An example of this type of future “urban” development is Bastrop, a small city located 30 miles east of Austin, with a population of 15,000. Bastrop has a historic, brick commercial district, streets of painted Victorian residential homes, and a roaring economy. Celebrity chefs from Austin are opening restaurants here, and are able to afford land for their kitchen gardens nearby, and podcaster Ryan Holiday of The Daily Stoic recently moved in, and can often be seen jogging in the city center. 

Bastrop is located in a still largely rural and agricultural county of cattle, cotton, and bees. Even so, it has a population of well more than 100,000, up from about 25,000 in the 1980s. Elon Musk has built the sprawling, ultramodern headquarters of SpaceX here, along with the headquarters for four of his other projects. There’s a new movie studio under construction, launched by two Hollywood production companies, and roughly 5,000 new housing units underway to support the influx of workers. 

This, perhaps, is what the “city” of the future looks like — sprawl, but a pleasant, livable variety. 

Across the Austin-adjacent region, more than 90% of population growth is taking place in the periphery — and places like Bastrop are welcoming it. “You might think that small-town Texans would not be so open to change,” says Vivianna Andres, an assistant Bastrop city manager who grew up in town. “But we are not limited in our ambitions. We want a great future.” 

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This kind of growth is a national phenomenon. In the last decade, suburbs and exurbs accounted for about 80% of all US metropolitan growth. The trend is fueled by people seeking to escape high taxes, poor schools, and unsafe streets. The pandemic — which normalized remote work and accelerated the existing exodus to the periphery — intensified the trend. The best of these new areas have attractive lifestyle features like the downhome charm of the city of Bastrop, or plentiful green space, or smaller village-like hubs that create community. These new cities come in varied forms. Some — like Irvine, Calif., or the Woodlands, outside Houston — are planned. Others, such as the developments around Bastrop, are a series of subdivisions. Some are organic, but others simply grow on their own.

Some design visionaries have always seen suburbs and exurbs as a path toward a better future. In the 1940s, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright saw dispersed communities as “a means of liberation” for families, because they allowed residents to work at home or nearby, while also being close to the blessings of nature. Wright’s vision is being carried out, particularly in Texas, in scattered new subdivisions as well as in planned communities.

The Lone Star State’s liberal land regulation allows developers in county lands to develop their own water, sewage, roads, and other infrastructure. Texas has more than 900 Municipal Utility Districts that average about 1,000 acres each, about two-thirds in the Houston metro area. Texas is also the site of the first development of 3-D printed homes, in fast-growing Georgetown, located 30 miles north of Austin.

To some, this outward expansion represents useless sprawl or poor urban planning. But Americans have been birthing cities from the earliest colonial times. In the 20th century, the nation even created a new urban archetype: the high-rise downtown epitomized by New York and Chicago. The world had never seen anything like them before. Today, Americans are once again creating something new. 

In some ways, the trend is merely bowing to reality. Jobs began to spread out as early as the 1950s. Since 2000, office occupancy and the construction of new office space have experienced major declines. But these facts have been either decried or ignored by a media based overwhelmingly in dense urban centers.  

In 2008, for example, CNN asserted that “America’s suburban dream” was “collapsing into a nightmare.” One prominent urbanist writing in The Atlantic predicted the exurbs would become “the next slums,” an idea widely embraced by the planning establishment.

These critics claim, often rightly, that much suburban development has lacked character, not to mention public places for people to gather. But there are now many communities that combine suburban densities with public and open spaces, plus good schools and robust public safety. Cinco Ranch and Houston’s the Woodlands, and Columbia and Reston outside Washington, DC, are prime examples. Rather than purposeless sprawl, these communities embrace the great British urban visionary Ebenezer Howard’s ideal of  “garden cities” that could exist without dependency on the big city. 

Irvine, south of Los Angeles — a city of 320,000 founded around 1960 and developed by the Irvine Company — epitomizes the new paradigm. Irvine has one of the most extensive urban park systems in the country, with 270 parks and one-third of its land dedicated to open space. Its largely affluent, increasingly Asian population has been attracted by a safe and well-maintained community with good schools, lots of jobs, and a low crime rate. Many of its workers are based at home; others enjoy short commutes to industrial parks and offices spread throughout the area. More workers come in from outside the city to work than depart from Irvine to work elsewhere.

