Unpacking Utopia

APPROXIMATELY 9,000 YEARS AGO, after humans invented agriculture and stopped moving around so much, about 10,000 people congregated in a place called Çatalhöyük in modern-day Turkey. There were no ground paths, so inhabitants moved around the maze of mudbrick build- ings via rooftop, descending into homes through holes in the ceilings like bees in a giant honeycomb. But because there aren’t any signs of public buildings—no markets, no government offices nor king’s castle, no congregation halls—archaeologists disagree whether Çatalhöyük can actually be considered the world’s first city.

Most scholars say the basic foundation of a city has something to do with population size and density. Some specify that it has more to do with geography, where people from the greater region would identify one location as the hub. Others look for touchstones of urbanity like public gathering places, places of communal worship, some sort of infrastructure of power.

Perhaps, then, Eridu holds the title. Located in what’s widely believed to be the world’s first civilization of Sumer in Mesopotamia, Eridu was established in 5400 B.C.E. near the mouth of the Euphrates River close to the Persian Gulf. Dig sites have unearthed evidence of irrigation, a robust fishing industry, temples, a writing system. According to ancient tablets containing the Sumerian Creation Myth, Eridu began because the mother goddess Nintur told her nomadic children to stop wandering and build something permanent: The concept of a city foretold by the heavens.

Though there may be no universal definition, we all know a city when we see one. We usually can agree whether a place is a city or just a town, a city or a large roadside rest stop. It’s our ideas of what makes a city a good one that are more complicated.

For the better part of the past decade, a group of big-name, big-tech investors now known as California Forever has been quietly purchasing thousands of acres of ranchland about an hour and half ’s drive from Santa Clara.

Their plan? To create a new kind of American city. One with enough housing to eventually accommodate 400,000 people, who could work, shop, and go to school within walking, biking, or busing distance of their homes. Everything would be built to the highest environmental standards. And if residents must leave, well, the San Francisco or Oakland airports aren’t far.

Founder and CEO Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader originally from Czech Republic, has told reporters he dislikes how the sprawl of Silicon Valley and California (and the U.S.) necessitates having a car to get anywhere. His would be a modernized, European-like city where people forgo driving from strip mall to strip mall and instead meet in communal harmony over cappuccinos at sidewalk cafes.

Though California Forever has fumbled the rollout of its as-yet-to-be-named city with some rather large public relations snafus—including suing local farmers for allegedly “price fixing” their land plots—the group has painted an admittedly appealing picture.

C.J. Gabbe, an urban planner and associate professor in SCU’s Department of Environmental Studies and Sciences, suggests that the new city’s appeal in some circles and controversy in others has to do with the current housing crisis in the U.S., and particularly in California. “It’s the intersection of all these big things. You have housing market issues and the cost of housing. You have tech money and environmental concerns. There’s [considerations around] transportation and whether infrastructure can support it,” he says. “It is a microcosm of greater issues in society.

Creating an idealized city is not a new concept. But it can be difficult to pull off—you have to get local and federal approval to build, you’ll likely need to change zoning designations, you have to, you know, convince people to actually move there. And even if you get past all the mundane hurdles, these places “usually fall way short of what their supposed ideals or goals are,” says Gabbe. They present “incremental improvements rather than transformative change.”

“I mean, we certainly need more housing, but it’s not going to make a dent in these larger problems.”

Then there’s the environmental impact of it all. Rather than renovating or reworking existing urban areas, it’s easier for developers to build new in what are called greenfield sites. These are undeveloped areas such as parks, forests, and agricultural land that have not been previously contaminated with urban construction. Even more appealing to developers is when these spots are in close or semi-close proximity to already established urban centers. Solano County, then, with its rolling hills less than an hour from San Francisco without traffic, must’ve looked downright Edenic.

This is not an investigation into land use policy or how Sramek courted tech billionaire investors to jump on the city-building bandwagon. Certainly, he isn’t the first rich guy to do something like it. See: Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff scooping up huge parcels of land on the Big Island of Hawaii; or richest-man-in-the-world Elon Musk’s plans to build a company town in Texas for his Tesla employees.

This past spring, The Atlantic ran a story on the next frontier for Silicon Valley bigwigs—creating their own kingdoms. Whether this is that for Sramek is not for this publication to say; rest assured other media will undoubtedly dig into it over the next few years. What we’re interested in is in how a city becomes alive, and who gets to decide how to make it breathe.

If anything, Sramek has demonstrated some level of willingness to tap the brakes when called on by public opinion to do things “the right way.” But is that way building new? Is it really that hard to improve existing cities, to bend them into new forms to accommodate us and our ever-evolving needs?

In her classes, He likes to give students good and bad examples from history. A success case for our purposes, she says, is Reston, Virginia, a master planned community of about 60,000 founded in the 1960s balancing work, life, and play. “It’s a beautiful town,” she says. But “it’s manageable,” less than 9% the size of Washington, D.C., just 22 miles away.

On the other hand, there’s Brasília, the capital Brazil. Founded in 1960 to replace Rio de Janeiro, deemed too crowded and congested, Brasília “started with good intention,” He says. But it turned out to be too far away—more than 700 miles inland—for people to want to leave the already-bustling cultural centers of Rio and São Paulo. “Sometimes distance can be a good thing,” He says. “But things like culture, social, economic factors are not predictable.”

