charter city Concepts

Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy

by Quinn Slobodian · 4 Apr 2023 · 360pp · 107,124 words

by the British.1 How could such historical accidents be made to happen again? The shortcut to Hong Kong that Romer offered was called the charter city. The formula: persuade poor nations to surrender patches of uninhabited territory to be managed by richer ones. Pollinate the empty land with rules known to

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set out to solve the hotel. Uber set out to solve the taxi. Theranos set out to solve the blood test. The idea of the charter city borrowed its sheen from the idea of charter schools, the privately backed start-up educational institutions that tripled in number from 2000 to 2012.5

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The Wall Street Journal made the connection, comparing Romer’s charter city model to a charter school “free of union contracts and public bureaucracy.”6 For mainstream America in the 2000s, charter schools were targeting the outmoded

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foreign investment. Romer saw Ravalomanana as a man willing to rethink sovereignty even in the face of controversy. He flew to Madagascar to pitch the charter city model and was delighted when the president agreed to create two of them.9 Other elites were less persuaded by the subdivision of the nation

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by one advisor as “an area governed by another country’s laws.”15 Lobo’s team was primed for Romer’s arguments, and when his charter city talk was posted online, they contacted him. By late 2010, the Honduran leadership had met with Romer and agreed to make their country “the site

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of an economic experiment.”16 The legal form for the charter city in Honduras was the Región Especial de Desarrollo (special development region), or RED, an extraterritorial entity to be managed by a foreign partner country.17

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on the auction block. “Who wants to buy Honduras?” asked the New York Times, reporting the expectation that Romer would be the “chairman” of a charter city of ten million people (in a country where the entire population currently numbered eight million).21 The Wall Street Journal praised Romer’s supervision of

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the host country, but he was having trouble finding a patron state, a richer country willing to manage the charter city. One of his dream candidates was Canada. In early presentations of the charter city, he fantasized about Canadians taking over the Cuban enclave of Guantánamo Bay from the United States and turning the

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United States. The Canadian company Gildan, producer of socks, T-shirts, and other clothing, was the single biggest employer in the Honduran EPZs.30 A charter city in the country would be a captive market and a client for Canadian services. Canada could offer education, health care, environmental management, and tax administration

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patrolling the zones with wages drawn from land revenues.32 He repeated a popular slogan: “The world wants more Canada.”33 But Canada demurred. The charter city connected to the dreams of Silicon Valley, but also to the context of larger geopolitics. Romer talked about the need to “rethink sovereignty” as if

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human rights violations compared to the death toll of attempting to bring (back) popular elections to the Middle East? US foreign policy and Romer’s charter city proposals worked in tandem to shift the Overton window on the idea of alien rule. If the world’s most prestigious publications could get behind

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tried and executed by the Honduras government.70 Locals complained of an “invasion of model cities created for the benefit of the rich.”71 The charter city dream in Honduras was made possible only by a violently repressive government, by thousands of illegal detentions and the murders and disappearances of protesters and

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he himself operated a territorial concession governed by foreign laws and overseen by foreign advisors.78 3. In one of his many glosses on the charter city idea, Paul Romer said elliptically that they were an attempt “to propose a different metarule for changing the rules in developing countries, one that could

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Might the future move away from anarcho-capitalist paradises after all? Another member of Próspera’s board of advisors was Oliver Porter, the godfather of charter cities, who had overseen the secession of Sandy Springs, Georgia, from Atlanta in 2005—a move that cut off tax revenue to the inner city and

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Ivan Ko, advised by some of the same people behind Próspera, has been exploring the possibility for an escape pod of Hong Kong émigrés, a charter city implanted on the Irish coastline.82 When the Hong Kong activists demanding democracy and self-determination in 2019 faced ever-harsher repression from the police

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and Stasis in Honduras’ Free Zones,” 51, 54. 31. Brian Hutchison, “Opportunity in ‘Charter City,’” National Post, December 27, 2012, Global Newsstream. 32. Brandon Fuller and Paul Romer, Success and the City: How Charter Cities Could Transform the Developing World (Ottawa: MacDonald Laurier Institute, April 2012), 15. 33. Fuller and Romer

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, Success and the City: How Charter Cities Could Transform the Developing World, 16. 34. Stanford Institute for Economic Policy, “SIEPR Economic Summit 2009,” March 13, 2009, Wayback Machine capture September 11, 2016,

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/news/articles/2021-03-27/prospera-in-honduras-a-private-tech-city-now-open-for-business; and Mario Aguero and Gissel Zalavarria, “Prospera: the First Charter City Approved by the Honduran Government,” Arias, June 30, 2021, https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=1ceb727f-364e-4d50–9018–803744f3c88c. 51. The second

