Building a new city involves a healthy amount of GDP engineering.

GDP= C+I+G+(X-M)

C= consumption
I= investment
G= government
X= exports
M= imports

In a new city you’ll have property owners and developers; they contribute to GDP by investing capital into the city.

Business owners and financial investors & intermediaries also fall in this bucket.

In both cases jobs are created. The former is easier to attract.

Consumption is really a function of human settlement, population density & the quality of jobs created. The bigger the population and the better the jobs, the greater the extent of consumption. Which hopefully drives more job creation.

Government in this instance is the city operator and its fiscus. In the early days, it’s likely the biggest actor in a new city’s economy.

Export - Import; this speaks to the extent to which the city trades with the rest of the country in which it exists and also the rest of the world.

All in all; you want to build your population, build high quality jobs, enable savings within the community so that investment capacity grows, and you want to export more than you import. Why? So that over time the city has a strong capital position.

Tried and tested play; worked for Singapore, London, Hong Kong, and many others.

The real value of a city isn’t its real estate. It’s it’s ability to create and sustain markets.

To the extent a city operator’s true business model is not selling or leasing real estate but taking a % of GDP as revenue; then you have multi trillion dollar industry.

We’ve modeled this. Governance as a Service is waaaaay more valuable than the underlying real estate opportunity. Though the real estate opportunity enables the former.

Ultimately, means successful city developers will need to be good at building physical infrastructure, digital infrastructure, civic administration and old fashioned business too (marketing, finance, corporate finance, etc.).