Tesla Plans To Build Entire City, Possibly Hundreds Of #TeslaCities

So, clearly this is just an April Fool's joke... but because we're here on /r/futurology, let's discuss it seriously anyway. It's an interesting idea.

On the one hand there is a lot of energy saving technology that could be baked in from day one, as well as 100% adoption of self driving vehicles, maybe with public transit such as a hyperloop or maybe without depending on scale. Similarly it could have a smart grid from the ground up and depending on location might even serve as a test bed for a smaller scale super grid. This would require a location which has near(ish)by but intermittent renewable sources with the smart grid accounting for whatever the shifts in energy generation would be. I assume of course that the powerwall or similar technologies would also be baked in and would be included in the smart grid's ability to shift power sources as generation fluctuates. Conduits would be run for all wiring to allow cheap future wiring changes or addition. The Boring Company could see significant use in laying such conduit among other things. I see the bulk of these ideas as a very positive test bed.

What should be taken into account though is the problems of company towns. In short, a single company owns the town, the businesses within it, and generally uses this to provide labor to a main business. These are generally paternalistic and lead to resentment from the population. This is exacerbated if the local government is essentially also a company institution. The Illinois supreme court shut down exactly one such company town in the late 1800's. The worst of these are essentially like sharecropping where locally purchased goods and housing end up being more than wages earned forcing citizens further and further into debt simply by working and living there. Such a situation should never be allowed to occur.

To deal with this I think it best that while much of the infrastructure would be provided by the originating company that it be a competitive and open marketplace within those constraints. Other companies could buy into existing buildings (or even design their own buildings within certain constrains to allow for some centralized gains in infrastructure to function). They, and individuals, could own actual property not simply rent it, but zoning and other forms of regulation would limit their ability to alter their property to keep centralized gains realized by building the town from the ground up. There would not be a single employer and the government should be mostly elected and free to do what the elected officials chose... within again the technical constraints of whatever infrastructure demands were imposed by the creation of the town. I understand the opposition to such elected government, but historically company towns who are too involved in politics get even worse than the alternatives. Depending on how this all was done it could also lead to more diversity in architecture options and would not have as sterile a feel as company towns historically had.

In short, it's actually an intriguing idea but would need to be practically tempered by a lot of lessons from failed central design ideas of the past. A combination of some central planning and market or democracy could yield very interesting results and no such hybrid has really be tried yet. The trick would be in striking the right balance.

/r/Futurology Thread Link - cleantechnica.com