“Freedom Cities”: Trump and an American global new city

ABSTRACT

This Urban Pulse entry examines Donald Trump’s campaign promise to build up to ten so-called Freedom Cities on federally owned land if re-elected. Similar to new cities being built around the world, Freedom Cities would be selected through a competitive bidding process and aim to overcome perceived crises in present-day urbanism. However, this essay provides a close read of the Freedom Cities proposal to examine how the idea of a new city provides a means for Trump and his movement to envision a society shaped by specific settler-colonial and far-right political visions emergent within the current American political-cultural moment. As such, the Freedom Cities proposal affords a rare window into the radicalization of the Trumpian movement in 2023.

KEYWORDS:

• Trump
• global new cities
• reactionary urbanism

Introduction

Over the past two decades or so, there has been a global trend for building master-planned new cities (Koch, 2018; Murray, 2015; Moser & Cote-Roy, 2022; Woodworth & Wallace, 2017). Projects like Masdar in Abu Dhabi, Songdo in South Korea, Dholera in India, NEOM in Saudi Arabia, Eko Altantic City in Nigeria, and Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco City exemplify this push (for case studies on each of these, see Günel, 2019; Halpern et al., 2013; Datta, 2015; Alam et al., 2021; Murray, 2015; Caprotti, 2014). China stands out in this arena, having scores of new-city projects in various stages of development throughout the country (Woodworth & Chien, 2022). Scholarship on new cities around the world has stressed that such mega-projects amount to locally specific artifacts of global neoliberal restructuring, where the master-planned new city is created de novo as politically potent, business-friendly vehicles for investment and global economic integration (Moser & Côté-Roy, 2021). Master-planned new cities are also invariably envisioned by political leaders as a means of transcending local conditions, which has translated to an emergent urbanism defined by class exclusivity, luxury amenity, spatial segregation, interchangeable global design tastes, upgraded infrastructures, and seamless connection to global centers of finance and trade (Datta & Shaban, 2016; Moser and Côté-Roy, 2022). Today’s global new cities thus mark a combination of developer and political interests and are, consequently, profoundly ideological.

The phenomenon of contemporary, city-scale master-planned new cities has overwhelmingly been a story of urban growth in the rapidly industrializing regions of the world. As the literature on global new cities specifies, this geographical feature of the recent new-city trend is tied to the prevalence of political, economic, and social conditions favoring widespread adoption of growth strategies hinging on monumental urban projects (Datta & Shaban, 2016; Moser & Côté-Roy, 2022; Su, 2023). The ascendance of new economic powers strongly indexed by the construction of new cities has inspired all manner of anxious commentary in the traditional centers of global power. Not only are countries such as China building boldly “as we once were” (Campanella, 2008), they are also doing it in anti-market or otherwise unfair and likely doomed ways, we are told (Farrer, 2019; Werner, 2018; Xie & Bird, 2020).

Against this backdrop, former U.S. President and current presidential candidate Donald J. Trump in March 2023 introduced a proposal as part of his re-election platform to charter the construction of ten new cities, which he calls Freedom Cities.¹ The proposal signals an awareness of, and a desire to mimic, some version of the contemporary global new city concept in the United States. On the other hand, it is also unmistakably specific and emergent from within the American far right and is replete with references to a type of American mythology. According to Trump, his proposed Freedom Cities would be built on federally owned land and contracted through a competitive bidding process that would select from among submitted masterplans. Though the Freedom Cities proposal was silent on technical planning details, it was nonetheless extraordinary in its succinct articulation of a social and political order and its intent to use new cities as vehicles for social reform. The purpose of this entry in Urban Pulse is to spotlight Trump’s Freedom Cities proposal as a historical event and, through a close read of its limited contents, show how visions of a new city provide a remarkably forthright definition of Trump’s political project, one that traffics in populist and fascist appeals.² A great deal of scholarly work has sought to explain the Trump phenomenon over the years and to understand its origins and forces. This essay is not aimed at resolving debates about Trumpism itself; rather, it considers how a familiar type of urban space – a new city – is taken up by Trump to conjure a vision of a perfected society that restores a social pecking order deemed by his supporters to have been lost (Lamont et al., 2017). In doing so, Trump follows a long tradition of authoritarian and fascist political leaders around the world hitching their fortunes to urban visions.

