A short drive from the bustling center of Nairobi, past rows of sprawling tin-roof towns and never-ending tea plantations, lies the city of the future. What Africa lacks, Tatu City proudly holds in abundance: new housing developments, infrastructure for corruption-free corporate growth, streets optimally designed for safe and orderly travel, and an entire city, population soon to be 200,000, 100 percent free of crime.
The catch? Tatu is a private city. It is led not by a local government but by shareholders. In the mind of Tatu City’s founder, New Zealand-born businessman Stephen Jennings, Kenya is not in need of better politics; rather, politics itself is the problem. To achieve a prosperous future, Tatu proposes that Kenyans turn not to the magnanimity of a great leader but to the bombastic force of private innovation.
Paradoxically, the thinking goes, one frees oneself from the problem of corruption when one abolishes all pretenses of public service. A shareholder’s private interest, unlike a government minister’s, is bound to the project as a whole. The task of successful leadership then is not to transcend private interest, but to embrace it. This is Tatu’s secret, which enables it to provide access to reliable electricity and clean water—swimming pools worth of it.
Indeed, to many Kenyans, Tatu City’s founders have a point. The Kenyan government has done little to encourage its citizens that it can operate in good faith—never mind embark on large-scale projects. One need only look to the widespread protests against extrajudicial kidnappings that rocked Nairobi last January, or the crumbling public infrastructure standing in the face of a sparkling parliamentary office building, to see that public administration does not promise magnanimous public authority.
For an average Kenyan, it’s not crazy to conclude that politics has failed. So why not try something else? Why not put your chips on something that has shown it can move quickly, build big and affordably, and promise safety—those very things that the government has failed at achieving for the better part of the last century?
Since Tatu City’s founding in 2008, it has constructed tens of thousands of housing units, set up 60 businesses, as well as its own hospitals and schools and the most reliable utilities in Kenya—all across over 5,000 acres of private property owned by the city’s shareholders. Its proven capacity to build big and fast as well as its promises of special tax breaks and anti-corruption guarantees have earned the trust of deep-pocketed investors and attracted business from the likes of Unilever and Moderna, who now each have manufacturing operations within Tatu City limits. Tatu has emerged as a blueprint within the larger private city movement. Its parent company, Rendeavour, has already begun constructing further developments in Nigeria, Zambia, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Ghana.
Jennings insists that the problems Kenya faces are solvable. Kenya’s overcrowding, increased cost of living, and overburdened and antiquated public infrastructure “are all governance problems, not technical problems .” “The technology exists, it’s developed a long time ago … but there’s no political will to apply that technology.” This is the private city’s great achievement: it creates a space in which the problems of governance disappear. “Imagine you could sit down with a clean sheet of paper … and you can do whatever you want to.”
The appeal of private cities extends well beyond Africa. Similar projects have been unveiled in Australia by billionaire businessman Maha Sinnathamby, in Honduras by tech billionaires Peter Thiel and Marc Andreeson, and in the suburbs of Toronto by Google. Even Kanye West speculated that he was interested in starting his own city “somewhere in the Middle East.”
But what does it mean to privatize the polis? What happens to a community, indeed to an entire city, when it trades self-determination for prosperity, and citizenship for a perfectly curated collection of what another deems “all that you need?”
In many ways, the kind of solution that Tatu City offers is uniquely attuned to our own political moment here in the United States. The nation has chosen to respond to the rise of rightwing populism not with resistance—as in 2017—but apathy. “Resistance media” ratings are down, people are over that stuff, retreating instead into their own lives, outside of the raucous national mediascape. At the same time, people are broadly dissatisfied, hemmed in by the inflated price of household goods, the stubborn decline of American manufacturing, and the seeming impossibility of large-scale innovation.
In the podcast-verse, the medium of choice for many of the politically disaffected, discussion is increasingly focused on the crisis of American dynamism. Why can’t we do big things anymore? Why must we live in overpriced cities paralyzed by red tape? Must we really go gentle into a national spiritual and cultural anemia?
The New York Times reports that 48 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 29 who responded to its poll felt that “voting did not make a difference in how their government operates.” Meanwhile 58 percent of all responding adults said that American democracy was in need of “major reforms or a complete overhaul.”
These are not just ideological gripes. While it is true that concerns over lackluster growth have been a perennial discussion within the tech-friendly right (think no further than the likes of Elon Musk) prominent figures within the liberal mainstream are now themselves taking up the need for expansion. Vox founder turned New York Times podcast darling, Ezra Klein, is at the time of printing touring the country in support of his latest pseudo-manifesto, laconically entitled Abundance.
Frustrated by million-dollar San Francisco public bathrooms and the expansion of apartment rents to unlivable levels, Klein hopes that he can push the descendants of the environmentalist movement to turn away from the regulations they once pioneered and come to measure their successes not by projects they have blocked—be they nuclear plants or subdivisions—but instead by what they have built.
As the rest of the political discourse collapses into Trump-centered incoherence, Klein believes that it will be the question of how we enter into an age of large-scale innovation that will emerge as our new political axis. I think Klein’s onto something. Today, both political parties in America seem to be converging into a single plea: do something, anything, so long as it’s big. But the private city, the future Klein longs for, in many ways reveals something that I find frightening about this kind of discourse.
