The utopian city with no cash and no politicians, envisioned by a 100-year-old futurist

IMAGINING a whole new city is one thing; building it is another. But these two visionaries are giving the Venus Project a go.

The dream community of 100-year-old futurist Jacque Fresco and his girlfriend collaborator Roxanne Meadows.

IMAGINE a high tech energy-efficient city where there is no such thing as cash or politicians, you can walk into a community centre and borrow anything you need and the whole thing is run by a central computer.

That is the ambitious life goal of 100-year-old futurist Jacque Fresco and his girlfriend collaborator Roxanne Meadows, called the Venus Project.

He won’t be around to see it come to fruition, if it ever does, but the renowned visionary has spent nearly 40 years tucked away on a 21 acre property in Florida trying to bring his idea to life.

According to the mission statement, the project wants to achieve a sustainable new world civilisation beyond politics, poverty and war.

The community will be run not by politicians but by a central computer that will distribute resources as needed. A computer, Mr Fresco says, is not susceptible to corruption.

Architect and designer Roxanne Meadows, 68, is the co-founder of the project and has worked with Mr Fresco since 1975 to develop and promote the Venus Project.

Together they want to build a place “where technology and the methods of science are applied to redesigning our social system with the prime concern being to maximise quality of life rather than profit,” she said in an interview with Futurism this week.

The dream of 100-year-old futurist Jacque Fresco and his girlfriend collaborator Roxanne Meadows.

The pair have been working towards the idea for nearly 40 years.

In Jacque Fresco’s 2002 book The Best That Money Can’t Buy, he explains “If we really wish to put an end to our ongoing international and social problems, we must ultimately declare Earth and all of its resources as the common heritage of all of the world’s people.”

Sound familiar? Well, that is the underlying philosophy of the utopian city in the making.

According to its founders, it will replace political leaders with engineered systems and do away with money all together. It plans to use artificially intelligent systems to solve social problems faced by the community and allocate resources.

“This socio-economic system provides an equitable distribution of resources in an efficient manner without the use of money, barter, credit or servitude of any kind,” Ms Meadows said.

She points out that while we don’t have enough money to house everyone on the planet, we do have the resources to provide for all the world’s population. They want the Venus Project to be a microcosm of that idea.

“You could liken this to the public library where one might check out many books and then return them when they are finished. This can be done with anything that is not used on a daily basis,” she said.

“In a society where goods and services are made available to the entire population free of charge, ownership becomes a burden that is ultimately surpassed by a system of common property.”

Jacque Fresco and Roxanne Meadows.

For Jacque Fresco, technology is just more junk unless it elevates people.

After purchasing the property in 1979, they got to work on their dream. They planted hundreds of trees, dredged the land, and began building examples of mass-produceable housing.

Currently on the property there are two dome buildings that contain workshops filled with hundreds of models and renderings for the utopian city. It is the nerve centre for what they call the experimental centre.

Two more domes house a steady stream of international Venus Project volunteers, who help spread Fresco’s ideas around the world.

Despite the decades of work, the project remains very much in the imaginary phase.

In its current format, the compound is intended to illustrate what the outskirts of a city built in the image of the Venus Project might look like.

Despite wanting to ultimately forgo a system of currency, they can’t escape the reality that capital is a major obstacle for carrying out the project.

“We didn’t build what we wanted to build, we built what we could afford to build,” Ms Meadows told Bloomberg in June.

Fundraising efforts are currently under way, according to the project’s website which gives a detailed outline of its plan.

The HQ of the Venus Project.

Jacque Fresco is not the only rich man in the United States who wants to build an incredibly bold, futuristic city.

There is the wealthy Mormon businessman David Hall who wants to build completely sustainable tessellating mini cities across America for his fellow Mormon adherents.

The 70-year-old plans to create hi-tech, high density and completely sustainable communities where everything is within walking distance and motorised pods deliver supplies.

Sound so simple, right?

Of course, the chances of these cities ever coming to fruition — at least in their desired states — seems highly unlikely.

There is plenty of past examples of failed attempts to build revolutionary new cities.

As for the visionaries who persist, you can’t blame them for trying.