The Freedom Cities plan is spelled out in a three-and-a-half minute video. Delivered by Trump as a speech recorded in a single take from a wood-paneled office at his Florida estate, the plan is communicated more as manifesto than policy proposal. All of Trump’s campaign proposals are video recordings shot in the same manner and are archived on his campaign website. In the months since its release, there has not been a more developed textual follow-up that might flesh out the Freedom Cities plan revealed in the announcement video. The plan is thus highly aspirational and under-developed from a planning standpoint. It brims, however, with symbolic and overt references with profound political signification.

Imagining a new frontier

Historically, new city plans are developed as future-oriented solutions to perceived problems rooted in dissatisfaction with the present (Fishman, 1982; Wakeman, 2016; Datta & Shaban, 2016). Following in this tradition, Trump’s prefatory remarks in his video situate the Freedom Cities proposal in a reading of American history that frames contemporary urban crises as the result of deviations from a grand tradition of heroic nation-building. Trump begins by exclaiming:

“Past generations of Americans pursued big dreams and daring projects that once seemed absolutely impossible. They pushed across an unsettled continent and built new cities in the wild frontier. They transformed American life with the Interstate Highway System – magnificent it was – and they launched a vast network of satellites into orbit all around the Earth. But today, our country has lost its boldness. Under my leadership we will get it back in a very big way. … Our objective will be a quantum leap in the American standard of living. That’s what will happen.” (Donald J. Trump, 0:05)

What stands out in this preamble as uniquely American is Trump’s reference to the mythology of the frontier. Famously described by Frederick J. Turner (1920) in his original 1893 essay “The Frontier in American History” as the “meeting point between savagery and civilization,” the frontier was, in his telling, more than just a place; the frontier, for Turner, was a process of incorporation, driven by an overwhelming settler-colonial push westward, carrying out the program of Manifest Destiny. Extermination of Native American societies was the order of the day. It is worth noting in this light that, despite this baggage, the frontier persists in the popular American vocabulary as an oft-used metaphorical space of heroic penetration and settlement of empty (or, emptied) space. Mobilizing the Turnerian frontier in this fashion, with its links to settler-colonial conquest, helps reinforce the nostalgic revanchism that has coursed through Trump’s movement from the start and, in fact, predated it (see Price, 2018). The call to build new cities as a rediscovery of the frontier signals a new and radical shift in Trump’s rhetoric, calling as it does for new rounds of land acquisition and development in an old and familiar idiom steeped in violent land claims and racial cleansing.

The homeowner dream and developmentalist nostalgia

Building on the frontier theme, Trump’s announcement roots the idea of Freedom Cities in state-led land acquisition and private property. Trump submits:

Almost one third of the land mass of the United States is owned by the Federal Government. With just a very, very small portion of that land – just a fraction, one half of one percent, would you believe that? – we should hold a contest to charter up to ten new cities and award them to the best proposals for development. In other words, we’ll actually build new cities in our country again. These Freedom Cities will reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people – all hard-working families – a new shot at homeownership and in fact the American dream. (Donald J. Trump, 0:58)

The expansive interventionist imaginary for the federal government on display in this passage is specifically designed to create and safeguard private property markets. It is, in fact, a throwback to the tools applied to state-funded continental conquest, including the Indian Removal Act (1830) and the Homestead Act (1862), which legitimized seizures over vast swaths of land across what is now the Midwest and West and handed it free to White settlers. Under Trump’s proposal, the federal government would dispose of land in adequate amounts to build full-scale cities and develop these through private real estate holdings. No mention is made of the contested nature of current-day federal landholdings, much less the long history of violent colonial land acquisitions. As with Trump’s referencing the frontier, it is unclear whether his silence on the violence that shadows these proposals comes out of ignorance or indifference. Regardless, the impetus to undertake forceful land acquisition in fact connects Freedom Cities with the current wave of new-city building around the world where mass expulsions and dislocations are the norm (Su, 2023).