Tatu City is certainly a mark of triumph. But it is also a mark of despair—a nation’s recognition that it cannot solve its own problems, that it has become a society in which politics—democratic self-government—is no longer possible.
There is a reason why the pro-growth figures of the new right, many of whom Klein has come to resemble quite closely, have jumped from being pro-dynamism to being anti-democracy. Meme blogger, turned right-wing political celebrity, Curtis Yarvin, for instance, proudly declares that he is a “monarchist” on the grounds that “having an effective government and an efficient government is better for people’s lives.” Is the Ezra Klein center-left ready for such admissions? Can the party that just fought and died on the hill of “defending democracy” make such an about face?
Klein toes the line cautiously, matter-of-factly telling interviewers, “Look, China’s built 23,000 miles of high-speed rail in the period of time that California was failing to build 500 miles … That allows for a very imperious and even abusive government of individual rights. It also allows you to build trains.” Klein is not a monarchist; he is, however, interested in looking at the political system that has led China to abundance with the intention of “striking a balance.”
In the hay fields of Solano County, just north of San Francisco, these new political battle lines are already starting to emerge—as is a Tatu City of sorts, updated to reflect the anxieties and aspirations of the west coast of the United States.
California Forever, as the project calls itself, has garnered upwards of $800 million in private funding, arriving from sources as varied as Trump-friendly tech mogul Marc Andreeson to Democratic party mega donor Laurene Powell Jobs. The city-to-be has bought up 50,000 acres of land with the hopes of building a walkable 400,000 person tech-hub for the future—all from scratch.
Its founder, 36 year-old Czech-born former Goldman Sachs investor Jan Sramek, claims that he thought of the project after confronting first-hand the signs of California and America’s decline. According to his California Forever bio page, “Jan grew up with the ideal of California as this incredible place of innovation, and creativity, and optimism, of building things, of the California dream … After coming to California in 2013, it quickly became clear that some of that has started to be lost.” Perhaps, Sramek imagines, we can innovate our way out of our malaise. Perhaps we can build our way back to the American dream.
At the moment, California Forever is caught in a holding position. Politics has gotten in the way. Many current residents of Solano County fear that the changes the city brings will extend well beyond the city limits. And of course, they are right. California Forever is part of a larger project aimed at redefining California living—one made up of apartment units linked by high-speed rail. This is the California needed to both transition to a more sustainable future and encourage continued financial and population growth, to ease the transition out of nonrenewables and to continue the state’s endless march of economic growth.
In the eyes of many agriculture-dependent residents, this amounted to an annexation of one side of California by another, the land of limitless startups that attracted immigrants pursuing the California dream facing the California of self-governance and self-sufficiency. California Forever marks an eclipsing moment in the conflict of these two, which until now have long lived at a mutually suspicious distance.
For the time being, however, rural California has resisted its billionaires’ utopic ambitions. Construction of the private city is caught up in zoning restrictions. Until a county majority says otherwise, Solano’s “empty” land can only be used for agricultural purposes. In the eyes of the developers, these are just bureaucratic hurdles and red tape—the very limitations their city is aimed at addressing. To Solano county, however, these are limitations imposed by a self-governing community with the intent to conserve what they consider to be their inherited regional identity; the mustering of political will to protect one of California’s poorest counties from the state’s billionaire goliaths.
California Forever is optimistic, however. Just like the Kenyan people before us, the city’s investors wager that we too are coming to the conclusion that politics, rather than the means of our deliverance, is itself the source of our problems. The days of zoning vetocracy, the planners imagine, are numbered.
I traveled to Tatu City in late December. I was fascinated to see the rows and rows of mostly empty luxury houses, the perfectly clean and perfectly quiet shopping centers and sports facilities.
But I was also fascinated to witness what appeared to be some glaring holes in this utopian doctrine. A factory for Unilever hummed, busy making use of the private city’s special tax-status. Armies of security guards kicked at the shiny new pavement, waiting to introduce any newcomer to Tatu’s uniquely stringent traffic restrictions. But the city felt lived in only in the most tenuous sense. A city without a soul—without meaningful signs of life even.
Tatu built luxury buildings, cafes, and swimming pools in record time; it resolved problems of resource scarcity through what seemed like impossible projects of construction and coordination. And yet, the pool sat mostly empty, the cafe sleepy and dysfunctional from lack of use, with the problems of society raging on right outside. The city was there, all around me. Its buildings stretched out as far as the eye could see. And yet, it still managed to feel like a rendering, the kind of “perfect” that better suits a corporate PowerPoint presentation than a place you would hope to live in.
Tatu City had everything you could want. And yet, its administered abundance gave off the feeling of a purgatory more than heaven. Is this our future? Is this what the coming 2028 administration of abundance has in store?
Shortly before leaving Tatu City, I navigated my way to a rooftop diner that Google Maps (but none of the security guards I asked) was able to locate within the utopia’s confines. The waitress looked surprised to see someone. Those in my small group were the only ones there.
And as I looked over the balcony, out at the outdoor basketball courts, the pool, and the newly constructed 5G cell tower, I pondered how Tatu’s stakeholders could build a city in less than a decade—and take an hour to make an omelet.
Image: Umberto Boccioni, Young Man on a Riverbank, opaque watercolor, charcoal, and pastel on paper, 1902 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).