Egypt

[Acitta]

It is possible to build lots of housing quickly if you have an authoritarian government. Egypt has been building a new administrative city outside of Cairo. Besides government buildings, it has a new mosque, Coptic cathedral, sports stadium and many tall buildings. It will have housing for 3 million people by 2027.

Photos: Egypt’s New Capital-City Megaproject

Egypt plans expansion of new capital as first residents trickle in

[KevinL]

South Korea is also building a new administrative capital, it seems to be going generally well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zsYwmOqt8U

[ac3r]

NAC is awful in so many regards. I wrote a long essay in an Austrian architecture publication about this detailing the issues,from the slavery involved to just being shit planning to the classism it promotes. I'd share it but it's written in German, but you can find lots of criticism of this project to read.

The issue with cities like these is that they often fail to work. Not always - there are great examples of planned cities like Kyoto or Brasília - but there are so many examples of failed ones. Or they seem okay on the surface...you see people, buildings, infrastructure etc...but once you get into the nitty gritty of these places, they're awful.

We don't need an authoritarian government to achieve similar things here. We just need to have good leadership, a population of people who want to feel prideful of their nation (which is hard to achieve...we love to work against our own best interest here) and some degree of willpower. I suspect those days are long gone, sadly. In the past we had nation building projects and things that brought us together - major projects like railway building, nuclear power, space exploration, ship building - but this is 2024 and everyone is selfish and sadly, our country is broken beyond repair thanks to useless left wing and right wing governments taking turns smashing everything.

[plam]

Nur-Sultan/Astana anyone? That is really not a place.

[tomh009]

The issue with cities like these is that they often fail to work. Not always - there are great examples of planned cities like Kyoto or Brasília - but there are so many examples of failed ones. Or they seem okay on the surface...you see people, buildings, infrastructure etc...but once you get into the nitty gritty of these places, they're awful.

Kyoto is a bit different from the others (Canberra, Brasilia, Sejong City, Nusantara, Astana, Egypt NAC etc) in that it was not a move of a capital city to a remote location, it was a redesign of an existing city. In some ways, the implementation Kyoto's plan was like the Paris urban plan, only a thousand years earlier.

The actual new capital cities (see above) have all struggled to various extents, it's definitely not easy to succeed with such a project, even if you control the government without any real opposition.