Trump is not merely concerned with property development, however. References to “young people” and “hard-working families” as the target customers for Freedom Cities signal a broader social engineering purpose at the heart of the proposal. In his announcement, Trump insists he will call on Congress to provide baby bonuses that will help “launch a new baby boom” (Donald J. Trump, 2:55). Fertility and family-formation have long been areas of critical concern for right-wing movements of various stripes, and the Trumpian movement is no exception (Dietze & Roth, 2020). By evoking the phrase “baby boom,” moreover, Trump again indulges a potent nostalgia for the original post-Second World War fertility boom that coined the original term. Freedom Cities are thus, not merely land development schemes; Freedom Cities are where deserving elements of the population are promised perks and subsidies that favor family formation and will build out the favored community as a replay of a mythologized past.

Alongside his Freedom Cities plan, Trump further advocates using a revived and broader developmentalist drive to reconstruct public facilities in the new cities and throughout the country. “I’ll challenge the governors of all 50 states to join me in a great modernization and beautification campaign, getting rid of ugly buildings, refurbishing our parks and our public spaces, making our cities and towns more livable, ensuring a pristine environment, and building towering monuments to our true American heroes” (Donald J. Trump, 2:58). In these passages, Trump channels the progressive construction drive of the New Deal and its flagship programs, like the Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Better Housing Program to declare an intent for the government to build at massive scale. By specifically targeting “ugly buildings,” he is also stoking a feud, maintained throughout his first administration, with the American Institute of Architects in which Trump waged a niche campaign against Brutalist and post-modern architecture. Days before leaving office, Trump issued the “Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture” requiring public building commissions to use neo-classical styles of architecture and specifically banning Brutalism.³ Trump’s petty-seeming preoccupation with Brutalism and his insistence upon neo-classical architecture is taken with utmost seriousness within the Trumpian movement, as evidenced by the Executive Order. Inscribing classical Western design principles onto the landscape, according to Trump and his Executive Order, is part and parcel of his movement’s intent to delegitimize “globalist” post-modern design precepts that have informed some recent high-profile public commissions.

The specter of China

Another animating feature of the Freedom Cities announcement is the presence of China as an arch competitor and point of anxious comparison. Specifically, Trump identifies China as a singular rival in an industrial policy offered in conjunction with the Freedom Cities plan to develop new modes of automobility. He says:

Another opportunity is in transportation. Dozens of major companies in the United States and China are racing to develop vertical take-off and landing vehicles for families and individuals. Just as the United States led the automotive revolution in the last century, I want to ensure that America – not China! – leads this revolution in air mobility. These breakthroughs can transform commerce, bring a giant infusion of wealth into rural America, and connect families and our country in new ways. (Donald J. Trump, 1:43)

In the following passage, China reappears: “Likewise, through our Strategic National Manufacturing Initiative, which is going to be very big and very, very successful, we will turn forgotten communities into hives of industry, producing the goods we will no longer import from China” (Donald J. Trump, 2:18).

Competition with China – and, especially the fear that the United States is losing that competition – has consistently figured centrally among Trump’s policy priorities. Whereas earlier U.S. presidents have tended to label China in one or another formulation of competitive partner, Trump discards any collaborative pretense in the bilateral relation, opting instead to characterize it as rivalrous and existential. It is with reference to these perceived stakes that Trump has repeatedly expressed grudging admiration for Xi Jinping’s strongarm style of rule, as well as China’s alleged craftiness on the world stage. China, as a country perceived to be “on the move,” is an ever-present specter in Trumpian politics, supplying urgency to devise grand national development schemes, including Freedom Cities.

