The Justice Department just rolled out its āModel Cities Initiative,ā a $300M pot cities must compete for by pledging to cut violent crime and ārestore law and order.ā Any city over 100,000 people has until Sept. 1 to apply, with winners picked later this year.
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Bloomberg: The Diapers.com Guy Wants To Build A Utopian Megalopolis
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I like Georgism as much as anyone else, but Iām not sure a new city in the desert is the right place to try it. Land in the desert is already really cheap. Youād have to really succeed at building a pretty big and desirable city before landlords started capturing a lot of value.
Also, model cities are a weird match for Georgism, because a big part of Georgism is that landowners donāt deserve credit for their land becoming valuable; the land is valuable because itās in a big desirable city. But in model cities, the landowner (usually the model city founder) is responsible for the city being big and desirable. Usually the founder would keep the land and use the rent to recoup their investment in making the city.
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But letās not think of depressing things like that! Letās focus on how innovative and diverse and inclusive Telosa is going to be!
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Thereās a lot of stuff like this. Concerned about education? Telosa will have an innovative diverse inclusive educational system where every student is above average. Concerned about unemployment? Telosa will have lots of innovative diverse inclusive jobs for everybody! How? Usually some bullshit answer like āby fostering a culture of innovative diverse inclusivenessā or something.
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Iām more skeptical of Telosa than some other projects for two reasons. First is that the other projects are libertarian, and libertarianism is easy; if you want to avoid taxes, and you find a jurisdiction that wonāt tax you too much, congrats, youāve achieved your dream. But if you want to build the innovative diverse inclusive city of the future, you have to ask yourself what advantage you have over all the other cities that wish they could do this, but are currently failing (ie all of them). And second, the other projects contain a little bit of an authoritarian element, so that thereās a clear path between the founders wanting something and it being likely to happen - and if thereās any of this in Telosa, theyāre hiding it pretty well.
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Prospera, Honduras
The latest from Prospera is some kind of drama with the neighboring community of Crawfish Rock over water rights.
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Iām probably biased here, but I trust Devon more than I trust some anti-tech e-zine. Other sources confirm that Crawfish Rock citizens have had big problems getting water for a long time. Rest Of World wasnāt really able to deny that Prospera gave Crawfish Rock water when they really needed it, try as they might to make it sound sinister. And they werenāt able to deny that their only condition was that the city officially say they wanted it, which sounds like a pretty reasonable demand with the news coverage being what it is.
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Auroville, India
I recently learned about this place, and itās pretty crazy:
The story is: in the 1910s, a nice Jewish girl moved to India to find herself and fell in with a guru named Sri Aurobindo. Fast forward twenty years and she is calling herself āThe Motherā and running what an uncharitable observer might consider maybe sort of kind of a cult.
Fast forward another twenty years and she has a vision of a city built for all humanity. A city where mankind can complete its spiritual transformation into a higher being. A city with a giant gold golf ball in the middle.
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Auroville was originally planned for 50,000 people, but has about 2,500 official citizens, and about another 10,000 squatters. It seems like an, ahem, highly selected population. From a great Slate article on the town:
Another woman I met from America told me that sheād moved to Auroville because everything in the States ājust feels really fake.ā She was on the waiting list to become an Aurovilian, a two-year process that requires applicants to prove they are self-sustainable and dedicated to the cause. Applicants are not allowed to leave Auroville for two years and must work for free as a contribution to the township. After two years they face the Entry Services, a small group that reviews applications and ultimately decides who can become an Aurovilian. An Aurovilian from Germany who worked for Entry Services told me her primary job was to weed out what she called āthe cuckoos.ā I didnāt ask what that meant.
Despite housing the remnants of the Motherās cult and getting large subsidies from the Indian government (which apparently has some kind of sentimental attachment to it), Auroville currently seems kind of anarchic.
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Thereās supposed to be some sort of moneyless card-based gift economy, but:
When I arrived I was forced to buy (with cash) an Aurocard, and told to use it in shops and restaurants around the township. It was a bit like a meal card in college: If I lost it, I would have to pay a $10 fine (in cash). But the idea hadnāt quite caught on. The first shop where I tried my Aurocard asked for cash instead. As did the second. When the third asked for cash, I asked why the Aurocard existed. The shopkeeper shrugged uninterestedly.
And the voluntary consensus-based utopian governing structures donāt really seem to work and nobody really knows who is in charge of fixing it. Problems include "robbery, sexual harassment, rape, suicide, and even murder".
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Honestly the only part of this story which surprises me at all is that the Mother was a Sephardic Jew; usually itās us Ashkenazi who end up in these kinds of situations.
Elsewhere In Model Cities
ā An attempt to turn a cruise ship into a cryptocurrency-themed seastead has failed.
ā The Charter Cities Institute has created a Governance Handbook. If you just remembered that you have to govern a charter city tomorrow and forgot to study, this is your cram sheet.
ā Did you know: in 2018, the Nebraska Assembly came within one vote of creating a charter city which would have been āsovereignā¦not subject to Nebraska laws or regulationsā
Here is my July 20, 1995, column from The Providence Journal about my father and his best friend, who both were city planners. The images are photographed from an old copy of the column, so I apologize if the expressions of their faces are not entirely clear.
