Mesa: Tech EnVisioning + Re/Generating "The Old Donut-Hole"

One of your MesaZona blogger's take-aways from the presentation by The Brookings Institute for the so-called "Rise of Mesa's Innovation District" is that while there might be "silos" that could somehow be individually successful, somehow they weren't all connected in ways that work for everybody.
Can we agree on that as a starting point?
Furthermore, there is no "core" here in Mesa holding it all together by magnetic attraction - instead we have centrifugal forces driving growth outside what used-to-be the center.

It's once again that unclear "Vision Thing" where we can agree on some of the paths to follow for endless promised possibilities perhaps leading to the New Zion - the promised land of Good-and-Plenty promulgated by early Pioneers from Utah who incorporated this city in 1878.
More than six generations have passed since then, from a small group of like-minded families numbering about 300 laying out a grid-structure with 1.25-acre homesites in the Original One-Square Mile where 12-oxen teams determined the width of the streets, taming the water resources of earlier cultures in the Salt River Valley.

Harnessing energies to build agricultural wealth was turned into the boom-and-bust cycles in real estate fortunes in the post WWII 1950's with millions invested in infrastructure expansion for miles of highways and freeways for an ever-expanding car-driven suburban culture  - to what is now again an accelerated fast-growing fast-changing landscape where demographics, ways of thinking and technology are rapidly transforming everything around us where we live.

WHAT'S NEXT? 
Let's recognize and acknowledge we find ourselves NOT in an Urban-Suburban divide but rather in growing networks of connected nodes and hubs and intersections that are connected in real-time - where are we going? And How do we "get there"? 
Hang on for a good ride > Future Shock on the way-forward

Let's take a look at - not at Salt Lake City or Provo, Utah - but San Francisco for what is called the maddening gap between how that place functions and how inventors and engineers there think it should. 
Many there (and now here in Mesa) have become enamored with the same idea:
What if the people who build circuits and social networks could build cities, too?
Wholly new places, designed from scratch and freed from broken policies.
Is that where want to be?

Could this be the so-called "Salvation Train" for cities like Mesa that seem to have gotten on-board for /startup/tech/innovation districts where ASU can be only game in town?
Transformation we can believe in?
_______________________________________________________Start-Up/Tech/Innovation
Tech Envisions the Ultimate Start-Up: An Entire City

Silicon Valley wants to save cities.

What could go wrong?

By Emily Badger 24 Feb 2018

SAN FRANCISCO — " For all the optimism, innovation and wealth that are produced here, the Bay Area can also feel like a place that doesn’t work quite right . . .

Last October, Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet company, announced it would team up with a government agency in Toronto to redevelop a stretch of the city “from the internet up.”

For others in tech — intrigued by word of a proposed smart city in Arizona, a big Bitcoin land grab in Nevada, a special economic zone in Honduras — fantasizing about newly built cities has become a side gig. They dream of utopias with driverless cars, radical property-ownership models, 3-D-printed houses and skyscrapers assembled in days.

While some urban planners roll their eyes, it is true that America’s cities have always been built on someone’s hubris . . . if you take literally the economist Ed Glaeser’s assertion in “Triumph of the City” that cities are our greatest invention, it ought to be possible to reinvent them. . .  

. . . But it is hard to overstate the degree to which these tech entrepreneurs are looking at the world in ways that would be almost unrecognizable to anyone already working on urban problems. . .

The model cities Mr. Huh and others in tech describe are not so different from what many urbanists want. They aspire to tame NIMBYism and private cars. They want to create walkable neighborhoods, albeit around hyperloop lines that would travel faster than any bullet train. They’re focused on affordable housing, although the shortage of it looks to them less like a matter of policy than a problem that better construction technology can solve.

READ MORE > https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/24