Irvine’s advantage, notes long-time planner Rob Elliot, who still consults for the Irvine Company, lay with having a large amount of undeveloped land and a good supply of money that was willing to be patient over time. The city has been laid out meticulously and in accordance with resident demands. Irvine, Elliot admits, lacks a walkable downtown, but it meets consumer needs with a polycentric series of town centers located in its many “villages.” “We didn’t want to build another New York City,” he notes. “Suburban urbanism is what people want.”

Today, the focal point for such development lies with market-oriented states such as Texas, Nevada, Arizona, and Ohio, home to the fast-growing New Albany area near Columbus. Over the past two decades, New Albany has relied on master planning to grow to more than 10,000 residents, up from 3,700. Meanwhile, employment at its business park has grown to 15,000. Lifestyle features such as a system of parks, distinct neighborhoods, and walking paths have attracted more than just residents. Since 1998, New Albany has gained more than $4 billion in private investment, 15,000 jobs, and some $100 million in income-tax revenue, according to the New Albany Finance Department. 

Overall, communities like these represent 43 of the nation’s fastest-growing regions. Most are within a two-hour commute from a major urban county. In rapidly growing Houston, the nation’s fifth-largest metro region, peripheral areas saw the vast majority of all growth since 2020. 

Much of this growth is driven by the migration of young families and professionals, who have been abandoning central cities in droves. In the past decade, the fast-growing counties that are home to most of the nation’s planned-community development, significantly increased their population of people earning more than $75,000, especially those between the ages of 30 and 44. This cohort is avidly seeking single-family homes. In Bastrop, the median house costs $350,000, one-sixth the median price in Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley. 

The Golden State provides a telling counterexample. Once a leader in building new communities, California is now a laggard; three-quarters of new city-making is concentrated in states like Texas, Florida, and Nevada. The test will be the massive, proposed “California Forever” project, covering 100 square miles of what is today mostly grazing land, some 50 miles from San Francisco.

Backed with tech-oligarch billions — including from heavyweights such as Michael Moritz, Marc Andreessen, and Reid Hoffman — California Forever has the formula of space-plus-capital that worked so well in Irvine. The plan is to develop housing for 400,000 people, as well as new factory and ship-building facilities. The goal, founder and CEO Jan Sramek told UnHerd, is to build affordable housing and provide good blue-collar jobs, essentially “what Silicon Valley used to do.”

You would think such a project would be welcome in a state with a particularly torpid economy.  Recently, the Bay Area Council Economic Institute released a report that examines the potential economic and fiscal impacts of the new city and shipyard, and estimates the projects will create 530,000 new jobs and $16 billion in annual tax revenue. And California Forever, whose home prices are to start at $400,000, would seem ideal in a state where housing is scarce and many families are leaving. The development should also offer better-paying jobs, and safe areas with good schools. 

Critically, the project also marks a major shift in what I’ve called California’s oligarchic socialist attitudes, which have stressed support for dense development near transit stops over the suburban expansion that once birthed the Valley. “Once the techies’ top employees started getting married and having kids, they realized the value of safe streets and backyards,” one top official told me. 

Yet what would be seen as no-brainer in Texas is running into opposition from California progressives, who want single-family suburban owners replaced by urban apartment renters. Pro-density YIMBYs, themselves a creation of the oligarchs, are deeply divided by the plan.  There’s also an apparent lack of support for the project in the area, which is currently largely home to middle- and working-class residents who like their semi-rural existence as it is.  

The opposition that keeps California Forever CEO Sramek and his staff awake at night comes from well-funded, intensely anti-growth nonprofits. “We face radicalized degrowth types who are rich kids, who want to stop building everywhere,” Sramek says with distaste. He calls the influence of California’s anti-growth greens as “insidious,” and says it is undermining “the spirit of the state” that once symbolized American aspirations.

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The plan itself also could prove flawed. California Forever’s lead planner, Gabe Metcalf, envisions a city of tightly packed row houses. Many young families — the project’s potential constituency — may not want to live cheek to jowl when they could get a better bargain on a single-family home in other parts of the interior, or in another state.    

California may still muff this ambitious and badly needed project, but other states seem more than willing to engage in city building. A new city, with a planned 100,000 homes, is being built at Buckeye, thirty miles from Phoenix, long a magnet for dissatisfied Californians. These new communities have shown they can attract a younger workforce, as many “new economy” jobs move out of traditional hotbeds like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco.   