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Pictured above are two men at their desks. The man on the left does not have the same āletās get this over withā look evident in theā¦
āModel citiesā, a radical libertarian social and development experiment, is getting a trial run in the Central American country of Honduras. The model cities idea, now re-branded in Honduras as ZEDEs (Zonas de Empleo y Desarrollo Económico, Zones for Employment and Economic Development), is simple: privatise everything within a specific territory the size of a small city, including social services, the justice system, and the government itself, and all your problems will be solved! Reality is not that simple, of course, and it seems that ZEDEs will simply exacerbate Hondurasā existing problems, which include rampant corruption, suspension of the rule of law, a democratic deficit, land grabbing, and widespread poverty. In this video, we visit two communities who are threatened by the prospect of ZEDEs. On Hondurasā north coast, the Garifuna, an Afro-indigenous people, have seen tourism developments eat away at their communal lands over the years thanks to illegal land sales facilitated by corrupt notaries and land registrars. On the Pacific coast, we visit a campesino community whose access to fishing and farming has been cut off by rich Honduran elites scrambling to grab beachfront property. In both cases, communities fear that the creation of a ZEDE will accelerate land grabbing as investors, both foreign and national, rush to empty the territories of their native populations and clear the way for development mega-projects.
The model cities idea suffered a major blow in early 2012 when the Honduran supreme court ruled that selling off sovereign territory is unconstitutional. The ruling National Party, which seized control of government in 2009 through a military coup, responded by dismissing the four judges who ruled against the model cities law. This move itself was probably unconstitutional, but the removal of four (out of five) judges meant that there was no functioning court that could rule on it. How convenient. This episode only further illustrates how model cities are an affront to the rule of law. They would not have been possible to implement without a military coup that brought the far right back to power and a subsequent judicial coup that essentially suspended any remaining pretense of the existence of the rule of law in the country.Ā
Model cities nevertheless needed a face-lift. A new law was introduced, re-branding them as ZEDEs (Zonas de Empleo y Desarrollo Económico, Zones for Employment and Economic Development) and softening some of the most extreme aspects. ZEDEsĀ nevertheless remain a threat to indigenous and campesino communities across the country. The Garifuna community we meet in the video have been fighting Canadian tourism developer Randy Jorgensen, known as the āPorn Kingā on account of having made his fortune in the pornographic industry, for several years. Jorgensen and his acolytes orchestrated the fraudulent purchase of communal Garifuna lands that by law cannot be divided and sold as private property. Jorgensen is developing a gated snowbird community, nature park, beach resort, and cruise ship terminal on Garifuna land. Though he claims to bring development to the communities, locals say that Jorgensen tightly controls where the tourists go and who is allowed to interact with them. Tourists get shuttled from the docks straight to Randyās own restaurants and tour operators, meaning that locals donāt see a penny of this new economic activity.Ā All they see instead is an erosion of their living space. The creation of a ZEDE in the region - which purportedly will include the construction of an international airport and several beachfront hotels - could accelerate this trend, expropriating the Garifuna and excluding them once and for all from wealth generation in their own homeland.
In the south of the country, on thePacificcoast, we meet aĀ campesino communityĀ on the peninsula of Zacate Grande that lives off of fishing and agriculture. Over the past few decades, Honduran elites have seized much of the land, including beachfront, this cutting off locals from access to both fishing and farming. Though Honduran law allows communities to obtain legal title to their land if theyāve lived on it for more than 20 years, prohibitive costs and lack of information means that many poor communities, including those on Zacate Grande, never get their rights recognised. Rich Hondurans, however, have the means to manipulate the justice system and obtain titles to lands āvacantā lands even if there have been generations of farmers living on them. As the prospect of a ZEDE in the region looms, locals fear that more land speculators will soon come to evict them, using the same old tricks as in the past, in order to seize their land and later sell it to the ZEDE investors for a profit.
For more information:Ā
AĀ full report on ZEDEsĀ by the National Lawyers GuildĀ (NLG). The NLGā international branch has worked with a number of organisations in Honduras on the Model Cities/ZEDE issue in the past. NLG member Mark Sullivan and his partner, Kristin Jensen Sullivan, financed this video. You can also check out NLG Internationalās press releaseĀ regarding the launch of this video.Ā
There Are No Peasants Here: Hondurasā brave new economic experiment is buoying an era of development by kicking poor farmers off their landĀ by Lauren Carasik, who was on location for the filming of this video. [Note that if you donāt have a subscription to Foreign Policy and youāve already used up your one free article, you can still read this by clicking onĀ āstop loading this pageā on your browserās task bar just after the headline loads and before FPās subscription policy has time to load]
āModel Citiesā: The biggest threat to democracy in Honduras? by Tyler Ingraham, published on TeleSur.Ā
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The Vancouver Model versus El Modelo Barcelona: Trevor Boddy talks, Francesc MuƱoz responds.
The Vancouver Model versus El Modelo Barcelona: Trevor Boddy talks, Francesc Muñoz responds.
TheĀ Canadian port city of VancouverĀ has entered centre stage of the global debate about future directions for cities in the sustainability era. Impressed with how increased residential density is used to create developer-funded public amenities there, American architects and urbanists first started speaking a decade ago of āVancouverizingā their downtowns to make them more lively, sustainableā¦
One last article for today about Honduras, this time about the Canadian connection up in the north coast of Honduras, in Garifuna territory. Is this guy Canada's version of William Walker?