This podcast is supported by VPLA. Victorian Planning Environmental Law Association. Welcome to the Planning Exchange where we interview built environment professionals who are doing interesting work beyond the ordinary. I'm Jess Noonan and I'm joined by my colleague Peter Jewell. we're speaking with Geoffrey Mason. He's the head of policy at Charter Cities Institute.
He joined CCI as a researcher in 2019, and his research interests include urban economics, structural transformation, Special Economic Zones and Technology Ecosystems. He's worked on policy advisory projects in Nigeria, Tanzania, Zambia, and Honduras, amongst other countries. Prior to joining the Charter Cities Institute, Jeffrey worked as an MA Fellow at George Mason University. He holds a BA in Economics from the University of Maryland and an MA in Economics from George Mason University.
Welcome to the show, Jeff. Thanks for having me, Peter and Jessica, glad to be here. Now, can you tell us what is a Charter City? So, in short, a charter city is a new city with better rules. In the 21st century, rapid urbanization at a massive scale is really the defining challenge. For much of the developing world, especially sub Saharan Africa, South Asia and elsewhere.
The scale of this urbanization, additional billions of new urban residents, across these countries and in just a few decades, that's a really hard problem for governments to try to solve, in terms of infrastructure, provision, service delivery, in terms of economies to provide the growth necessary to support that kind of urbanization, without endless economically unproductive sprawl. So we think that, building master plan cities, new cities in the growth path of existing cities.
Can help capture some of that urbanization in a way that is ultimately more productive, more primed for growth, and more prepared for rapid urban expansion. And then if you're doing, these sort of master planned, city projects that it makes a lot of sense to pair them, with the kind of innovations and governance. That are typically used in special economic zones, which is typically applied to, like, an industrial park setting, but is increasingly being applied to new and innovative contexts.
So you can create the sort of new urban hub to focus infrastructure, investment, focus, job creation, focus, service delivery. All these types of things, and pair that with reforms to governance, to promote growth, to build state capacity, when it might be difficult or, politically difficult or infeasible to say, do full scale reforms at a national level. Some of those things can make a difference in terms of effective government and economic growth.
You can start out on a smaller scale in a limited geographic area. And so we focus primarily, I'm sorry. I was just going to say to paint a picture, Jeff, have you got an example of an existing charter city or a city that you've worked on that you could talk to? Sure. One good example of something like a charter city. Would be tattoo city in Nairobi, Kenya. So this is a new city, privately developed city just outside of Nairobi. It has status as a special economic zone.
It's building, it's taking in lots of, investment in various industries. It's deployed lots of infrastructure. And it's also paired that with housing, public spaces and other uses like that. So it combines, the, sort of economic focus. You know, something like an industrial park, with housing developments. How big is that, Jeff? What sort of scale are we talking?
I don't know the exact figures off the top of my head, but they're looking at at least a couple thousand residents in after several years of construction. I think their master plan is looking at sort of tens of thousands or more. So they're not building that particular project to say. Accommodate a million or something of that scale. But is a fairly large area, and has a lot of room to grow. And there's projects like that, all throughout Africa, Asia and elsewhere.
Some maybe focus on, different economic sectors through targeting, for investment. So we're targeting different price points, right? There's a sort of emerging middle class, throughout a lot of the developing world that, some of these projects are catering to. Others are trying to figure out, how can we push the price point of housing and entry, as low as possible. Because right when you're working in.
Countries where it's, you know, 2000, 3000, 4000, 5000 GDP per capita, the lower you can push the price point, of housing and those kind of things, right? The untapped market for, for that is huge. So some are focusing really large scale, right? How can we attract. Big industry with lots of employment, lots of jobs, and others are sort of taking a more targeted approach. So we're building a tech hub or a cluster for this industry or that industry.
So there's a wide range of, of what you could call a charter city projects throughout. Jeff, we'll talk about a bit more about charter cities in the scale of the issue, but about you, what led you to your current role and what sparked your interests in city making? Sure. So in short, Twitter. While I was in grad school at the time, a couple of years ago, I was interested in things. I have an economics background.
So I was interested in economic developments and governance and public policy, you know, these, these kinds of things. And you had an interest in cities, but I never sort of focused on it, in any kind of concentrated way. It was in the same social professional circle, as the charter city's founder, Mark Lutter. I was looking for what to work on next. Hey, you guys, what you're doing looks really cool. Would love to work with you guys.
Signed up to work on a, research project as I was finishing school and then, stayed ever since. It's been about six years. Since then. I was employee number three at the time. We started there. And I've been, very focused on cities, especially from a global perspective. Ever since. We've spoken a little bit about charter cities itself and what its mission is. How does it work? Does charter cities ordinarily partner with. Particular governments or with particular private clients.
