Every time this is brought up I fail to understand how people think that this time would be any different. Cities are agglomerations of patterns at every scale and the emergent beauty that arises is absolutely impossible to design in any sort of masterplan way. Organic cities are resilient in ways that we can't every really understand, and that's the important element in making a place that is livable for the longer term.
I can think of Washington DC and Salt Lake City that were planned and aren't disasters.
Ex: EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) was originally supposed to be this in the 60s[1]. And was in a place exactly like what you propose (a large uninhabited tract of land).
After Walt died they just made it a theme park of the future envisioned by giant corporations like Exxon.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epcot#1960s:_Experimental_conc...
The problem is when you start adding cameras and electronics. It's obvious Sidewalk Labs is just an arm of the Google data collection funnel. I don't want any part of that in my life.
What I object to is Google being the one entrusted with this data, with no oversight, and cross-referencing it with all the other data they have on me.
Cameras don't prevent crime. They may shift crime (if you have cameras and your neighbor doesn't, guess whose house is going to get burgled first?) and they may make crime easier to prosecute after, but they do not stop crime in any meaningful way.
And more than likely, the people who are spending a lot of money to buy and monitor those cameras don't really care about the shoplifters and graffiti artists - those crimes don't cost very much of society and stopping them is a low priority. Serious crimes like murders and home invasions are.. actually pretty rare and cameras generally don't catch them.
If you're spending millions to install cameras, record them constantly, and store all that footage in a way that's searchable.. it has nothing to do with crime. It has everything to do with monitoring your population.
Edit:
Found it: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7469369.stm
I'm really quite surprised, you'd imagine having a bigger chance of getting caught would make people stop and think.
Probably the reason is, as you say, that those types of crime take place where the cameras mostly aren't, like indoors.
I would love to see a new city designed from the ground up on some currently uninhabited plot of land. You could make it walkable, beautiful, design it to have higher density housing from the start—so many things that would be difficult to add to a city that already exists (an underground tube system for transporting food and packages??). I guess the economic and individual incentives just aren’t there. Even if you built it, would people come?