It’s time to build new cities

Powerful shifts in technology, demographics and geopolitics are about to reshuffle where people live.

In the twentieth century, people lived near the workplace. Cars extended the commutable distances and gave us suburbs.

Self-driving cars and VTOLs will extend the commutable distance even more.

And thanks to remote work and AI tutoring you no longer need to live near your job — or a “good” school.

In the twentieth century, our ability to make new land was limited to crude efforts like the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

Almost all household water in Israel, Saudi Arabia and UAE now comes from desalination. Starlink, cargo airships, and weather-altering technology make it possible to start new cities almost anywhere on Earth.

In the twentieth century, the majority of population growth happened in Asia.

There are now more babies born in Africa each year than in China and India combined.

In the twentieth century, people moved for jobs. There were no remote workers, and very few retirees.

Remote workers and retirees — together ~50% of the population now — can just move.

In the twentieth century, the US exported manufacturing jobs and subsidised grain to contain the Soviet Union. That spurred population booms in places that had had little economy to speak of beforehand.

The US is now dismantling its empire, while competing with China. This will have profound effects on both regional security and on where jobs are created.

The world is about to get very weird and very volatile.

Forces reshaping where people live

Yes, remote work and digital nomads

A confluence of new technologies and cultural shifts makes it radically easier to work from anywhere in the world.

Connect from anywhere: Satellite internet services like Starlink now provide reliable connectivity from the remotest villages, boats or desert oases.

Raise family anywhere: AI tutors, paired with homeschooling play pods, beat even the best schools. There is no need to save up for a house in the right school district anymore.

Immersive presence from anywhere: Next iterations of AR and VR are set to make remote work seamless.

The rise of singles: Marriage and cohabitation rates are declining rapidly around the world. The only region where the percentage of 25 to 34-year-olds who are married or cohabiting is over 60% is South Asia.¹

Me first: The younger a generation, the more they optimise for the quality (or perceived quality) of their lifestyle over fulfilling “responsibility” to family, employer, spouse, country. They won’t live next to mum just because she’d like them to.

Death of distance

Self-driving cars

Fully autonomous vehicles will make longer commutes far more comfortable. The car interior will become a hotel room once you never have to touch the wheel. There won’t even be a wheel!

This will lower the importance of living in dense urban centers and unlock more satellite city opportunities.

VTOLs (Vertical Take-Off and Landing Vehicles)

VTOLs remove the necessity of major road or rail access. This opens up new possibilities for remote or “off-the-grid” developments — still within a comfortable commute distance.

Supersonic flights

Boom Aero is targeting 2029 to deploy its Overture airliner.

London to NYC flight time will be cut from 7 to ~3 hours, NYC to SF from 6 to ~2.

SpaceX Earth-to-Earth (suborbital flights)

While still at concept stage, this would make London to NYC or NYC to SF a ~30-minute trip.

Demographic collapse

Everywhere apart from sub-Saharan Africa fertility rate is declining rapidly and has been below replacement level since mid 2000s.

Countries as diverse as Thailand, Puerto Rico, Brazil or Iran that were all recently notorious for some of the highest fertility rates in the world now have some of the lowest.

India’s fertility rate has been below replacement level since 2020. No one had this on their bingo card. Even the “ideas crowd” have rarely updated on this.

Assuming South Korea’s fertility rate doesn’t sink any lower, its population will halve every 21 years. In 90 years its population would be 4 million, down from 52 million today.

The trend is not being reversed anywhere and neither artificial wombs nor radically better IVF are arriving in the foreseeable future.

Future is African

Africa’s urban population is set to double from approximately 600 million to 1.3 bn by 2050.

40% of global births in 2050 will be African.²

Free people move

There’s been a surge in citizenship and residency arbitrage.

More people than ever are living outside their birth countries, and many are strategically obtaining second passports or residence permits as a form of insurance.

70% of countries now allow dual citizenship, and every other country has introduced a “nomad” visa in the last few years.

Inversely, governments are becoming increasingly proactive in attracting wealthy and highly skilled migrants.

80+ countries offer citizenship or residency-by-investment programmes. Dubai wants to double its population from 3.5 million to 7 million by 2040. 10% of total Portuguese FDI comes through the “golden visa” programme.

The end of Pax Americana

America’s post-WWII economic and military dominance shaped the current global order.

WWII was fought for access to markets and natural resources.³ The US emerged as the ONLY global power. In 1945, it had 50% of global GDP and 75% of global gold reserves. No one else had a navy; the US covered the whole globe with military bases.

To counter the Soviet Union, the US gave all its allies military protection and unfettered access to the US consumer markets.

You just lost the war? Not to worry, you get the same economic benefits as if you had won!

This “international rules-based order” is now over.

Regional powers will assert themselves more strongly, with hard-to-predict effects.

