Akon performs in London in 2017. His plans for a real-life, high-tech Wakanda in Senegal are not coming to fruition.

In 2020, the rapper Akon declared he would build his own eponymous city on the site of the coastal village of Mbodiène, Senegal.

Akon envisioned Akon City as a real-life Wakanda, the Afro-futurist utopia from the film “Black Panther.” But his extensive plans — 100% solar power, Africa’s most advanced hospital, a high-tech university, an economy running on Akon’s personal cryptocurrency — omitted one crucial detail:

How Akon City would be governed.

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Akon’s failure to plan for governance stalled construction and created questions he could never answer. Last month, the Senegalese government confirmed that the project no longer exists.

The rapper’s combination of ambition and disinterest in governance is remarkably common.  

With the world seeming stuck, more celebrities, oligarchs and governments are seeking to create futuristic, paradigm-shifting cities to advance new aesthetics, technologies or sustainability standards. But for all their awesome grandeur, these proposals offer no new ideas — and often no details at all — about city governance.

In this failure, the world’s rich, famous and powerful demonstrate a planetwide lack of imagination in local democracy and government.

This fundamental failure to think about governance is perhaps most evident in California Forever, a proposed city in Solano County backed by venture capitalists who pride themselves on world-changing........

© San Francisco Chronicle