Donald Trump recently said he wants to construct “freedom cities” if elected again. He has had this idea for a while; a story from March 2023 provides more details:

Former President Donald Trump on Friday proposed building up to 10 futuristic “freedom cities” on federal land, part of a plan that the 2024 presidential contender said would “create a new American future” in a country that has “lost its boldness.”…

He said he would launch a contest to charter up to 10 “freedom cities” roughly the size of Washington, DC, on undeveloped federal land.

“We’ll actually build new cities in our country again,” Trump said in the video. “These freedom cities will reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hardworking families, a new shot at home ownership and in fact, the American dream.”

These cities are tied to a bigger project:

Trump’s plan, shared in advance with POLITICO, calls for holding a contest to design and create up to ten new “Freedom Cities,” built from the ground up on federal land. It proposes an investment in the development of vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicles; the creation of “hives of industry” sparked by cutting off imports from China; and a population surge sparked by “baby bonuses” to encourage would-be-parents to get on with procreation. It is all, his team says, part of a larger nationwide beautification campaign meant to inspire forward-looking visions of America’s future.

When I saw that Trump mentioned this again, I immediately thought about free market cities that some have proposed for different parts of the world. But, that does not seem to be the goal here. Trump wants to build new cities that fit a new vision of American innovation. Freedom = innovation. One implication is that current cities are not free.

For such an idea, multiple practical obstacles exist:

1. Where would these be located? Which federal lands?
2. It is hard to build a new city. What is the timeline for this? How many resources will be involved? Will it be all private actors and developers doing the construction?
3. What will be the guiding mission of these cities? If the goal is innovation, what will be different about these cities compared to existing cities?
4. What will be the politics of these cities?

All that said, the likelihood of these being built is very low. And I thought Trump was was trying to save suburbia, not necessarily build cities?