Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty
Peter Thiel’s floating city in French Polynesia. Elon Musk’s self-sustaining city on Mars. Bill Gates’ smart city in Arizona. Long before a host of the biggest players in Silicon Valley set their sights on creating a new city in Solano County, California, many billionaires thought they could start their own utopia. But one man, a retired AT&T executive from Georgia, has actually been able to do it—for better or for worse.
Oliver Porter, 85, is the architect of Sandy Springs, Georgia, a city of 108,000 people outside Atlanta that set off a wave of similar new towns when it incorporated in 2005. Porter has assisted in creating nearly a dozen new cities in Georgia and several others around the world. The legacy of that movement, which has improved services for some while icing out others, carries important lessons for those attempting to start their own private paradises today.
Porter joined the Sandy Springs planning committee in the late 1990s, more than 25 years after residents of the neighborhood started pushing for independence from the government of the surrounding Fulton County. The fight started in 1965, when Atlanta attempted to annex the wealthy, white enclave just outside the city limits and was met with resounding resistance from homeowners—in part for fear that annexation would require racial integration. (Reps for the suburb threatened to “build up a city separate from Atlanta and your Negroes and forbid any Negroes to buy, or own, or live within our limits.”)