Free Republic

Travis Air Force Base and surrounding land in Solano County, Calif. Image: Google Maps Since 2017, a shadowy Silicon Valley company has bought up 52,000 acres of farmland around Travis Air Force Base in Solano County, Calif., totaling about $800 million.Flannery Associates is a company run by Jan Sramek, a 36-year-old former Goldman Sachs trader. Beyond that, nothing much is known of the company except that some of the most famous names in Silicon Valley have invested in a project being promoted by Flannery. Some backers include Marc Andreessen, Powell Jobs, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, LinkedIn co-founder Reid...

For the first time in history more than half the world’s population is living in towns and cities. We passed this milestone in 2008 and by 2040 two in three people are expected to live in urban environments. Urbanisation presents us with a wealth of new opportunities and huge challenges. It has the potential to further economic development and innovation, but also threatens to exacerbate key global problems, including resource depletion, climate change, and inequality. Megacities on the move sets out to find solutions to one of the biggest challenges – how billions of city-dwellers can access what they need...