New paper! "Carving Out the City from the State: Charter Cities and the Quest for New Urban Futures"

Helmut Aust and Alejandro Rodiles have posted a new paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6725331

Here is the abstract:

The idea of building new cities from scratch is gaining new popularity. A particular form of these endeavors relates to the construction of so-called "charter cities" which would be built on the territory of a given state, but would find themselves in more or less complete independence from the legal framework of the host state. Going back to ideas propagated by former World Bank Chief Economist and Nobel laureate Paul Romer, the idea behind charter cities is a decoupling of cities from the state.

Ideally, these cities would be carved out of state jurisdiction almost entirely. This article discusses this phenomenon both in the light of a now apparently failed attempt at implementing this plan in the case of Prospéra in Honduras, but also in the light of its broader historical, conceptual and political implications. As the article demonstrates, charter cities demonstrate a considerable overlap with concepts like special economic zones. Also other attempts at decoupling territories from states like seasteading projects are based on similar ideological underpinnings.These shared conceptual undercurrents relate to techno-libertarian concepts and their growing international influence finds resonance in recent attempts of post-conflict peace-building propagated by the US administration. The article critically assesses these developments and points to the dangers that such new urban futures present.