I'm one of those folks who would love to drop everything I have going to wander off into the desert/forest/underwater/whatever with the intention of bootstrapping a new city from scratch. The more I talk about it, I've found that there are a lot of people who would love such an adventure - if we could all just find some effort worth getting behind. It's sort of like starting a hippy commune, only with high-tech intentions. I'd rather embrace the world and one-up it than to hide away from it. I meet a lot of people who agree so I'm surprised there aren't more projects of this nature getting traction.
Need a kickstarter like system. Get 10,000 people to deposit $10,000 and you have got $100,000,000 to acquire a nice plot of land, set up planning and governance, and incorporate a new town. I'd be interested in seeing plans for such towns and would be interested in living in one.
I'd be down. I would be curious of how the governance would work for a situation like city-funding(?). Would funders get some special say, or are they simply along for the ride?
What if a corporation started a city instead of a billionaire? "Hello, welcome to Amazon!"
A benevolent dictator does have its advantages. For example being able to determine a culture until it's proven and critical mass makes it unlikely to change. It's comparable to the eternal September problem.
Say some 'hippies' try to bootstrap a city that's very walkable and people flock to it because they want to live in such a city. But it takes a while to get used to a new situation and during that time it's very easy to say "I like to walk to the shops, but I'm used to doing my groceries once a week, so allow me to use my car for that." Before you know the 'short-sighted yuppies' overwhelm the 'stubborn hippies' and cars are allowed everywhere one exception at a time.
The biggest disadvantages of a dictator are overcome by being able to move easily and the city being part of the larger legal framework of the country it's in.
Multiple of both types would be nice to have to see how they turn out. If you are not locking people in, the amount of dystopia that such a city could support should be minimal.
I would love to do that too. The problem is that you have to comply with the laws of whatever state/province/country on whose land you build the city, so you are often restricted in many ways - not least in understanding the regulations and working with the government to demonstrate compliance.
These guys https://www.seasteading.org/ are working towards building floating cities. In the short term, they want to figure out the technology part of it, but in the long term, they want to build cities in international waters and declare independence. Then you can do whatever you wanted to.
I believe there's still unincorporated land in the American Southwest. I've heard secondhand about a "new intentional city" project in Colorado. Someone had a big chunk of land; other people -- invite-only -- were buying lots.
I think the Rajneesh movement is a pretty bad example of the kind of project the OP talks about. Among the ways it could be improved on, it would be nice to not destroy a town which was already there, to build a secular community without a cult leader, to avoid kidnapping and drugging homeless people, and to not poison hundreds of people in an attempt to interfere with an election. Oh, and maybe let people wear a color that isn't red.
