Volts How to design a brand-new city
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Mar 13, 2026 
Jan Sramek, founder and CEO of California Forever, is building a new large-scale city in Solano County with expertise in urban design and infrastructure. They cover walkable neighborhoods and five-minute amenities. They discuss transit-first corridors, car-free living and shared vehicle fleets. They explain large-scale approaches to affordability, modular housing, district heating, solar and phased downtown-first development.
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Design From Experience Not Dwelling Types
- Designing urban life from the desired experience backwards yields very different density and retail patterns than starting from housing types.
- Jan Sramek used the five–10 minute walk to coffee/school as the key metric to size neighborhoods and determine apartment/row‑home types.
Vacation Walking Habit Sparks Desire For Better Cities
- Sramek recounts vacationing in European towns where casual walking and higher daily step counts made people feel happier and more social.
- He observed visitors want that lifestyle back home but often don't realize it's replicable in US cities.
Physical Streets Build Social Trust
- Social trust grows from repeated low‑stakes face‑to‑face interactions in shared physical spaces, not from online contact.
- Sramek argues cafes, streets and parks produce trust by making people routinely co‑present and visible to each other.