Weaving ground-level reporting with stories of rebel mayors, visionary architects and tech bros, the first comprehensive exposé of a new urban phenomenon: private cities.

Elon Musk has built his own city in Texas. Rapper Akon is building one in Senegal. Around the world, entrepreneurs, celebrities and philanthropists are creating communities: an eco-town in India, a robot-built village in the Caribbean, a crypto-retreat in Malaysia, floating platforms off Panama, a longevity hub in the Balkans?even cities that exist only in the metaverse. They are quietly transforming how millions live, work and govern themselves.

This is the story of one of this century's most ambitious, and misunderstood, urban trends: private cities. Drawing on a decade of research and dozens of interviews, Vera Kichanova takes readers from Siberian oil rigs to a futuristic Arabian desert oasis. City Makers is not just about cities. It is about people: ordinary residents as much as high-flying businessmen and politicians who are building these places?or trying to stop them. Neither manifesto nor warning, it argues that private cities are less dystopian, and more diverse, than the media portrays. For every Silicon Valley billionaire, a dozen quieter idealists are building the cities of tomorrow.

Provocative, deeply reported and refreshingly balanced, City Makers explores a phenomenon that will shape where we live, the rules we live under?and who writes them.