Nearly 25,000 acres of Arizona land was recently purchased by Bill Gates in an attempt to create a “smart city”. Belmont, the proposed name of the city, is located about 45 minutes outside of downtown Arizona. An investment firm Gates runs has already pledged to devote $80 million to the project. Belmont Partners, an Arizona-based real-estate group, said in a recent press release, “Belmont will create a forward thinking community with a communication and infrastructure spine that embraces cutting-edge technology, designed around high-speed digital networks, data centers, new manufacturing technologies and distribution models, autonomous vehicles and autonomous logistics hubs.” The land Belmont is proposed to be built on is currently almost completely undeveloped. Belmont Partners plans on completely transforming this space into 80,000 homes, 3,800 acres of industrial, retail, and office space, 470 acres for public schools, and 3,400 acres of open land. Belmont would be connected to other cities by a freeway that would run through the city and lead directly to Las Vegas. This influx of traffic would help Belmont to grow and flourish without a concerted effort of getting people into the city. Belmont may be the best designed smart city, but it is not the only proposed smart city currently being examined. There is currently “groundwork” being laid with a partnership with Panasonic to transform Denver into a smart city. The smart city with the most monetary resources is the $30 billion proposal Wanxiang, a Chinese electric car manufacturer, made for buying 83 million square feet of land in Hangzhou, China for the project. With seemingly a new focus put on creating smart cities, possibly one day smart cities will be as synonymous with “normal” cities as smart phones are with “normal” cell phones.
