Conference Presentation
California Forever: The Startup Building America's Next Great City
- The project envisions a new, entirely self-funded, and sustainable city with a capacity of up to 400,000 people, inspired by traditional American neighborhoods and future 21st-century technologies to create a walkable environment where children can walk to school alone.
- Designed to restore Northern California's 1960s–1980s status as the U.S. high-tech manufacturing hub, the Solano Foundry is planned as the nation's largest advanced manufacturing park, positioning facilities within an hour of Menlo Park to enable Silicon Valley R&D and production co-location.
- Operations at the Foundry will leverage robotics and AI to significantly boost worker productivity and compensation, while the Deepwater Ship Channel site in Solano County is projected to host all shipyard activities for new submarines and programs, utilizing less than 10% of the total land area.
- The shipbuilding initiative aims to move the needle on national capacity, utilizing Bay Area AI talent to construct future vessels and establish West Coast repair and deployment capabilities that bypass reliance on the Panama Canal during conflicts.
- The speaker identifies the methodology of building in America as the defining challenge for the next 20 years, positioning this physical manifestation of the "reindustrialized" and "abundance" movements as a required "shining city on a hill."