This movement will be greatly enhanced by wage rates that are increasingly similar in different parts of the country. As Brookings Institution scholar Mark Muro has noted, salaries across a 19-state American Heartland region, essentially between the Rockies and the Appalachians,  adjusted for the cost of living, are above the national average. In contrast, those with the lowest adjusted incomes were entirely on the ocean coasts.    

Traditional cities, furthermore, will be challenged by the rise of socialist-leaning politicians, not only in New York, but in Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle. The deep-blue cities, led by people who often denounce the idea of home ownership, and even capitalism, could become increasingly unattractive for both workers and  employers. Despite media accounts that young people do not want to start families or own homes, most surveys show that the vast majority of Americans in their 30s want to replicate these foundations of middle-class life. One key fact: some one million millennials become mothers every year.  

To this generation, the appeal of safe, reasonably priced housing near good jobs cannot be underestimated. And for the country, the new cities represent a revival of an America that is eager to build a future that will be better than the past. This is already becoming a reality in places like Bastrop, where not only people, but new factories, offices and most importantly schools are being built at a rapid clip. 

“Ultimately,” suggests Vivianna Andres, the assistant city manager from Bastrop, “this is about making things better for our children, and our children’s children.” If only other communities had the same perspective.

Some of the difficulty seems to arise from the sheer weight of what’s already there, whether it’s regulations, houses, roads, communities, title deeds, drains, vested interests and so on. A nation that’s centuries into its current iteration, on an island continuously inhabited by humans for 40,000 years, has had the opportunity to accumulate a hefty overlay of stuff, at least some of which has to be flattened or else worked around if you’re going to build anything new.

But it isn’t just the weight of history gumming us up. The Victorians had nearly as much history as we did, and they managed to crack on: Paddington Station went from planning decision to opening Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s magnificent steel-framed structure in three years, between 1851 and 1854. But somewhere between Brunel and today, urban planners first began to worry about the impact of grand plans on ordinary people, and then to grow just as worried about the impact of ordinary human activities on our ability to deliver grand architectural schemes. And the entire contemporary urban and ex-urban layout of the whole South East is shot through with this tussle, which we could characterise as the politics of abstraction.

To explain what I mean by such a politics, let me describe two consecutive days of getting lost, in two similar but also very different woodlands: the Ramble in New York’s Central Park, and a patch of publicly owned forest close to me in Britain. These spaces cover a similar amount of ground, and are both (in human terms anyway) mainly used for leisure. Both are riddled with little paths. But how they got their walkways, and thus how it feels to move through them, couldn’t be more different; and this difference illustrates something subtle and characteristically modern about how we build today.

The term for a path that appears spontaneously, because someone or something often needs to pass that way, is a “desire path”. Here’s one near me, crossing a field of half-grown wheat.

Desire paths are rarely straight, but rather follow the line of least effort through the landscape. They’re maintained by usage: the one in the picture disappears briefly, every year, when the farmer ploughs and sows the field — then, every time, it’s trodden back in within a few days. Such footways capture an emergent, organic way of using space, which blurs the boundaries between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. We are, after all, not the only species to take regular routes through our home areas — and by doing so, over time, write on the soil with our feet.

On a dogwalk the other day, I turned off the main path down what looked like a well-trodden side route, only to find it getting narrower and more overgrown and eventually disappearing altogether, into an obstacle-course of brambles and fallen trees. At that point, I realised it probably wasn’t made by humans at all, but the badgers, foxes and muntjac deer that make their homes there. For a moment, the woods felt uncanny — as though (despite the distant sound of car noise, and a plane overhead) I had left the human world briefly behind.

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Nothing like this happens in Central Park, even though the maze of winding paths known as the Ramble is designed to simulate that experience. First formally opened in 1859, a few years after Paddington Station and with the ambition typical of both Britain and America in the 19th century, it was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead as a “wild garden”.

Unlike my local woodland, though, here the paths mark a distinct boundary between the human and animal worlds, neatly delineated by little fences that make it clear where humans are invited to tread. And while it’s possible to get pleasantly lost there, as I did, in doing so you never leave the human world for even a second.

The desire-path-like experience of the Ramble has been, for perhaps a century and a half, the closest urban planners have got to creating spaces that feel as though they emerge organically from a place. Rather, the emphasis has been on grand visions, set out by confident men on big pieces of paper, then imposed from the top down: the architecture of abstraction.