Is that generally how it works? Sure. We do a handful of things. One is, active partnerships and technical assistance, and we've done that both with governments. We've worked with governments, in a couple of different countries. on legislative projects. For example, in Malawi, we worked with the National Planning Commission there, who was leading the revision of the country's special economic zones law.
And we worked with them to include language, in that bill, which became law at the, end of 2023, which wholly revised their special economic zones, but also included provisions that would allow, secondary cities and urban areas, to be established as, as, as secs. So that's, that's one example. And we've, we're working on, similar engagement right now in, Zambia, with a legislative process that's been ongoing for a couple of years. Then we also work on the private side. For city developers.
We've done urban planning services, feasibility studies, case studies, helping with investment detraction. Sort of a whole suite of, different activities. And then we also engage in your typical, think tank type activities. So research, public media and engagement. And we also try to act as a convener for this sort of strange ecosystem, of governments and city builders, financial institutions. Practitioners and experts, academics, et cetera. And to, coalesce the conversation about new cities.
So it sounds so good, Jeff. It sounds like it's almost pure planning in lots of ways. Just rather than what we do is, have battles about, suburban developments in first world. Countries and you know, height limits and this and all the public consultation, but your focus is largely on the global South. A lot of people might be familiar with that term in general sense, but can you just explain it at a Twitter style and also why it's particularly relevant to new city development?
And I know you've touched on that, but if you could just talk about what the global South means. Yeah, that's Global South is just kind of the in vogue term for, I think, everybody called developing countries 10 years ago. And really, in terms of new cities that that's where most, most of the projects are, I touched on before, the sort of urban rates of urbanization that you're seeing sub Saharan Africa, India and elsewhere.
It's really at a pace and a scale unlike anything that we've seen, in the United States, Europe or anything like that. And it's also happening at a much lower. Level of economic development that occurred here, right?
I think the United States, for example, hit and I know there's you can quibble about how countries sort of define what urban means, but I think the United States hit 50 percent urban in, the early 1920s, I believe, at I think the figure is maybe 5, 000, 7, 000, US dollars per capita. Korea hit it in the seventies at maybe 3500, something like that.
And you see a lot of countries now are hitting, 50 percent or more urbanization or are well on their way to getting there, with simply much, much less dynamic economies, and much less capable governments, to respond to that. So there's both a demand side to this, just the sheer volume of people moving to cities. And who need those cities to be productive.
And then there's also a sort of supply side in terms of, a growing interest, both from the private sector and ever more so the sort of development finance institutions. Your Africa development banks, your Africa export import banks, these types of groups, they're increasingly interested in urban projects. And then also from governments, and there's a long history, especially with governments of city projects, and, you know, we can get into, there's sort of a mixed track record there.
But yeah, it's also not something new. I think the scale at which. The number of city projects of various types and forms are being built, and financed and planned is higher, is really taking off compared to the past, but it's really just a sort of extension of a much longer history. Of these types of new city project, efforts. Just moving into a discussion about the need for new cities. In the past, governments have been the main drivers of new city development.
So thinking of capital cities like Brasilia or Canberra, what's different today and what role can or should private actors play in that space? Sure. Yeah, especially in the mid 20th century, right? There's a lot of examples. And even into like, even into today, there's still examples of countries who are. Either building entirely new capital cities, or at least, maybe, maybe capital districts might be more appropriate phrase for some of them. Egypt is doing one.
Indonesia is another one of note, that's trying this, South Korea did this a few years ago. So those kind of efforts are still ongoing. Even for non capital city related projects, there are still a number of public sector led, new city projects. Even if they're not formally new capitals, Senegal is doing one outside of Dakar, for example, and they've moved, some of their, ministries out there. The U. N. Presence in Senegal is based out of that city.
For instance, we're working with a public private project in Zambia right now. The government is interested in. They're doing a new hydro project, hydro power project, and they want to do a sort of urban extension and zone kind of off of that. Investment. So that like that's another example of a republic type project that we're working on. But yeah, there's a growing industry, and a willingness to finance, private led city projects.
Some of these projects are coming from a more sort of traditional real estate background. And, you know, they sometimes it's basically just a housing estate. And that's kind of on one side of things. Maybe they start to bring in some economic activity beyond housing as well. You can go the other way, and find projects that at their core are closer to industrial parks. That maybe are starting to, incorporate housing and other amenities.
And between those, there's this emerging product type of project that is a true combination of both targeting industry, housing public space, commercial, and that these projects are in fact bankable that they're commercially viable. We're seeing that. All over the world, Jeff, there must be some sensitivity in not wishing to challenge national or local or regional sovereignty.
