The latest issue of Wired has a very interesting article on the Chinese city of Dongtan, which is being built from scratch by a British architecture firm to be environmentally sustainable. Not only are there lots of interesting urban design issues, but the article spends some time discussing the benefits of starting from scratch. I found this interesting in light of the recent discussion of scrapping the Internet. It seems that in a lot of cases we are being held back not by technology, but by the cost of modifying current infrastructure.