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How things are made by others

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Mogul:

--- Quote from: Athrael on Tue, May 01, 2007, 01:06 ---Going back to what I said above, this provides us with an opportunity to slough off the old way of doing things and build, really build a society, government and business model that reflects a more enlighten society.

If you are going to look at the old models, then look at them as experiments that are basic failures and seek ways to improve upon, or better those ideas.
--- End quote ---

Sure, all the past and existing societies should serve as examples only - good or bad - on construction of society and living areas. Thinking of a Gay society, we should take the good ideas and abandon bad ones, like any sensible people would do. I would applaud any pragmatic approach where we are open to new perspectives but also aware of our possibilities. If a swimming nation is not (yet) possible due to high coast, and any "back-yard" land-locked project is politically unviable, so may be an insular solution with extended sea farms and a merchant navy is a good middle way?

Forgive me my scepticism on social engineering, but I grew up in conditions of the "real socialism" and thus have not very good memories of societies motivated by high goals, but neglecting human nature...  Industries and economic activities can be influenced by the government to some degree, but it seems to me that this influence is better kept low. Wherever the governments attempted to dictate to the economy what it needs to produce, the result was poor and mostly provided shortages in supply even with basic goods, not to speak of more complex products. Any future Gay government should not try to influence the economy out of ideological reasons, but instead precisely look at the effects to be expected from some regulation. Then you have right, we should be open-minded to choose the ways promising the best results for the society as a whole.

Now something entirely different: I stumbled upon this report recently:

Entire Tuscan village falls to invasion of German tourists

--- Quote ---Tuscany is about to lose one of its picturesque villages to tourist development, inevitably, but not in the usual sense. Tenuta de Castelfalfi, a hamlet in the heart of Chiantishire, will be wiped off the map, to be replaced by Toscana Resort Castelfalfi, owned outright by Germans.

TUI, Europe’s largest tour operator, has bought the entire village, 11 sq km (eight square miles) in all, boasting a medieval castle, a three-star hotel, an 18-hole golf course, and cottages and farm houses in various states of dilapidation. The Germans intend to build another hotel for their choosier customers, an adventure resort and yet another golf course.

TUI is paying €250 million (£170 million) for this highly desirable piece of real estate northwest of Siena. It says that it will offer 3,200 customers a genuine rural experience.

Locals were relieved to discover that not everything was for sale. The village church will remain Italian, and will be renovated by the Germans. (AP)
--- End quote ---
Emphases mine.

This much to the foolish argument of the folks roistering around with the "there is no free place anymore" argument. If TUI is able to purchase 11 km2 inmidst of the highly populated Italy, Gay State would be able to purchase an equally large area somewhere in less densely populated place. Taking a density of 20.000 persons per km2, those 11 km2 can give home to 220.000 persons. Considering that in Brazil (and elsewhere) more extended areas could be purchased without evicting many inhabitants, and that population density in modern city districts easily can reach some 40.000 persons per km2, what doubts can someone have that a territorial Gay State can be realistically established somewhere? As one can see, the price for the area was rather acceptable.

Athrael:
It is still the "old design" dusted off and wrapped in new ribbon and presented as "new". There are in the Southwest 'ghost towns', they surrounded the gold mine and as long as the mine produced they lived, as soon as the mine was tapped the city/town faded to abandonment as people moved on.  Although secondary sources of employment, saloons, brothels, doctors, churches, schools, etc were in place, once the main business shut down the rest closed as well.

Detroit based in auto manufacture did rather well, as soon as the auto-industry started closing factory doors the "rich" and middle class moved away in search of jobs while the poor and marginal remained. Detroit is considered a terrible failure when it comes to city planning.  Other towns dependent upon the corporation and the fickleness of the owners of the corporations stand as ruined testimony as to the economical realities of what happens when the interests of stock-holders take precedence over the workers. ruined financially, becoming ghettos of poverty where a widening deepening circle of welfare and crime spiral out of control. Poverty breeds crime, social injustice, bigotry and more.