In Brunel’s day, at the height of British imperial self-confidence, engineers and architects alike felt a God-given right to remodel the world and everything in it according to such grand visions. The result, along with many fine railways and canals, was mile upon mile of suburban terraces in London, laid out on loosely rectangular patterns of side-streets. More abstract still, the streets on New York’s Manhattan Island were given their grid layout between 1811 and 1821.

By the late 19th century, though, a new generation of planners worried about the alienation from nature that came from living in such built-up environments. One influential thinker, Ebenezer Howard, responded to this with a new vision: garden cities. In Garden Cities of To-Morrow (1902), Howard set out his dream of a new kind of conurbation, that would reduce urban alienation by blending green space with wide, curving streets intended to mimic the natural curvature of organically-emerging desire paths.

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Howard’s vision still wasn’t very organic, though. The original garden-city vision was formed of concentric circles, bisected at equal intervals by straight lines: a very geometric kind of naturalness. But if Ebenezer Howard sought to improve British city life by re-introducing (however stiffly) more curvature into the built environment, a few decades later another influential urbanist would try to fix cities not with an orderly echo of the organic, but by doing away with it altogether.

In The City of Tomorrow, (1929) the modernist architect and urban planner le Corbusier dismissed desire paths derisively as chemins de l’âne – donkey paths. For him, such routes expressed animalistic “looseness and lack of concentration”: physical signs of our failure to strive for a life of pure reason. Le Corbusier denounced any urbanism that gave space to such meandering routes as a threat to the man who “walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going”.

Instead of encouraging such slackness, le Corbusier declared that homes should serve as “machines for living in”: engines to power rationality and productivity for both sexes. He dreamed of demolishing chaotic, human-scale buildings, envisioning instead a high-rise, symmetrical and orderly Radiant City where streets would follow a grid and humans could be kept from the “ruinous, difficult and dangerous curve of animality”.

These twin poles of modern urbanism’s fraught relationship with “naturalness” shape the whole South-East of England. City centres follow le Corbusier’s footsteps, sprouting glass-and-steel skyscrapers that tower over older structures like alien arrivals formed of pure idea. On the periphery, new construction takes a more Howardesque approach, rolling out vaguely garden-inflected dormitory estates (all without Howard’s integrated Garden City amenities, but complete with “naturally” meandering cul-de-sac roads).

And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the South East is also the part of Britain most hopelessly gripped by housebuilding paralysis, and a more general Nimby-ish resistance to new architectural impositions. It’s not just about traffic, or noise, or population: somewhere in the resistance to every such scheme is an inchoate rejection of how abstract they all are.

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Not one is of a place. Not one is built in accordance with local vernacular, or even local topography — let alone local desire paths. Every bit as much as the tower blocks that now dwarf London’s skyline, or the artificially meandering synthetic randomness of the Ramble, such estates owe their approach — and unpopularity, whenever they are proposed — to a worldview less grounded in place than in pure abstraction.

Perhaps, one might say, the key thing is to build more houses; but perhaps, too, we might wonder whether this resistance isn’t a sign of deeper malaise. That’s certainly the sense emerging from the architectural campaign group Create Streets. Longstanding advocates of walkable streets, human-scale building and construction for place and community, their Restitch summit hopes to find answers to a growing fear, across political divides, that “the fabric of Western society is unravelling”.

I doubt this unravelling is happening merely because people think new-build estates are ugly. But there’s a sense across both architecture and politics that something fundamental about the compact between the great (who make abstract plans), and the small (who have to live in them), has come radically adrift. The Elizabeth line is surely the exception. For if it stumbled to fruition, it is surely down to bucking this trend.

As a project, it is place-bound in just the way every skyscraper and housing-estate is not. It may be a large-scale civil engineering project, but it’s laboriously built round, through and under what’s already there. And, importantly London needs and wants it. For the rest of us, though, it’s a matter of luck if you get any say in how the place where you live is remodelled around you — or if such a remodelling has any regard at all to the organic paths that were there before the bulldozers arrived.

How likely are we to see this change? A pessimist might say: for desire paths to express the organic social fabric, there has to be a social fabric to express. A more upbeat response might be: simply leading ordinary lives in a place is what forms such a fabric, as well as what forms desire paths. But we need leaders with the courage not just to impose a vision, but also to be guided by those emerging patterns.