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Night (New York: Ace, 1979), 106. 64. Schulman, Alongside Night, 87–90. 65. “Charter Cities Podcast Episode 12: Erick Brimen on Próspera and the Birth of the First Charter City in Honduras,” Charter Cities Institute, September 8, 2020, https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/podcast/charter-cities-podcast-episode-12-erick-brimen/. 66. Prospera Arbitration Center, https://pac.hn/, June 3

Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

by Jacob Silverman · 9 Oct 2025 · 312pp · 103,645 words

Balaji Srinivasan, a tech investor who was promoting an esoteric but stubbornly influential concept called the Network State. Drawing on the anti-state and corporate charter city ideas then coming into vogue, the Network State described a potential “tech Zionism” in which right-wing techies (“Grays”) would buy property, take over local

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anonymous shell corporations7—generated discontent among locals worried about rising housing prices, the Salesforce founder donated $150 million to two Hawaiian hospitals.8 Investing in charter city startups, promoting cryptocurrency and borderless digital money transfers, and agitating for the end of the democratic nation-state, Peter Thiel became the movement’s presiding

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of conservative economist Milton Friedman, whose ideas helped underwrite the economic policies of various right-wing Latin American dictatorships. The same men invested in other charter-city-style ventures. Praxis, which aimed to build a 10,000-person “cryptostate” in the Mediterranean,11 raised more than $544 million in investment capital from

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elected a party that regulated women’s bodies and was a slave to corporate power. They wanted free markets and government bailouts and perhaps a charter city in Greenland. They wanted it all—on their terms. Thiel, who held a pro-Trump election night party at his Los Angeles mansion, seemed fully

The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World

by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian · 7 Oct 2024 · 336pp · 104,899 words

differently. —David Graeber I hesitated before deciding to include a chapter on charter cities in this book, in part because the idea is not so new. For one thing, a charter city, if we use Paul Romer’s working definition, is a territory located in one state that operates

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on booming tech stocks, a new guard, out of Silicon Valley, had taken up the mantle. In their ideal vision, the foreign state administering the charter city from afar was replaced with a private company that enjoyed similar concessions but answered to private interests, not the public. This was a departure from

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even a permanent, city of refuge. To cede this territory to rigidly ideological capitalists alone would be a big mistake. * * * • • • When Romer initially proposed his charter city concept, he didn’t start with anything terribly radical. Rules, he wrote, were important. Good rules encouraged good outcomes, while bad ones did not. Lots

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.) Whether Hong Kong is a good example or not, Paul Romer was right in one important respect when he held up Shenzhen as a model charter city: no gunboats or unequal treaties compelled the People’s Republic of China to build it. The pressures were internal: China was, at this point in

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, border guards, checkpoints, and barbed wire.” At the same time, when you consider the tested options for would-be migrants, the drawbacks of a potential charter city or zone start to look like a somewhat lesser evil. The ferocity with which the United States, the EU, and Australia have resisted newcomers is

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problem worse. Perhaps it is time to try something new. Lan Cao is a law professor at Chapman University who has written in support of charter city–style proposals, both as an economic development tool and as an alternative to the refugee camp. As a child, Cao was herself brought to the

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those on offer by the 192 nation-states of the world. Nations have failed us, but they also rule the world. Maybe, done right, a charter city could provide a much-needed alternative. This may mean giving existing cities that want more migrants the leeway to grant foreigners legal residency—a power

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guns to hunt game. They needed guns to protect themselves. Longyear went so far as to propose his own zany governance plan—a kind of charter city, really—to the U.S. government: that the region be run by a private corporation, registered in the United States or Britain and capitalized with

Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age

by Lizabeth Cohen · 30 Sep 2019

Building; architects; architecture; Back Bay; B-BURG program; Beacon Hill; Bunker Hill; business allies; cars; Catholic Church and; Center Plaza; Charles River Park apartments; Charlestown; charter; City Hall; “City of Ideas”; clubs; common renewal patterns; community activism; Copley Square; Cornhill Street; deterioration of; downtown renewal; Elevated Railway; Faneuil Hall; federal funding for

Europe: A History

by Norman Davies · 1 Jan 1996

number of fishing villages had found a precarious foothold in the lee of the dunes. Several of these had reached the status of a formal chartered city—Dordrecht (1220), Haarlem (1245), Delft (1246), and Alkmaar (1254). But none of them contained a fraction of the teeming population of the great textile cities

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

by Benjamin H. Bratton · 19 Feb 2016 · 903pp · 235,753 words

years ago, drew on the fungibility of enforcing this credentialization of infrastructural access. Elsewhere, a new kind of tabula rasa urbanism is seen in the charter city movement, as evangelized by New York University economist Paul Romer. The city remains a crucial site for challenges to traditional spatial models of sovereignty and

