Telosa and the Challenge of Building a City from Scratch

The construction of a truly new city is among the largest infrastructure projects that can be undertaken. The metropolises of the modern world are supported by long-standing infrastructure that has been continuously improved over decades, if not centuries. To realize utopian plans, city planners must plan for and establish new water, energy, and transportation systems. Telosa is a contemporary example of an audacious project to build a planned city.

Telosa is the name of a utopian proposed city devised by billionaire entrepreneur Marc Lore. The goal of the Telosa project is to construct a new city in the American desert, using technology to create a “futuristic” environment intended to house five million residents by 2050. Lore’s plan is to establish this new city based on his Georgist socioeconomic model of “equitism.”

Under the proposal, public services such as transportation, safe energy, and utilities will be funded by a community wealth fund. In the Georgist tradition, land will be owned collectively in a nonprofit community endowment. As the city develops, land values would appreciate, ideally returning large profits to the community wealth fund.

Planned cities are not an entirely novel concept. Notable world capitals like Canberra and Brasília were planned cities, and the storied American company towns of Pullman and Hershey were created from scratch to serve specific purposes. Telosa is novel in approach and scale, while being a private plan to create a metropolis that does not exist to serve a specific economic purpose.

Telosa’s plan for transportation contains a common urban planning slogan: the 15-minute city. The concept of a 15-minute city entails residents being able to commute to work and meet all of their regular needs in 15 minutes or less, either by car, bike, or public transport. A trademark proposal of Telosa is a total ban on privately owned motorized vehicles, replacing them with publicly owned autonomous vehicles (AVs).

Supporters argue that the dangers currently associated with AVs are caused by having to navigate human traffic, and that fully AV traffic would reduce accidents by 90 percent. While Telosa has made little progress on establishing the city, developments in autonomous vehicle technology make Telosa’s ambitious transportation plan more plausible. Waymo robotaxi services have recently expanded throughout American metropolitan areas, serving millions of customers.

Telosa’s focus on environmentalism includes plans to extensively recycle water and exclusively rely upon carbon-neutral clean energy sources. Development of water infrastructure is a major concern for a project that aims to build a city in the desert. Telosa’s website discusses the use of microgrids (many small grids rather than one centralized grid) and “multiple renewable sources and storage technologies capable of providing clean energy” but does not elaborate. In the absence of any established centralized grid system, opportunities to innovate are plentiful, but a lack of pre-existing infrastructure comes with significant challenges.

Planned city projects are often criticized for their seemingly unrealistic utopian visions. Telosa was announced in 2021, yet a site for the city still has not been selected as of mid-2026. While the project received extensive media coverage following the 2021 announcement, Lore has hardly made any public announcements about Telosa over the past two years. The project’s YouTube page has posted only two videos over the past three years, both of which focused on “community” as opposed to tangible infrastructural plans.

Another contemporary planned city project is NEOM, a Saudi Arabian plan for a 110-mile-long smart city in the shape of a line. NEOM was also announced in 2021 but has since been scaled back due to excessive costs and delays, with many key plans postponed. Constructing a planned city requires large up-front costs and extensive logistics coordination, as well as convincing potential residents of the project’s viability. Telosa’s website still contains its future plans and depicts the project as a work in progress, even if it is only in the planning stage. However, the lack of recent statements suggests that the difficulty of executing the project may have led to its tacit abandonment.

Telosa is a case of ambitious infrastructural ideas which technology has made increasingly possible but nonetheless difficult to achieve. The project’s apparent pause during the mid-2020s highlights the immense logistical and financial challenges involved in building a planned city from the ground up, particularly without government support yet inside that federal governments rules, regulations, and permitting structures.

The appeal of such projects lies in the opportunity to innovate in ways that may be constrained by the infrastructure of established cities, especially laying specifically new and dedicated lines like fiber optic cable capable of providing datacom services and serving as a sensor to monitor traffic, construction, and other purposes. There will also likely be lessons for other new or revitalized city projects in the American West as well as farther abstract applications like colonizing the moon or Mars. Telosa ultimately reflects a persistent utopian optimism within modern society: the desire to pursue grand projects built around strong ideals, even when their practical feasibility remains dubious.

Written by Vincent Stone, Public Policy Intern