Tomorrow’s Cities Are Here

If you go east from hilly Austin, Texas, onto the flat coastal plain that stretches for 130 miles toward Houston, you can glimpse a future of the American city. But it won’t look like Manhattan, Chicago, or even Los Angeles. In fact, you might not realize you’re looking at a city at all.

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.”

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.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com, follow him on Substack and Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: The city of Bastrop, Texas is drawing talent from nearby Austin. Credit: City of Bastrop.