Spatialized Trumpism

In an essay exploring the Trumpian movement and its continuities with American political and social development, Markley and Allums (2020) argue that a vital aspect of Trump’s appeal is rooted in the specific relation between White racial anxiety and suburban property ownership. They submit that the intensity of White anxiety in the post-2008 conjuncture, when unemployment and housing precarity impacted large swaths of the White population, ignited latent fascistic impulses that overrode laissez-faire myths and legitimized forceful state action in defense of sectional privileges. Across his first campaign and his administration, Trump embraced these anxieties by identifying migrants and various internal Others as the source of the generalized crisis, not neoliberal capitalism itself. Drawing on Neil Smith’s (1996) account of the “revanchist” urbanism of 1990s New York, Markley and Alums find a common thread between then and now, when middle-class and ruling-class elite groups, enraged by the rise of locality-based progressive political power in cities, assembled a reactionary coalition to violently dismantle these bases of power in retribution for having allegedly stolen the city from its rightful leaders. Smith recounts how a cast of Others – women, minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ communities, environmentalists, homeless people – were singled out as the culprits of the city’s fall from grace, and how their expulsion was sought as a foremost task of the state. As a fixture of the New York property developer scene since the 1970s, Trump’s reactionary politics were forged in the post-1970s anti-progressive backlash nurtured within that milieu.

Trump’s Freedom Cities should be seen as an important addition to this brand of politics, one that turns to space as a vehicle for realizing his movement’s objectives. In context, the proposal arrives at a moment when the ambition to retake cities foundered amid the massive opposition to police-inflicted violence in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in spring 2020. Trimming its sails, Trump’s new agenda is instead to abandon cities in favor of starting afresh. Freedom Cities are not subtle in this respect. As the reading of the proposal above indicates, Freedom Cities represent a desire to build exclusive new cities that materially and symbolically manifest the reactionary and fascist thrusts of the Trumpian movement. Clues to the social regime envisioned for such spaces emerge in Trump’s ominous comments on the role of the police. “Very importantly, I will make sure that all of these new places are safe. We love and cherish our police. They will do the job the way they have to,” he says (Trump, 3:20).

Much like, as Murray says in the context of building Eko Atlantic City near Lagos (2015), a new city provides a means of building a sanitized mirror-image of existing cities, Freedom Cities advance a fantasy of spatial cleansing. Underlying this is an emulative drive to join the new-city building trend around the world, to which Trump and his advisors are surely exposed. Yet, in lieu of the technophilia and celebrations of global connection that define places like Songdo and Masdar, Trump’s imagined Freedom Cities cater more directly to sectional and parochial interests inflamed by the forces of globalization. As a political maneuver, the Freedom Cities plan’s core purpose is precisely to conjure new cities in a distinctly fascist mold and generate a shared desire across the Trumpian movement not just to carry out a clean break with present-day cities but to turn their backs on the latter. In the imagined new city of his movement, prosperity and safety abound, while elements that have been cast as undesirable, abject, and anti-American are forcibly kept out through intensive policing and state protection.

As Trump prepares for a second try at the presidency, observers have noted deepening radicalization in his proposals for immigration, policing, judicial reform, education, and energy policy (Swan, 2022; Arnsdorf et al., 2023). The Freedom Cities plan, however, was largely ignored by the media after a flurry of dismissive commentary. This brief essay has sought to argue that the Freedom Cities pronouncement warrants attention, not so much as a policy platform but as a window upon an evolving Trumpian movement in 2023, one whose longstanding grievances have been massively amplified by humiliating electoral losses and overt promises of retribution extended by Trump to his followers against their collective perceived enemies. Freedom Cities, as figments of the Trumpian imagination, are a statement of intent with far-reaching implications.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See “Agenda47: A New Quantum Leap to Revolutionize the American Standard of Living,” Donald J Trump for President 2024, Inc. https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/agenda47-a-new-quantum-leap-to-revolutionize-the-american-standard-of-living

2 I mention the terms “populist” and “fascist” in recognition of the vigorous and diverse debates underway seeking to accurately understand and characterize Trump, the American right, and its relation to global variants of right-wing populism. For excellent review essays parsing this debate, see Paul N. Jackson (2021) Debate: Donald Trump and Fascism Studies. Fascism 10(1): 1-15.

3 See https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-promoting-beautiful-federal-civic-architecture/ (accessed June 12, 2023).