Future utopias stumble over governance

In 2020, the rapper Akon declared he would build his own eponymous city on the site of the coastal village of Mbodiene, Senegal.

- Joe Mathews

Akon envisioned Akon City as a real-life Wakanda, the Afrofuturist utopia from the film Black Panther. But his extensive plans — 100% solar power, Africa’s most advanced hospital, a high-tech university, an economy running on Akon's cryptocurrency — omitted one crucial detail: How Akon City would be governed.

Akon's failure to plan for governance stalled construction and created questions he could never answer. Last month, the Senegalese government confirmed that the project no longer exists.

The rapper's combination of ambition and disinterest in governance is remarkably common. With the world seeming stuck, more celebrities, oligarchs and governments are seeking to create futuristic, paradigm-shifting new cities to advance new aesthetics, technologies, or sustainability standards. But for all their grandeur, these proposals offer no new ideas and often no details at all about city governance.

This fundamental failure to think about governance is perhaps most evident in California Forever, a proposed city on the Bay Area’s outskirts backed by venture capitalists who pride themselves on world-changing ideas, including LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Emerson Collective's Laurene Powell Jobs.