I first heard about it in The River, a trendy new saloon in Manhattan’s Chinatown. A girl had lassoed me with a dog tag (etched with the slogan ‘Meet me in the Eternal City’) and started evangelising about a company building a new city in Europe. I felt sure something was off.
Praxis (aka ‘The City of Praxis’ or ‘Praxis Society’) is a startup with the modest ambition of building a city – a real one – likely in Europe, which would be home to 10,000 residents. The company has outlined how this is going to happen with a five stage masterplan. First they need future residents: ambitious young people bonded by shared values who are sufficiently zealous about Praxis to leave their current homes. When enough future residents commit to moving, Praxis will convince a country into letting them build an autonomous state on their land – preferably several thousand acres on the Adriatic. Praxis say they expect the groundbreaking ceremony on their first city to happen in 2025.
Despite the significant legal, financial and moral challenges to Praxis’ project, they have enough cash to be taken fairly seriously. Their war-chest stands at around $20 million, contributed by some characters you might hesitate to entrust with the future of humanity including Peter Thiel, the Altman bros, the Winklevoss twins, and Sam Bankman-Fried, of FTX infamy. In June, they scouted the former CEO of the Howard Hughes Corporation (yes, that Howard Hughes) to search for a founding site on the Mediterranean.
The co-founders of Praxis, Dryden Brown and Charlie Callinan, are themselves only in their twenties. Brown was a competitive surfer from California while Callinan played wide receiver on Boston College’s football team.
Defying the conventional wisdom of build it and they will come, Praxis intends to do the opposite: ‘The first step is to secure demand’. And Praxis has had some success in stoking hype through a hybrid of URL and IRL forums. Their discord channel plays host to minor internet celebs, the eccentric director Tony Kaye and their in-person ‘Little Praxis’ events range from symposiums to banquets at the Yale Club.
What’s less convincing is the conversion rate from internet hype to the sort of demand required to build a city. Growing over the pandemic, when work and social lives were largely plyed out online, it’s easy to see the attraction of the business model. It’s harder to feel the same optimism today, especially after last year’s crypto collapse.
Before breaking ground on a Mediterranean techno-utopia, they would likely need to front the cost of EU citizenship for their young pioneers. This mundane detail is something Dryden has conceded could cost around a quarter of a million dollars. Multiply that by ten thousand, their desired population (‘a university campus’), and the number is 125 times the total that has been invested in Praxis to date.
On many of these more tangible, thorny issues, Praxis leadership alternates between silence and vagueness. At a dinner they hosted at the Yale Club in Manhattan, Brown allegedly confirmed he’d been undergoing partnership discussions with Canada and a few Gulf States, but the company remains reluctant to provide details about most of their operations, citing the commercial sensitivity of their work. I have no doubt that commercial concerns, of some description, explains why attendees of their events now have to sign NDAs and why freelance journalists often get thrown out of their symposiums.
