Seeing Like a Condo: A genealogy of free private cities in Honduras
A guest lecture by Professor Raymond Craib of Cornell University.
Co-sponsored with Critical Social Theory at McGill.
Abstract: If novelist J.G Ballard and free market economist Milton Friedman got together on the shores of a Caribbean island and built a city, it might look like Roatán Próspera. In the works for nearly a decade and part of a wider tech-libertarian ecosystem, RP is located in Honduras and intended to be a “start-up” (or “charter”) city: a private community in which few of the articles of the Honduran constitution and state regulations will apply. Despite the hoopla surrounding start-up cities, they are not new. In the 1960s libertarian thinkers and entrepreneurs made plans and sought out locales to create what they variously called proprietary cities, microstates, and new countries. While few, if any, were successful, the consequences for local populations in the places with which they experimented—the Bahamas, the New Hebrides, and other areas of the southwest Pacific—were troubling. In an era of Silicon Valley excess and efforts to translate festivals such as Burning Man into political theories of the state, a longer historical perspective may offer some insight into what to expect from this new round of private city- and state-making.
