Think Your Startup Is Ambitious? This One Wants to Build a City
This Urban Planner wants to Revolutionize Housing in the 21st Century
It may not be on the radar of startup culture just yet, but the brave new world of the Ecopolis is coming. It grows within the determined mind of Jordyn Barber, an African-American urban planner plotting it’s real-world implementation.
Barber is the author of The Greenprint, a 25,000 word manifesto on a planned community sustained entirely by its own resources. In her book she details a society where everyone grows their own food, and everyone owns their own businesses, where “excess byproduct” is sold to the “misguided” outside world of conspicuous consumption.
“I want to revolutionize life as we know it by creating communities that produce everything they need on their own…and own it.” — Jordyn Barber
Within this community of some 20,000 inhabitants, there is no need for monthly rent, weekly paychecks, or hourly wages. Everyone works a total of 20 hours per week, and everyone has the right to come and go as they please. You become a citizen through an app, where you can also file a police report, or a birth certificate. It’s Airbnb logistics frosted over the corporate culture of Apple Park, with some gig economy sprinkled on top.
Barber’s urban plan might seem like an outlandish Bolshevik fantasy, but at its roots, her ideas are strictly entrepreneurial; the renderings throughout this article are an intricately designed real estate project.
She is determined to transform the way communities feel connected to the resources that sustain their existence, something she believes is at the root of today’s social ills. Everyone must feel enfranchised, she says, the key to a future where racial inequality and social inequities will seem like antiquated systems of late stage capitalism.
As absurd as her vision might seem, the mechanics of it all are not as far-fetched. Nevertheless, is she prepared to dedicate herself to a project that could take an entire lifetime to complete?
The 21st Century Garden City
Barber’s urban project can be described as a self-sustaining solution to socioeconomic inequities. She is passionate about resolving the traumatic reality such inequities have enabled: poor mental health care, domestic violence and suicide; all rising ailments in the Black community.
The Greenprint is meant to create, as she puts it, “ value in giving to the community you benefit from.” Everyone is enfranchised knowing everyone else is doing their part. “I wouldn’t want to have an environment where one person or group of people can sit back while everyone else does the work,” she told me, “it’s my ancestral trauma.”
The city itself is divided into four sectors, and a “commercial core,” with the overall rotunda-like infrastructure as a means to control population size, urban density, and supply.
There is a residential sector with “high-density” dwellings, where mostly young labor lives within a vast array of high-rise apartments. There is also a second residential sector for “low-density” dwellings, which are suburban-like, and where older residents and healthcare professionals live in houses.
The senior population is prioritized in their spatial relationship with medical providers. This relationship between low-density and high-density implies a merit-based symbiosis: the older crowd have endured for much longer, and are rewarded with a more spacious district.
“Localization will bring power and freedom back to people by bringing the systems that serve them into their own backyard. Now you know exactly where your apple came from and can even have a chat with the farmer who helped nurture it.”
The third sector is the farmland, the facilitator of all food and energy. It will focus entirely on plant-based byproducts, all consumed and produced by residents. It will be where wind and solar energy systems are built as well.
There is also about 25 acres of the city reserved for botanical vistas and resort-like venues. Residents would also be able to utilize it as a campsite to get away from their tight-knit quarters.
The heart of the city is the “Commercial Core,” which connects the outside world to the gross domestic product of the whole city. It functions as a marketplace for residents to sell their own products and services — groceries, restaurants, art, performances, etc.
Lessons Learned from a Fellow Filmmaker
“…it is easy to see EPCOT as the ultimate fairy tale in the true Disney tradition. Urban blight? Not a problem, corporations will fix it for you. Racial unrest? Not a concern in our planned Community.” — Alan Bowers, Future World: A Critique of Disney’s EPCOT
There is a reason the Garden City — a planned city where structures radiate from a core — is over a century old, and not a single planner has fostered any sort of viable real estate. With these lofty urban goals came a moral dilemma that went beyond a mere desire for peace and harmony. These grandiose visions tend to also encompass a planner’s need to organize society the way they would prefer it administered.
Jordyn Barber holds a BA in Interactive Media, and an MFA in Television & Film Production from USC. Her background and cinematic ambitions puts her in the same category of another Hollywood dreamer-turned-urban planner: Walt Disney.
For historical perspective, I asked Barber about Disney’s original plans for EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), a planned community in central Florida that was to have 20,000 acres and a population of some 100,000. Like Barber, Disney had envisioned an idyllic city where commerce was at the heart of progress, and meticulously planned layouts were a means to prevent urban and social decay. The gist of Disney’s project was the same: a human ecosystem sequestered, but a functional model for harmony and order.
Disney’s plans however, were far too demanding. His postwar version of the city required a near authoritarian control of the entire community, a near impossible budget to maintain it, and its technological capabilities would have been far too experimental for people to truly call home.
Barber’s city on the other hand, is far more humble in its use of space, she claims, with only 750 acreage space (about the size of the upcoming SoFi Stadium entertainment complex in Los Angeles). As a smaller city, it is a smarter one as well, with use of sustainable technologies (green energy, bio-degradable materials etc) influenced by planned community principles that enable a denser yet simpler urban setup, according to Barber.
But like Ebenezer Howard, the Father of the Garden City, who also wrote his own manifesto-meets-blueprint, Tomorrow! A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898), Barber follows a similar pattern of planning: most of the content in her book is focused on the administrative aspects of controlling a society. The infrastructure itself is merely the tip of a social engineering iceberg.
First Steps into Final Fantasy
“Many utopias are like a photograph, or a glimpse of a society at a moment in time containing what the author perceived to be better, and designed to break through the barriers of the present and encourage people to want change and work for it.” — Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (2010).
Throughout my discussions with Barber, I asked how realistic her vision was, and what she felt were some of the challenges she will have to endure to make that vision a reality. Most importantly, I asked why all of it — the inevitable dismal of it as unrealistic, impractical, and even anti-American — seemed worth it to her. “My parents always kept me informed about the history of Black people in America,” she told me. “How slavery shaped my experience and the way the world around me worked was always apart of me.”
Barber explained to me the Greenprint is much more then a vision of how things should be. It is also a vindication of her identity as a Black American. “Because my ancestors worked very hard and made a lot of money for other people “ she said, “my first draft was to create a community where people could live for free, learn a trade, make money, and one day leave if they wanted to.
“A lot of generational wealth has been created on Black backs without it going into our generation. As a human being I feel that having a house should be a natural born right.” — Jordyn Barber
Her real estate proposal — which she is sharing with potential investors — outlines various opportunities her development project will bring, namely in the plentiful space beyond the urban peripheral of Greater Los Angeles. She hopes that with further interest in her work, and possibly grassroots support from those tired of the “legacy software” our cities are programmed to work on, that her objective of having enough space for 20,000–25,000 people will find movers and shakers receptive to the undertaking.
She is also beginning her social media campaign (@CreatetheGreenPrint), where she posts different ideas and communities that inspire her. She hopes to build her audience by engaging with people who are as interested in sustainable cities. Her long-haul objective however, is to prove to investors she is the real deal.
“I think now is the perfect time for me as a Black woman to acquire the resources to build this. The paradigm is rapidly shifting and people are looking for Black-led solutions…well here I am.”
Like the earnest planners before her, Barber is on an age-old quest for Utopia, that mythical society on a far-off island only known to them on paper. Her Greenprint may unravel something tangible for the rest of us one day, but for the time being, pie-in-the-sky thinking certainly has its place in the world of bold startups. How else could we have made it this far?
