Brandon Fuller and Paul Romer discuss the history of building cities from scratch:
In 1091, Count Roger of Sicily raided the island of Malta, then under the control of the Fatimid caliphate, and secured the release of Christian captives there. Rather than observing the customs of conquest and forcibly resettling the prisoners, he let them choose between returning to their homes (many were Greek) and taking up residence in Sicily. There, he promised, they would be free to work their land as tenants, unchained from the burdens typical of medieval enserfment, such as servile dues and obligatory labor in the lord’s demesne.
Roger’s effort to attract, rather than enserf, new residents was unusually progressive for the time, but historian Richard Bartlett claims that it became common as western Europe expanded during the High Middle Ages. By offering people rights and opportunities, nobles could quickly attract voluntary migrants to new settlements, raising the productivity of their land and earning commensurately higher rents. Migrants who chose to move to the new settlements could improve their status, gaining improved legal rights, hereditary tenure as rent payers, and temporary exemptions from rents and military duty while they cleared land and built houses.
A related start-up dynamic played a role in colonial America several centuries later. To settle a debt, King Charles II gave William Penn dominion over Pennsylvania, a territory named for Penn’s father. The younger Penn was free to write the territory’s charter — its constitution — and to experiment with the very ideas that made him unpopular in his rigidly Anglican homeland. Penn’s charter provided one of the first legal guarantees of freedom of religion and was also the first constitution to allow for an amendment process. Because people valued religious freedom, the new charter attracted many new residents, and the city of Philadelphia grew rapidly.
Similarly, nineteenth-century settlements on the American frontier lured residents by experimenting with new rights and economic opportunities — particularly for free women, who secured a number of rights before their counterparts back east did. These included jury participation, the pursuit of higher education, and the ownership and management of property.
Note that this is a very different sense of ‘cities from scratch’ than Brasilia — a planned-from-above city that did not work out very well. Same with housing projects such as Cabrini-Green in Chicago, now torn down, that turned out to be way more disfunctional and dangerous than the ‘bad neighborhoods’ it replaced.