The Unmapped City unsurveyed · unbuilt · underway Enter FOMO

Document 007 · the land search

We are not
looking for
empty land.

The romantic version of this is a blank desert and a permit fight. The practical version is a place that already won that fight thirty years ago, and has an empty half of its calendar.

We do not need to find the finished city's landscape. We need to find a working property whose terrain and infrastructure can be reinterpreted.

Aerial view at dusk of a rural off-road park: dirt tracks looping through graded berms, a row of RV hookup pads, an equipment barn, and a gravel access road out to a highway.
Plate XI — site survey, generic. Graded berms, serviced pads, an access road that already takes a forty-foot trailer. None of it ours.

The thesis

The hardest thing to build is not a city. It is permission.

A bare parcel gives you nothing but dirt and a five-year argument with a county that has never allowed anything like this and has no reason to start. Meanwhile, scattered across rural America, there are hundreds of purpose-built off-road and motorsport parks where somebody already had that argument, won it, and has been quietly operating ever since.

They hold acreage, camping rights, serviced pads, roads built for trailers, water, dust plans, a gate operation, a medical protocol, an insurance history — and neighbours who made their peace with noise decades ago. We are quieter than a race weekend.

Best of all, their business is seasonal and runs on weekends. Ours wants weekdays and the shoulder season. We are not asking anybody to give up their calendar. We are asking about the part of it that is already empty.

Where this stands

This is a thesis about what kind of site to look for. It is not a deal, a negotiation, or a shortlist with anybody's name on it.

No site is under contract, no owner has been approached with an offer, and no permit has been applied for. If that changes, it changes on the status board first.

We publish the criteria rather than the candidates, because naming somebody's business as a candidate before they have agreed to anything is how you lose them.

What a working park already holds

Seven things that take years to get, and are already there.

01

A use that already exists

You are amending a permitted assembly and recreation use, not inventing one. That is a different conversation with a county, and a far shorter one.

02

Neighbours who accepted noise

The single hardest fight a gathering faces, settled long before we arrived — and settled at a volume we will not come close to.

03

Serviced pads, already inspected

Power, water and sewer in the ground for twenty or thirty vehicles. That is the Caravan Ring's plumbing, built and signed off by somebody else.

04

Roads built for trailers

Every module arrives on a truck. These places take forty-foot rigs, toy haulers and equipment trailers every weekend of the season without thinking about it.

05

Terrain that hides things

Sculpted berms, jumps, cut banks, tree lines and elevation. A flat playa shows you the whole city at once. A park like this is an anti-map — you cannot see across it, and the discovery is built into the ground.

06

An operations muscle

Gate, parking, dust, water, sanitation, ambulance staging, crowd flow. Exercised weekly by people who will still be there when we arrive.

07

An empty calendar to fill

Race weekends in season. Which leaves weekdays, and months of shoulder season, on land and hookups that are sitting there earning nothing.

A correction we are making in public

The first city should be small enough to be good.

Two hundred acres is not twenty thousand people. It is worth saying so before somebody builds a budget on the other number.

A livable temporary city — camps, art, service corridors, fire lanes, roads, parking, and enough dead ground that you are not always looking at someone — runs somewhere between thirty and sixty people per acre. That arithmetic settles two questions at once, and they have different answers.

What the land can holdA 200-acre developed core, alone, is single-digit thousands. Core plus a leased ring at 400–600 acres reaches twenty thousand at the dense end — so the ambition is real, but it lives in the ring, not the core.
What year one should beTwo to five thousand. Not because the land cannot take more, but because a first city should be smaller than its site, staffed above its size, and good rather than large.
What the ambition isWhat year one should be
A city of twenty thousand, once a year.Two to five thousand, on a site that has already held crowds.
Two full-scale vessels and every district built.One vessel, honestly unfinished, and a Caravan Ring around it.
A permanent home.A partnership with somebody who already owns one.
Everything discovered in a week.Everything discovered in a week — this part does not scale down.

This is why the Fleet is built from modules. A city that outgrows its first site should be able to load onto trucks and become a larger city somewhere else, without throwing away a single thing anyone built.

The reinterpretation

The track does not sit inside the city. The track becomes the city.

Forty years of somebody else's earthmoving, already paid for, already graded, already drained — and shaped, by accident, into exactly the thing we would have had to build.

A motocross park is not a blank field with a track on it. It is a landscape that has been deliberately sculpted for sightlines, drainage, separation and drama. Read it as an urban plan instead of a racecourse and most of the plan is already drawn.