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innovation in what might augment or displace them, and Romer has advised plans for a “charter city” in Trujillo, Honduras, one administered by the courts of Mauritius and, in principal, open to qualified persons who may choose to reside there. Here individual

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System of the Earth (CeNSE) (HP), 192 Cerf, Vint, 42, 62–63 chains of interfaciality, 231, 233–234, 338–339 change, commitment to, 303–304 charter city movement, 310–311 Chicago Boys, 385n25 Chile, 58, 328 China boundary enforcement, 310 carbon emissions, 259 conflict with Google, 9, 112–115, 143–144, 245

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Systems, 88, 179 cities. See also entries beginning with urban agricultural, 307–308 ambient interface, 296 borders within, 311–312 building codes and zoning, 162 charter city movement, 310–311 citizens, 153, 159, 175 of control, 157–160 function of, 168 future of, 308–312, 315–316, 414n10 futuristic, 162–163 green

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, 135 Google AdWords, 255 Google AI, 134 Google bashing, 402n62 Google Car, 129, 134, 139, 281–282, 344, 437n55, 437n57. See also cars: driverless Google charter cities, 352 Google City, 444n26 Googledome, 184 Google Earth, 86, 91, 134, 242, 247–248, 322, 391n30, 431n70 Google Earth RealTime, 299–300 Google Energy, 134

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World

by Gaia Vince · 22 Aug 2022 · 302pp · 92,206 words

countries would donate territory to a wealthy, well-run nation, such as Switzerland, to govern effectively. Romer’s idea is that the citizens of the charter city would benefit from good governance, safety and wealth; the host nation would receive taxes, plus the benefits of having a well-developed economic hub in

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charter city called Próspera ZEDE (the Spanish acronym for ‘Zone for Employment and Economic Development’) on a small, 58-acre plot of unoccupied land on its Caribbean

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the planet’s big problems, it is claimed. For the more sceptical among us, this smells dystopian, rather. The group’s first venture, a floating charter city in French Polynesia, stalled at the planning stage due to negative reaction from the French Polynesians, concerned about pollution, disruption and environmental damage. One Tahitian

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Builders, off the Caribbean coast of Panama, this time with the agreement of the government of Panama. Even if the Panamanian venture or the Honduran charter city prove successful, their locations in the tropical Caribbean are far from ideal given their vulnerability to climate change – however, with enough money and engineering, it

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lease land for a charter city, protecting Russia’s sovereignty from its fear of Chinese encroachment, and the revived productivity would provide useful tax revenue. The depopulating nation favours immigrants from

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Melbourne, Pixel Building Merkel, Angela Mesopotamia Met Office, UK, methane Mexico Mexico City Miami Micronesians Middle East migrant cities: the Arctic as new region for; charter cities option; and circulation of community resources; ‘climate haven’ cities; creation of entirely new cities; as cultural factories; environmental sustainability; evidence of decline of tribalism in

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’; vested interests in the rich world; Westphalian state system pollinators pollution Polynesians populist politicians Portugal postcolonial diaspora poverty see inequality and poverty Próspera ZEDE (embryonic charter city) Prussia Puerto Rico Putin, Vladimir Pygmies Qatar race and ethnicity: and anti-immigrant feeling; deliberately prejudicial policies; and demographic change; European colonialism; fallacy of biological

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; migration to urban areas; and population expansion in Africa; remittances from urban migrants; as single largest killer today; and water scarcity Russell, Bertrand Russia: and charter cities model; depopulation crisis; economic benefits from global heating; economic sanctions on; expansion of agriculture in; infrastructure built on permafrost; invasion of Ukraine (2022); mega-heatwave

Lonely Planet Belgium & Luxembourg

by Lonely Planet

(depending on reservations). Huy POP 21,280 Straddling the Meuse River between Namur and Liège, Huy (pronounced ‘wee’), was one of northern Europe’s first chartered cities (1066) and later became a major metallurgical centre within the Prince-Bishopric of Liège. The outskirts can be off-putting but the centre retains a

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together

by Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin · 21 Jun 2023 · 248pp · 73,689 words

cities should be set free from the constraints of national governments. One such example of this is the charter city movement, originally championed by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer. The idea of the charter city movement is to grant municipal governments the right to develop their own system of governance and undertake policy

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty

by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo · 25 Apr 2011 · 370pp · 112,602 words

. Inspired by the example of Hong Kong, developed with great success by the British and then handed back to China, he developed the concept of “charter cities.” Countries would hand over an empty strip of territory to a foreign power, who would then take the responsibility for developing a new city with