Further It still depends on mega-corporations, mega-government and still creates classes within the framework - in other words somebody is still a ditch digger while somebody grows wealthy of that ditch. The rich get richer while the poor remain poor. The inequality of this situation needs to balanced, mostly by making the rich a little poorer so there is money for the poor. The elite still rule, the politics still remain. Yes it looks pretty on the outside, but the reality is that this a continuation of the old way of doing things.

If you are seriously considering a "Gay Nation" a Gay Society then we must examine carefully the straight way of doing things and immediately discard a great majority of those notions. We are given an opportunity to not only change the way a society views it members, we are also being given a chance to change and improve the way that that society conducts business, governs itself and to some degree establishes itself in the ecology. As far as I can tell this "new city" as laid out is much the same thing, it produces a great amount of waste, carries on the traditions of societal intolerance, is dependent upon the greed of a few rich men and takes from the land and the natural order more than it puts into that ecology.

The dependence upon foreign investors is a bad idea.  It may work, in part, for the straight aligned world, it will not work for the non-straight aligned society. However there are plenty of examples of how such a system can fail.

Investors should be mostly gay, all nationals and also workers for that corporation or series of corporations that sustain the local economy. Anything else puts you at the mercy of the fickle foreigners who will be swayed by the majority who will, as has been shown time and time again, stomp on anything remotely "gay" and seek to destroy it as soon as possible. Corporate Investors are promoters of self interest, if the majority threaten that self interest they will cave to the "popular" opinion of others.

Since you can not change the self interest of the investors, then you must make certain that the self interest of the investors will be aligned with the city/town/nation/providence in which that corporation is placed.

The Gay Community can be a powerful force, if motivated. I suspect that our GNP (Gay National Product) Is most likely in the billions even those we make up less than one percent of the population (By more modern, biased estimates not by the Kinsey Report of 10%) We already are told that Gays in the western "free" world have a larger pool of fundage not put to use in the family rearing process simply because most of us live in areas where adopting children if not directly prohibited by law is such a process we give up the notion of a family and proceed to accumulate our wealth and invest it in bed and breakfast's or spend it on gay cruises or some such.

A good corporation sells its product to the people and to its investors. Even if it is selling something that actually is useless, it makes it appear that its product is worthwhile not only as an investment but as a much needed product that the consumer must have. If you need money then you need to sell your corporation to gay investors.

In recent times we find a sudden growth of gay oriented commercialism. Trust me on this corporations realize that we gays are an untapped well spring of wealth. Although those self-same corporations have done NOTHING to promote our needs prior, they are jumping through hoops to get us to buy what ever it is they are selling.  This trend is very important and should not be dismissed out of hand. Corporations are self interested and always go after the market that will reward them with the most money. They rarely, if ever target insignificant or poor groups.

As for territory, I gave you an alternative to land. Again I point out that people are not interested in having a gay city in their back yards, their counties, their states. They will scream "Not in My Back Yard!". Further the future is sort of grim, with a predicted rise in sea levels of 12 to 17 inches in the next 50 years of feet by the end of this century. That means land will become more valued as less of it remains above water.

Going back to what I said above, this provides us with an opportunity to slough off the old way of doing things and build, really build a society, government and business model that reflects a more enlighten society.

If you are going to look at the old models, then look at them as experiments that are basic failures and seek ways to improve upon, or better those ideas.

cheers

Mogul:
Well, Hong-Kong and Macau might be the most striking examples, perhapts. These two cities developed breathtakingly quickly from smaller towns (for Chinese scale) to megapolices within vew decades, all thanks to immigration. They didn't start, however, right from the scratch.

What I actually wanted to demonstrate by quoting this article, is both the possibility of a new city project, and the territorial scope of such an enterprise - some 100 km2 seem to be appropriate. It is clear, however, that every city developes in pace with the number and demands of its citizens. This does not necessarily mean, that the citizens must limit themselves in comforts while living in a smaller town - all the new-founded Jewish cities (like Herzliya) are good examples for this approach. The latter developed from some 7.000 in 1948 to currently 84.000. At the end, building cities is a problem which is reduced to 1) planning city quarters, 2) calculating communal infrastructure and 3) building houses, streets and canalization. The velocity of actual realization of all the high-flying plans depends mostly on the number of acters involved: many autonomous projects will accomplish their goals probably much more quickly than a bureaucratical monstrum of a state-controlled agency.

