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Inside America's Newest Utopia: Tony Hsieh's Las Vegas

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An outdoor chess board at the Golden Spike, a rehabilitated hotel in Tony Hsieh's innovation city in downtown Las Vegas. (Vjeran Pavic/Recode)
An outdoor chess board at the Golden Spike, a rehabilitated hotel in Tony Hsieh's innovation city in downtown Las Vegas. (Vjeran Pavic/Recode)

Zappos founder Tony Hsieh has invested $350 million to buy and build up 60 acres of downtown Las Vegas, hoping to create a community centered on technology and entrepreneurship.

Re/code editor Nellie Bowles has been reporting from Las Vegas and she says that Hsieh is part of a long American tradition — he's founding a utopia.

"It is strange. And it is struggling. But it's the most ambitious experiment in building a 21st century utopian city in the U.S.," Bowles writes in her special series.

She joins Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson to describe Hsieh's progress.

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This segment aired on September 30, 2014.

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