The Venus Project
And the Case for Starting Cities Anew: Why Greenfield Design Is Getting Harder to Ignore
The Venus Project and the Data Case for Starting Cities Anew: Why Greenfield Design Is Getting Harder to Ignore
The Venus Project — Jacque Fresco’s long-running proposal to redesign human habitats and economies from first principles — has always been as much an engineering brief as a philosophy. It asks: instead of endlessly patching cities built in the Industrial Age, what if we designed urban systems top-to-bottom for the 21st century — energy, water, transport, industry, governance — as a single, integrated machine? That idea still feels radical, but it’s increasingly backed by hard numbers and failed-upgrade case studies. The Venus Project
Why retrofits are so expensive (and getting pricier)
Retrofits are rarely a clean swap. Old pipes, century-old mains, mixed ownership of streets, and tangled utility easements mean every replacement touches a dozen other systems. Beyond the engineering complexity, financing and governance often make upgrades painfully slow: public budgets are constrained, private capital favors predictable returns, and regulations are siloed. The World Bank estimates that low- and middle-income cities need 821 billion per year through 2050 for resilient, low-carbon urban investments — a scale that shows how deep the investment gap is if we only try to patch what exists. World Bank Blogs
A few additional realities make retrofitting harshly inefficient:
Hidden assets: utilities under streets that aren’t mapped accurately, increasing discovery costs.
Disruption penalty: rebuilding in-place shuts streets, businesses, and transit, imposing economic costs on residents.
Layered obsolescence: old systems were not designed for modern loads (data centers, EV charging, desal plants), so parts of the system remain bottlenecks even after costly upgrades.
When engineers model whole-city transformations, the “disruption cost” and multi-system coordination often tip the balance in favor of greenfield strategies for certain large-scale needs.
Real-world greenfield tests — wins and warnings
Governments and developers have been trying to prove that you can do better from scratch. But the results are mixed, and instructive.