You can’t will a beloved city into existence on the back of good intention. You can build as many cultural touchstones as you like, but no number of theaters or museums or parks full of cute cafes can convince artists and consumers to come if the rest of the place is deserted.

Let’s say zoning changes are approved, ground is broken, and construction is underway on a new city. Success! But once that city is built, what does it take to run it? Or, not just run it, but make it adored?

“Well, who’s the city built for? What are its values?” asks Diego Mora ’13, an associate planner with the city of Pleasanton. “A city starts with a vision and identifies its end goal. Its general plan lays out how to achieve [that goal]. And I believe community participation is an integral part of it.”

Mora, who studied environmental studies and public health at Santa Clara before getting his master’s in urban and regional planning at San Jose State University, says it’s a good thing he’s a people person, because speaking with them is a daily part of his job. “A lot of it is getting true public feedback—asking [community members] what they prioritize, where public funds should go, what infrastructure improvements matter most,” he says. The end goal of any city’s short- or long-term strategic plan is to get city council approval, but “the root of it comes from those who participate in it. Ideally, the residents.”

Though he’s too nice to admit it, all this community involvement surely involves a lot of complaining. “I would say, they float ‘concerns and suggestions,’” Mora suggests instead. And, really, complaints should not come as a surprise considering what’s required to make the smallest change. Like, he says as an example, installing a stop sign and crosswalk near a school. “There’s gathering signatures, public meetings, figuring out how to fund the installation, making sure we’re in state compliance.”

If Mora could give advice to the developers of California Forever (and, to be clear, he has not heard from them), he’d tell them they must engage with current and future residents. “How are they going to allow for the public voicing of concerns or calls for change?” he asks.

Yes, you can build a beautiful city out of nothing, a quilt of buildings made out of concrete and steel and sustainably sourced lumber. But culture is not made from buildings. That’s a fabric that can be woven only by its people.

Santa Clara sociology Professor Enrique Pumar says for a city to be successful in this way, it needs to encourage socialization, “which is the core of communities.” “When a community socializes, they tend to have less crime, a better quality of life, more empathy and solidarity among neighbors,” he says, suggesting a city can build a successful community by meeting three conditions: sustainability, walkability, and diversity.

A sustainable city should place a great focus on reliable public transportation (ideally of the sort with low emissions) for those times residents must venture beyond city limits. Meanwhile, things that get people out of their homes or cars and into spaces that inspire interaction encourage walkability—“wide sidewalks, good lighting, communal places to sit—in a park, an open area, whatever,” Pumar says.

As for diversity, he means in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, and age, but also socioeconomic class. Americans have a hard time with this last part, Pumar says. “The moment someone from a working class moves into a middle- or upper-class neighborhood, people begin to worry, ‘Is this going to lower the property value?’ ‘What’s going to happen to the schools?’” But until a place is made accessible to both its well-to-do and its most disenfranchised residents, it’ll have a hard time reaping the fruits of true emotional investment.

So, yes, you can build a beautiful city out of nothing, a quilt of buildings made out of concrete and steel and sustainably sourced lumber. But culture is not made from buildings. That’s a fabric that can be woven only by its people. They are what make Chicago cunning and coarse, San Francisco moody and romantic, and New York a stage full of possibility. A city is just a place, after all, until its people define it.

Sir Thomas More coined the term utopia in his 1516 book by the same name. A combination of ancient Greek words, utopia literally translates to “no place.” More’s Utopia is an imaginary island where everything is publicly owned, and its largely classless society divvies up labor equally, so citizens work to produce just enough for survival. Despite its very name suggesting its impossibility, the concept of utopia as an idealized, perfect version of something persists. In religion and literature, philosophy and politics, in technology and economics, people strive toward their own definition of Shangri-la, cloud cuckoo land, heaven-on-Earth.

To environmental studies major and economics and Spanish studies minor Bea Ricafort ’26, a utopia is a place where everyone’s basic needs are met. That certainly doesn’t feel possible with the way American cities function today, she says. “A key part of my definition of utopia is that the city itself meets its residents’ needs, not that people would arrive with their needs already fulfilled.” By her definition, then, California Forever, built by billionaires and likely attracting upper-class residents, couldn’t really ever reach utopia status.

Ricafort was recently assigned to the affirmative team in a debate about California Forever in her urban planning class with Professor C.J. Gabbe. “It made me think about how cities as a whole, the model through which a city functions, the way money is allocated, it isn’t working,” she says.

Ricafort, who came to Santa Clara from South San Francisco, says she learned from her beloved hometown that you can’t just solve a city’s issue “by throwing billions of dollars at it.” Cities are complex ecosystems with “lots of intersections” that are often gridlocked by bureaucracy at the local, county, state, and national levels, and filled with people who don’t often agree on the best way forward. It’s not fair, she says, that most people without extravagant means are stuck in this gridlock and can’t even get a pothole filled while billionaires who are able to take the financial hits get to play at building the perfect city.

Rich investors aren’t worried, she says, “about being unhoused, struggling to build generational wealth, accessing quality health care, or living in environmentally degraded areas,” so they focus on building their own idea of perfection rather than investing in existing, flawed places. Ricafort would rather be part of the latter conversation, about how to lift up and bolster, how to get closer to fairness and justice for all city residents, not just the richest ones. She calls it a moral imperative, something instilled in her at SCU: “We’re supposed to go into the world to create a more humane, conscious, sustainable future. I don’t think that should only exist within a bubble.”