The question of industries/business remains always one of the central points of every society. It belongs, however, to the competencies of the local governments and the citizens themselves to find some suitable income sources - and the experience shows that they manage this task usually rather well. Societies, which have no possibility to posess heavy industries, have to search fortune in other ways - tourism, finances, trade, shipping etc. I doubt that an entire city can live from writing and programming, but if a couple of banks, pharmaceutical companies and a few private hospitals etc. come to this, one can have some basis for a living. We shall not forget, that people themselves create consume and thus jobs - with or without heavy industry.

Feral:
A fascinating project. It would be interesting to see other examples that were not so dependent on heavy industry and, of course, the oil-wealth of Saudi Arabia. Most of us are so used to  old and well-established cities that it is easy to forget that it is quite possible to create them.

Mogul:
The following article illustrates, how a new city can be built from the scratch in the middle of nowhere:

JEC to Usher In a New Era in Jizan Development

EDDAH, 6 November 2006 — Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah laid the foundation for Jizan Economic City (JEC) on Saturday night after announcing plans to establish a city designed to attract more than SR100 billion in investment.

Malaysian company MMC and Saudi Binladin Group are leading partners in the Kingdom’s fourth economic city project which is set to usher in a new era in Jizan’s development. The city will have a port, an industrial zone, a logistic service center, an energy/desalination plant and a residential zone. Many international companies have already shown their interest in investing in the city.

According to informed sources at Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA), the main facilitator of the project, three giant factories will be established at a cost of SR15 billion by Chinese firms.

King Abdullah, who is on his first visit to Jizan since ascending the throne in August 2005, announced plans to establish the city while attending a popular reception held in his honor by the people of the region.

The king said JEC would attract more than SR100 billion in investment and create some 500,000 new jobs. He also said that SR375 million worth of free shares in the SR15 billion JEC company would be allocated to the region’s limited income people. He also disclosed plans to establish an oil refinery in Jizan. The Ministry of Petroleum and Minerals has been instructed to conduct a feasibility study on the refinery project.

The new economic city will be located about 50 km north of Jizan city and will spread over an area of 100 million square meters. About 12 km of this land is situated close to Jizan coast while eight kilometers are inland.

“JEC will focus on heavy industries that require intense use of energy, which is readily available in the Kingdom,” SAGIA said in a statement. Jizan is located in a strategic position close to international maritime routes in the Red Sea as well as the Indian Ocean. “This will facilitate marketing of JEC products in Asia, Africa and Europe,” the statement said.

The city will also have secondary industries related to agriculture and fisheries and a full-fledged research center to support them. A regional center for the distribution of iron ore will also be established. The developers will bear all the cost for building the city’s required infrastructure.

MMC is one of the largest companies in Malaysia specializing in engineering, construction, mining, transportation, logistic services, energy and power generation. It owns and manages the main ports in Malaysia. Saudi Binladin Group has built several industrial and residential cities around the world. It employs more than 55,000 people.

SAGIA chief Amr Dabbagh said the king’s announcement concerning JEC and his support for the project were in line with the government’s strategy to achieve balanced development in all regions. He said JEC would focus on industries that needed more manpower. There will be advanced centers to train the people of the region.

King Abdullah, who is on the last leg of his tour of the south, yesterday received prominent Islamic scholars and senior civilian and military officers in Jizan. He later distributed deeds and keys for 372 low-cost houses built in Daheema village to deserving people.

The King Abdullah Charitable Housing Foundation carried out the project at a cost of SR100 million which includes mosques, schools, health, social and cultural centers and public utility facilities.

Later in the day, King Abdullah launched a number of welfare projects in Jizan including the first phase of Jizan University campus. An exhibition of the models of projects to be implemented in JEC is being held at King Faisal Sports City. The king has instructed officials to continue the exhibition for two weeks in order for the people of Jizan to become familiar with the projects and plans for the city.


Certainly, the enterprize is not of the easiest kind, but it is not that difficult too.

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