts it, they
offer a secessionary envelope for the rich a form of class apartheid. He argues that new
cities often fail to provide enough jobs for poorer residents or affordable transport to areas
where they could find more work.
Its an important point. Around the world, new cities often exclude all but the wealthiest. For
instance, the least expensive apartments in Lavasa now sell for between $17,000 and $36,000
well out of reach for most middle-class Indians. The developer says it has modified its plans to
offer affordable rental apartments for young professionals. New cities are thus often confounded
by the inverse relationship between maximising real-estate proceeds and making new cities
livable. Or, to put it another way, if you want your new city to become something other than a
ghost town or a large-scale gated community, it must be socially diverse.
What the world doesnt need is any more unimaginatively shaped developments for those with
more money than sense, such as the Palm Islands in Dubai. The entire point of the islands is
that you can see them from space. On the ground, however, it means long spits of land that
dont connect to each other and leave you in a kind of endless residential street maze.
Besides, what must our alien neighbours think?

Part 4: Steps 16 to 20

Step 15: Make a statement

The Palm Islands might be ridiculous, but who
wouldnt want to live in the worlds first inhabited
volcano? When, in 2008, Norman Foster unveiled
plans for a new city on an island on the outskirts of
Moscow, the centrepiece was to be (at that point) the
tallest building in the world: 450m high, covering
almost half a million square metres and with a total
floor area of 2.5 million square metres, housing
theatres, exhibition spaces, 3,000 hotel rooms, 900
serviced apartments and a school. Crystal Island is
one of the worlds most ambitious building projects,
and it represents a milestone in the 40-year history
of the practice, he said. But the economic crisis put paid to the grandiose scheme, which is
perhaps a shame. After all, whats the fun in building a new city if it doesnt look cool?
Step 16: Treat workers with respect
In 2013, Nepalese migrants working in Lusail City in Qatar told the Guardian that their
employers were making them work long hours in the heat and were withholding pay to keep
them from running away. The International Trade Union Confederation estimates that 4,000
workers will die in Qatar by 2022. The countrys kafala system where employers exercise
broad power and influence over the lives of their workers has been called modern-day slavery
by human rights watchers. It doesnt have to be this way. Building a new city from scratch can

be socially beneficial. For instance, perhaps one of at the most heartening features about the
Palestinian new city of Rawabi is that one third of its engineers and architects are women, a
gender balance without precedent in the Arab world.
Step 17: Build fast. No, faster
Egypts new capital city, according to the developers brochure, will have exactly 21 residential
districts housing 5 million residents, span 700 sq km (a space almost as big as Singapore), with
663 hospitals and clinics, 1,250 mosques and churches, and 1.1m homes. Oh yes, and
according to the brochure it will be built within the next five to seven years. No pressure.
Step 18: Re-educate your new urbanites
In Kangabashi, a new city for one million people in the Ordos region of Inner Mongolia, China,
new residents are handed a welcome pack that includes fans and a list of instructions: Dont
spit, dont throw rubbish on the streets, dont play loud music, dont drive on the pavement,
says the introductory brochure. The thinking is that most of the residents are country dwellers
from nearby villages who dont know how to behave in cities. I know what youre thinking: when
are the urbanites of London, New York and Paris going to get forcibly re-educated so they dont
continue to [cause a ruckus]?
When work started on Kangbashi five years ago, it was derided as a ghost city. But rural
workers are now indeed moving into the citys new high-rises, lured by generous compensation
packages. The Chinese authorities idea is that such cities help diversify the countrys economy:
subsistence farming was becoming less economically worthwhile, owing to poor soils and
increasing water shortages. The enormous wealth of the regions coal industry helped pay for
much of the citys infrastructure, and there was cheap land to build on. Kangbashi is just the
beginning: a test run for Beijings plans to urbanise the vast rural interior of China, and relocate
250 million farmers over the next two decades a social experiment as much as an economic
one.
Step 19: If you build it, they will come
As any planner knows, it doesnt matter how sophisticated your 3D-imaging software or how
smart your urban vision. The test will be when [the problems come], Ajit Gulabchand, the
developer of Lavasa, has said. I dont want to plan for that, but Ill be happy if it happens. Quite
so: one of the pleasures of creating a city from scratch must surely be that it goes rogue and
becomes something other than you imagined.
Step 20: Oh, yes give it a name
The planned new capital of Egypt doesnt yet have a name, though the safe money says it wont
be called Mubarakville [or] Cairo 2.0 though I kind of like the last one. And what of the new city
rising on the coast of the Red Sea? It has a lot of things going for it. It will house one of the
largest sea ports in the world. It will provide more than a million jobs. And, if construction sticks
to schedule, it will be complete by 2020. Only one problem: its called King Abdullah Economic
City. Perhaps it sounds nicer in Arabic.
This article was amended on 7 July 2015 to remove allegations about the Lavasa project,
which we accept were wrong.