The wealthy have recently become obsessed with building new cities. Hip-hop and R&B singer Akon has been influenced by this. In 2020, Akon announced that he would build a futuristic new city in his “hometown” Senegal. “Akon City” will run on green and solar energy, feature apartment complexes, seaside resorts, a university, and use his own cryptocurrency, Akoin, as the main means of exchange. Akon promised that the “city of the future” will soon come to life in the African country, creating a “real-life Wakanda” that will be a model for “what African society will look like in the future.”
Now, fast forward to 2024, and it seems like little is being done to make this dream a reality. The Senegalese government, which offered Akon a vast swath of land to build a futuristic new metropolis, is now reaching the end of its patience. Bloomberg reports that Sapco-Senegal, the government-owned entity in charge of tourism and development in the country, has given Akon “a formal notice” to begin work on the project. If there is no progress soon, the government will take back much of the land it previously gave him. The government issued the notice after Sapco missed several scheduled payments to him.
Gizmodo has reached out to Akon for comment and will update this article if we hear back.
Akon previously promoted the project heavily, but has since toned it down, and Akoncity.com, which once detailed Akon’s growth plans, now just redirects to Akon’s personal website.
#Aconcity pic.twitter.com/IYbIjsd7HY
— Akon (@Akon) August 26, 2020
Akon isn’t the only rich guy who’s bad at building cities. In the Bay Area, tech billionaires’ recent attempts to bring their own urbanism to life on thousands of acres of cow-filled farmland have fizzled out. Then there’s Neom, the Saudi Arabian government’s 105-mile-long city on the Red Sea coast, which has also stalled. Despite promise after promise to the press and investors, the Saudi government was recently forced to scale back its ambitions. Other billionaire-backed urbanism projects dot the US, and even Kanye West is planning his own “ecosystem.” Despite billions of dollars in investment and much talk, none of these projects have come to fruition, proving that the urbanism expertise of the one percent may be overstated.
