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Xenter Xity is an open source project with the goal of creating flexible, hyper efficient charter city plans.

Our Vision: to address the coming humanitarian impacts of climate change

It's possible (some argue likely) that rising sea levels and other climate change will create tens or more likely hundreds of millions of climate refugees. Possibly without our lifetimes. A group of ~5 million Syrian refugees created global instability. Imagine what an order of magnitude more could do. In addition to global instability, this is a massive humanitarian crisis.

One way to effectively manage this is to be able to quickly re-settle these climate refugees. Very quickly. And the likely ONLY way to effectively do this, is to be able to quickly build new, desirable, highly functioning, hyper efficient cities.

Why cities: mankind's greatest invention

Cities are our greatest product. Organic entities, growing, evolving, with a life of their own. Nearly impossible to kill. Dynamic, fun. Home to over half the global population.

Nicely summarized by Geoffrey West in Scale:

The future of humanity and the long-term sustainability of the planet are inextricably linked to the fate of our cities. Cities are the crucible of civilization, the hubs of innovation, the engines of wealth creation and centers of power, the magnets that attract creative individuals, and the stimulant for ideas, growth, and innovation. But they also have a dark side: they are the prime locus of crime, pollution, poverty, disease, and the consumption of energy and resources. Rapid urbanization and accelerating socioeconomic development have generated multiple global challenges ranging from climate change and its environmental impacts to incipient crises in food, energy, and water availability, public health, financial markets, and the global economy. 
       - West, Geoffrey. Scale (p. 8). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Yet in their current form they leave much room for improvement.

City creation today

We have atrophied in our ability to scale cities quickly. In 100 years after the turn of the 19th century, [Manhattan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Manhattan) grew 10 fold (1,000%), from 96k inhabitants in 1810 to 2.3M in 1910, then somehow declined 25% to 1.6M 100 years later. The reasons for this are multiple - economic, regulatory, cultural - but the results are undeniable. Incremental improvements of current cities are important, but not enough to address the coming humanitarian crisis. Here's another option.

What could a model city look like

The perfect city would the charm of Paris, the bikeability of Netherlands, the efficiency of German cities, best in class public transit, pedestrian first, bike friendly, public transit, and essentially car free. To accomplish that we’d need to have cargo bike delivery, or perhaps a system of alley ways for simple rolling drone delivery (or more outlandish but probably too expensive a series of tubes).

The governance needs to be as independent as possible, hence the desire to leverage a Charter City framework. Our policies would be to create the simplest set of rules that can evolve into a sustainable organic being. Leveraging concepts like land value taxation to spur development, or how Japan has a “most permissive zoning” rule - so you can live in industrial areas (at your own risk), but not manufacture in residential areas (a big inconvenience). The decision making body needs to be clarified - but based on least amount of governance needed.

Cities and countries develop and identity. That identity takes on a life of it’s own - commonly known as “culture”. Culture is a powerful force. It’s hard to specify it, but important to set a foundation for future evolution. The best example is probably Burning Man. Cohesive based on 10 principles. Those might be a good starting point, but some would have to change, to facilitate commerce.

Record keeping from big to small would be public, easily auditable. All the books and taxes and real estate and financial reports will be publicly available, perhaps leveraging blockchain. This will make real estate transactions trivial, and enable real time public accountability. It sounds crazy but Iceland (or a Scandinavian country) has a public database of every citizen’s income. The sales tax and property tax and land value tax and income tax and real estate purchases and public works projects and operating budget and salaries - all of that public and on the block chain. That sort of pure public commitment would help weed out the fraudsters, and build a culture of transparency and civil engagement. As such, the budget can be much more collaborative. and if you do this from the start you check yourself before you keep doing silly things you’ve always done. And of course ALL public contracts and laws and regulations will be on a git like system.

To accomplish the goal of being able to quickly resettle tens of millions of climate refugees, then we need to be able to BUILD. Quickly. Cost-effective. To last as long as needed. To adapt to changes. But quickly and cost efficiently above all else. Because if you have those, others get easier. We’d want to borrow from the culture of SpaceX at Boca Chica.

Another aspect of culture is the arts. How can we show an appreciation for arts?

And as you do this - we can create perfect images of beautiful pedestrian zones, and cozy neighborhoods, and maintain dynamism

Making this a reality - the grand plan

Step 1: Create an open-source city plan

We will create an open source planning framework for new cities. Taking the best ideas from around the world, working collaboratively on ways to reduct cost, increase sustainability, and accelerate cycle times.

Step 2: Build a self-sustaining prototype city

Next, we'll focus on building a real world version of this. The prototype is meant to be built quickly, to test the various ideas from the open source plan. It will be a world model of sustainability. Water re-use, energy creation, internal transport, density, carbon footprint. All built at a fraction of the cost of traditional cities. And beyond that, it'll be economically self-sustaining, to test the forms of governance and growth, and supporting the refinement of the open source model.

Step 3 - Scale and replicate that city

After learning from watching a prototype city scale to tens of thousands of inhabitants, we'll change the mission of the first city to focus on scaling itself in sustainable ways, and encouraging the adoption of our plans around the world - for cities new and old.

City creation is now in vogue

We had a bit of a lull the last few decades with bold ambitious city creation, but the idea is gaining steam, and we've seen plenty of examples historically of creating cities from scratch.

Some were wildly successful. Theodor Herzl's essay helped drive the creation of Israel, half a century later. Lee Kuan Yew helped turn Singapore from backwater to world city. Walt Disney went to Florida with a dream, and while his massive vision for a city of tomorrow was turned into a kitchy theme park Epcot, his main theme park vision is known to have some of the best urbanism in the US.

Some new city developments have been disappointments. Los Angelos could have been anything, but turned into suburban sprawl because it's explosion coincided with the rise of the automobile. Dubai had an even better hand half a century later, but wasted it without an urban vision other than ego-driving supertall skyscrapers and isolated enclosed shopping experiences.

Some concepts didn't directly result in new cities, but influenced for better or worse. Le Corbusier's Plan Voisin thankfully wasn't implemented, yet it directly impacted the "Urban Renewal" around the world that saw razing of neighborhoods and erection of massive highways. William J Levitt unfortunately had too much success with Levittown, creating the blueprint for so much isolating sprawl we see today.

There's no denying that compelling visions for cities can change the course of history, for better or worse.

In fact, we're seeing new ideas for ambitious cities being announced all the time. Marc Lore (billionaire founder of Jet.com and Diapers.com is starting Telosa, a venture backed startup Praxis Society raised $50M, and Saudi Arabia is marketing the crap out of Neom. They have tons of capital and resources, and if they want to leverage some of these concepts that might come out, that's great, this is not a zero sum competition.

Next Steps

If we're successful at this project, we'll be able to significantly reduce humanitarian suffering and increase global stability.

A secondary benefit would be to create new types of cities that should be ecologically sound and culturally interesting.

Finally, a more prosaic but still worthwhile outcome, is simply a menu of options for cities everywhere to use to improve their current.

We're creating an open source corpus of information, filling out the concepts referenced above, and generating new ones. This corpus is meant to take the best ideas from around the world and bring into one place to serve as sort of a handbook to create new cities from scratch, or improve existing ones from within.

Join us. If you're interested - simply start contributing to one of the topics and examples above.