Bonus points where the idea is to just build in the middle of a desert in the middle of nowhere because that's where the land's cheap enough to try, with little regard for what that means for the sustainability of the food and water supply for all these people.
There is some merit in the idea of trying to build a city in well-planned chunks instead of growing organically, since it lets you head off some of the problems that tend to arise when cities make it up as they go, but that idea is held back by the reality that getting that much useful land all at once is really expensive and you won't see any sort of return until you've built most of a city on it. That means that if you want to try, you have to settle for land that isn't useful, and that's cheap for a reason.
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