Jan Sramek
Article
Jan Sramek is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between September 04, 2023 and October 28, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “led by the mysterious Jan Sramek”; “project lead Jan Sramek’s understanding”; “CEO Jan Sramek summarized the urban design as ‘American street grid, Spanish/Japanese superblocks, and Dutch woonerfs’“. It most often appears alongside California, California Forever, Honduras.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: September 04, 2023
- Last seen: October 28, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
-
- California (3 shared issues)
-
- California Forever (3 shared issues)
-
- Honduras (3 shared issues)
-
- Prospera (3 shared issues)
-
- San Francisco (3 shared issues)
-
- Suisun City (3 shared issues)
-
- Charter Cities Institute (2 shared issues)
-
- China (2 shared issues)
-
- Dryden Brown (2 shared issues)
-
- Dubai (2 shared issues)
-
- Elon Musk (2 shared issues)
-
- Idris Elba (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
The specific elites include the Collison brothers, Reid Hoffman, Nat Friedman, Marc Andreessen, and others, led by the mysterious Jan Sramek. The specific land is farmland in Solano County, about an hour’s drive northeast of San Francisco. The specific utopian city is going to look like this:
Inline links: Jan Sramek
I think it signals [project lead] Jan Sramek’s understanding that while the need for more affordable housing and good paying jobs has merit, the timing has been unrealistic. I want to acknowledge that many Solano residents are excited about Mr. Sramek’s optimism about a California that builds again. He is also right that we cannot solve our jobs, housing, and energy challenges if every project takes a decade or more to break ground.
Period where locals in the area to be annexed may protest (there aren’t really any locals except some landowners who have already sold their land to the project, so legally relevant protests are unlikely) The paperwork itself contains some exciting details. Phase 1 of the city will have 175,000 people, with the ability to expand up to 400,000 later. CEO Jan Sramek summarized the urban design as “American street grid, Spanish/Japanese superblocks, and Dutch woonerfs”. The American street grid is the logical right-angled design typical of cities like Manhattan or Chicago. The Spanish superblocks are the big blocks with courtyards in the center, typical of cities like Barcelona: ...and woonerfs are small Dutch side streets which are designed to just-barely-allow drivers but prioritize pedestrians. creating a road layer in between big car-centered thoroughfares and pedestrian-only sidewalks: The proposal also moots two additional megaprojects: the Solano Shipyard, where the new city touches the upper tributaries of the San Francisco Bay. American shipbuilding has long been something of an embarrassment, the Trump administration is working on it, and the new city would be strategically placed to benefit if the federal government could remove some of the barriers that make US naval manufacturing unprofitable. And the Solano Foundry would be the “the largest [advanced manufacturing] park in the US”. Many of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs’ manufacturing startups set up shop in Southern California - for example, Elon Musk’s original base for SpaceX and the Boring Company was in Hawthorne, near LA - just because the Bay has so few good industrial locations. The Foundry aims to change that, and aims for 40,000 new manufacturing jobs. Finally, something nobody else will care about but which is close to my heart - Jan is pursuing a partnership with Monumental Labs, a group working on “AI-enabled robotic stone carving factories”. The question of why modern architecture is so dull and unornamented compared to its classical counterpart is complicated, but three commonly-proposed reasons are: Ornament costs too much
Inline links: summarized, Spanish superblocks, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!85zv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F12dd47a8-20ab-4699-a4e8-77c2eed30705_1024x683.jpeg, woonerfs are, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5-gC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6f23ae71-8eca-4cea-8ee3-8b26633be1f1_1000x562.png, Solano Shipyard, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cZKL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdaff879b-2364-49e3-9568-2779f28cd231_639x426.jpeg, Solano Foundry, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!APFe!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2086d0cc-0654-4c0a-80c3-3aaacbe5744e_1199x675.jpeg, Monumental Labs, is complicated