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Another capitalist utopian visionary. You set up the new colony, investors run the show and oligarchy results. So the standard of living goes up but now people live in dirty cities in tiny apartments making Iphones for giant corporations.
Wouldn’t Detroit be a failed example of a charter city? Do we need more examples?
I swear, economists have trouble with history.
I agree with you David Lee. Charter schools are not successful and are elitist, so why would it work on an even bigger scale.
I wouldn’t dismiss the entire notion. It can certainly go very wrong easily if property developers and oligarchs have the power (which is the norm for cities).
However, the idea of city-states has a lot going for it in the modern world. There are existing cities which are (or should be) their own states, HK, London, NY, LA, Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Singapore, ect. Founding new entities designed to become this class of city-state is very appealing (the opportunity to “do it right” instead of just accepting the accidents of history).
The core, potentially unsolvable, problem is balance of power though. Developers/investors will demand and receive power initially, but somehow the populace needs to have a check on that initial power and eventually supplant it. The way this has happened ‘successfully’ in the past in most cases has involved revolution.
Some cities around the world *are* chartered, and as far as I can tell that means “more bullshit and higher costs all around”.
One of the advantages to a planned city, vis-a-vis development, is the opportunity to lay out a development plan that sets up a geography of common areas. There is a tremendous difference in character between cities that have taken the opportunity to do this, sometimes as an accident of geography, and those that haven’t.