What the park hasWhat the city makes of it
Earth berms between track sectionsWalls between districts. You cannot see the next world from the one you are standing in.
Jumps, tabletops and elevated runsOverlooks, stages and monumental foundations — the only places you can see any distance.
Cut trenches and track corridorsRoads through the wreckage, already graded, already draining the right way.
Starting gatesEntry checkpoints. A row of rusted steel gates is a better threshold than anything we would build.
Maintenance sheds and equipment barnsFabrication shops, tool libraries and the year-round build campus.
Grandstands and towersShip superstructure. Bolt a hull to a grandstand and you have saved a year.
Existing RV padsThe first Caravan Ring neighbourhood, serviced and lawful on day one.
Track lighting, irrigation, dust control, internal roadsThe utilities spine. Someone else's capital, already in the ground.
One track kept rideableThe transit line — a choreographed route for art vehicles running a loop through the dark.
A row of rusted motorsport starting gates at night, repurposed as an entry checkpoint with brass lamps.
Plate XX — the gates. A better threshold than anything we would have built.
Looking down from an earth berm into a hidden district of lantern-lit structures.
Plate XVIII — the berms do the work. You cannot see the next world from the one you are in.
A handmade transit vehicle running at night along a dirt track cut through earth banks.
Plate XIX — one track kept rideable. It does not publish a timetable.

After the transformation, a visitor should have no particular reason to think they are standing in a motorsport park. They should only notice that the ground keeps hiding things from them.

The specification

What we are actually looking at.

If you are helping us look — and we would like you to — this is the list. A site does not have to satisfy all of it. It has to satisfy the first four.

  • An existing permitted use for crowds

    The parcel has lawfully held a multi-thousand-person event, with camping, in living memory. This is the one that cannot be substituted for.

  • A developed core of 150–300 acres, inside a leasable ring

    The core is the part with the roads, pads, power and permitted history. Around it we need enough adjacent farmland or pasture — leasable for a few weeks, ideally in the same jurisdiction and under few enough owners to be negotiable — to bring the controlled footprint to roughly 400–600 acres at full size. The core is bought with a partnership. The ring is rented with a handshake and a fence.

  • Camping already lawful on site

    Overnight occupancy is the difference between an event and a city, and it is where most venues fail before anything else is discussed.

  • An owner interested in the empty months

    Not a sale. A partnership with somebody who wants their off-season to earn, and who would rather their land became known for something.

  • Serviced RV pads, expandable

    Twenty or more with power and water, room to add more, and a lawful answer for wastewater — hookup, holding, or contracted haul-off.

  • Potable water, or a real plan for it

    A well with capacity, a municipal connection, or an established trucking arrangement that has supplied an event on this ground before.

  • Highway access and internal roads for heavy trailers

    Paved road within a few miles, and a site loop that a forty-foot flatbed carrying a container can actually turn around in.

  • Power, or room to generate

    Three-phase service is a gift. Space, fuel access and noise tolerance for temporary generation is enough.

  • A week of survivable weather, and a viable lodging season

    One window where a person can live outdoors safely, and six or more months where somebody would genuinely want to come and stay.

  • Risk an insurer will actually write

    Wildfire, flood, wind, dust and heat exposure that a real carrier will quote on, for fire art, rigging and overnight occupancy. If nobody will write it, the site is not a site.

  • A town near enough to matter

    Fuel, hospital, hardware, freight, and people who might want the work. A city this size is an economic event for wherever it lands, and that should be a good thing for them.

  • An airport within a few hours

    Not essential in year one. Essential by year three, if artists are going to come from anywhere but the nearest three states.

If you own or run one of these

Here is the version of this that is about you.

We are not asking you to sell your land, change your sport, or give up a single race weekend. We are asking about the eight months a year your hookups are cold.

Revenue in your dead seasonLodging, residencies and retreats on pads that currently earn nothing from October to spring.
Improvements you keepPower, water, pads, structures and grading are capital work on your land, and it stays yours.
No calendar conflictYour race schedule is the fixed constraint. We build around it, in writing.
A second business you own part ofThe Caravan Ring is intended to run year-round. That is a revenue share, not a rental.
Your ground, known differentlyThe same acreage, in front of an audience that has never heard of it.

Businesses sharing one set of infrastructure

  • The motocross and off-road park, unchanged
  • A themed RV hotel
  • An artist fabrication campus
  • Retreats and private events
  • A film and photography location
  • A nighttime interactive attraction
  • Seasonal mystery experiences
  • The annual city

Eight businesses, one set of roads, pads, water and power. That is the whole reason this works on a property that already exists and does not work on a field.

And if the answer is no, tell us why. A no with a reason is worth more to us right now than a maybe.

What rules a site out

No lawful path to overnight camping. A county that has refused a comparable event. A neighbour dispute already in progress. Floodplain or wildfire exposure no carrier will write. Single-track access with no second egress. Water that cannot be proven.

We would rather find these out in week one than week forty.

Nothing here is an offer, and this creates no obligation on either side. We will not publish your facility's name without written permission.

Seeking an existing motorsports, off-road or previously disturbed event property with dramatic terrain, internal roads and year-round operating potential.

150–300 developed acres · adjacent land reachable for a temporary city · capable of carrying lodging, fabrication and recurring public experiences

One introduction from somebody who already knows the operator is worth more than a year of us cold-calling counties. If you are that person, you are currently the most important person in this project.

Make an introduction City status