The Great Leap Forward with AI

The best way to conceptualise the impact of AI is that we have just discovered a new continent with 100 billion people — and they are all willing to work for free.

The conservative scenario is ubiquitous PhD-level AI white-collar employees in 2-3 years.

AI will be constrained by regulation and state capacity. African governments already have plenty of “intelligence” to provide safe drinking water to their people, yet most don’t.

The jury is still out whether AI will prove a powerful force for centralisation, or even a “world government”. The latest tea leaves as of February 2025 are pointing towards the opposite. But this debate won’t be settled any time soon.

AI will have a transformational impact on the labour markets; it’s hard to imagine it won’t transform migration patterns.

US-China Great Power competition

We are already seeing the regionalisation of supply chains (“nearshoring”), which started during covid.

Competition for natural resources, especially rare-earth minerals, is going to heat up.

The resource-rich Arctic is in play, as the warming seas are making it more easily navigable.

It’s never been easier to build new cities

Existing cities created “out of nothing” either started as ports (Aden, Singapore..), natural resource boomtowns (San Francisco, Johannesburg..) or as government projects (Brasilia, Islamabad..).

Location always mattered; proximity to trade routes and transport infrastructure was essential.

New cities face three key challenges: finding a viable location, attracting population, and building critical infrastructure before running out of capital.

Location

Starlink has opened up the map. The Arctic will have new trade routes. Deep ports are still being built in Africa.

New terraforming tech — especially desalination — can transform previously uninhabitable areas into prime real estate.

Population

Now is the first time in history people will move to a city without having a job there.

This means a city doesn’t need to have a functioning labour market to start with.⁴

Remote workers, tourists and retirees will come because they like the city’s “product”.

Existing cities’ network effects are weakening. In developed countries, only ~45-55% of the population is employed (either full-time or part-time), a historic low. 25%+ of knowledge workers work remotely.

Yet humans will keep clustering in cities.

The cities’ role as a dating market is particularly underrated. Singledom is on the rise, as is non-monogamy. Being part of a large dating market is very important to an ever larger proportion of the population.

A full-on demographic collapse would only increase the importance of clustering in hyper-efficient cities.

In the 20th century people lived in cities to be near jobs. In the 21st century moving for quality of life and connection will be just as important.

Infrastructure

There is an enormous potential to radically cut infrastructure buildout costs.

Regulatory arbitrage

We can’t build fast in the West because of regulation.⁵ But the same constraints don’t apply to other jurisdictions.

Build from first principles

SpaceX built its Florida launch facility for $20 million (tower, ground systems, and processing hangar). NASA is spending $3 billion just on the tower.⁶

Leapfrog the inter-city transport systems

I am excited about the cargo airships technology, currently being developed by multiple startups.

While slower than jets, airships are much faster than ships (days instead of weeks) and need no port or runway at all — they can land on a simple clearing or even hover to unload.

This opens the door for a point-to-point global supply chain. For instance, an airship could load factory goods in an inland African city and deliver directly to a warehouse in the US Midwest, obviating the need for seaports, highways and railroads.

Airships could take over half of container ship traffic, yielding a $650 billion global market — far larger than today’s air cargo industry.⁷

Startup cities

Mobile, wealthy “consumers” of cities will demand ever-better city “products”.

And new, startup cities can innovate faster than incumbents.

For example, imagine a city decides to be microplastics-free, to attract a longevity-conscious population.

An existing city would struggle to implement necessary changes — try asking everyone to throw out their polyester clothes!

A new city can take a holistic approach — one that addresses everything from construction materials and daily consumer choices to infrastructure for waste management.

People want dramatically better city (and society) products across many dimensions; some illustrative examples:

• The first city built from scratch around biosecurity and pandemic prevention. If the next covid will be 10x more lethal, where would you want your children to be living?
• Zero cars
• Microplastics-free city
• Zero-STDs city
• Everyone’s trained in NVC
• Zero tolerance for crime
• Best for children
• Optimised for communal child-rearing, coparenting and novel family structures

Africa’s century

It’s easier to build greenfield (and satellite) cities in a market where 700 million young villagers will be actively looking for a city to settle in in the next 25 years than to build them in places where urbanisation rate stabilised at ~90% decades ago.

While inter-state conflict has become rarer, intra-state violence has surged dramatically in Africa. The two largest African countries by population, Ethiopia and Nigeria, are suffering from multiple local armed conflicts. The civil wars in Congo, Sudan and the Sahel have no end in sight.

Yet this could play in favour of jurisdictions that act as regional safe havens, much like Dubai and Singapore did in their early years.

It’s also imminently conceivable that AI will be a massive equalising force in the world. This would elevate Africa’s status immensely purely by the virtue of its demographics.

What will you build?