So it must be a very delicate measure to work in this space without with allowing the whatever government body still retain, well, essentially, oversight. Is that, can you talk a little bit about that? Sure. So most projects, that CCI works with and just as a general model that we sort of, tend to advocate for, is to pursue some form of public private partnership, structure, align long term incentives between private developers, Who can raise the capital, to deploy infrastructure.
And also, come with the, advantages, of having more grounded budget constraints. Um, a sort of impose a sort of discipline on the projects that maybe some public sector projects don't have. And also offload risk, from pretty limited, public sector budgets. But at the same time, you know, maybe, tying in government's long term interest to support the project, to make the necessary infrastructure link ups. You know, things like roads power, and to provide long term policy stability.
And you can structure these projects in such a way that it's mutually advantageous over the long term. But I do think that is an important concern, especially for the types of projects that are pursuing a more advanced type of special jurisdiction, where more of that governing authority is devolved to a local level. If you're talking about a basic set of things. Like maybe just urban planning or the types of very light touch things in your standard industrial park.
So maybe you're talking about some tax concessions, but things that are basically in statute that, aren't being, implemented or tried on the ground that's a pretty tried and true method that makes an extension of what's already been done, in a lot of these countries where I do think it becomes more challenging. It is when you get into the more advanced devolution of authority, not just to do.
Okay. Here's what the law says this jurisdiction can do, but rather here are the powers that the special jurisdiction has to make its own decisions. That's where it becomes tricky. I was going to say, Jeff, it takes two to dance. And so there's also the risk of the private sector investing and the concern of sovereign risk that. They might, something might, drastic might happen and they might lose their investment. So there, there's also that to balance up, isn't there?
We were seeing this one example of this saga play out in in Honduras right now about a decade ago, Honduras passed a form of charter cities legislation under under a previous government, the sort of current, you know, very sort of left wing government didn't like it and campaigned on repealing it. And that's what they did.
And it's stuck been stuck in this legal constitutional limbo, for a few years now, where the sort of private projects are taking the government's international arbitration because they say the government violated, you know, the legal stability arrangements that were in the law. We'll see how it all shakes out. But I do think it is a good example of how, if there's not that sort of long term alignment, that these types of projects can be tricky.
I will say that that is 1 reason why I'm just as a general rule, a little more bullish on, Africa and some other regions for these types of projects, as opposed to Latin America, just because the, the sort of. The wild left right swings in sort of the political culture and in a place like on Honduras doesn't quite exist in the same way in a lot of the places where we're spending more of our time. So they come with their own challenges, of course, everywhere it does.
But I do think there are reasons to be optimistic, that a framework, a similar framework to what was deployed in Honduras, if deployed elsewhere, might not face the same risks. So I think it's one of those things where I think it really is, it's a country by country basis. How committed is the government? What are the politics like? Is the local community? How well bought in is the local community? In and around where a project is going to be, right?
That can either be, depending on how you, you know, conduct the project, right? They can either be your biggest allies and supporters, or be the people most upset, by the project, as is the case with any large scale You know, infrastructure project, if you're doing a highway or anything, right, there's there, depending on how you approach it. You can make friends or enemies. So I think that that's something that a lot of projects, probably could be more cautious about and more thoughtful about.
But I do think it's something that they're taking into account, especially as they see examples. Now Jeff, the urbanization of the Global South is happening at an unprecedented pace with around 200 new cities being built, 78 million people moving to urban areas each year. How long is this process expected to take and what challenges do you think arise from such rapid change? So this, this is something that's going to play out. Um, you throughout this century.
If you look at, you can have an argument about how reliable these projections are. Um, but if you look at some of the population projections for cities, up to 2100, all of the largest cities in the world by far, they'll be in South Asia. They'll be in Africa. And we're talking, In some cases, 40, 50, 60, 70 or more million people, in one city, assuming those projections are right. And these are cities that are generally building.
There's a dynamic from a World Bank report that we like, it's called pancake building cities that are pancakes versus pyramids, right? Are you building up and vertically and with infill or are you sprawling outwards? And virtually all of the cities. That we're kind of talking about in these discussions. They're almost all to a rule. Sprawling outwards. And there are there already. Most are at a point.
Where that kind of urban growth in these areas are so large, and it's so difficult to get from, you know, just one place to another, is really a huge economic disadvantage, if you can only get to a very limited pool, say, of available jobs within a reasonable commute, from your home, and whether that's in the city. On foot, bike, bus, however it is, the people get somewhere.
The extent that you can have customers, that you can find a job within a reasonable time from home, is really a limiting factor. This is something that maybe your listeners will know, Alain Berteau's, excellent book, Order Without Design. This is a point that he makes there. These cities are completely unprepared, to grow like this. At these rates for that long.
This is also something that even as, countries say, like India and others hit peak population and start to decline and start to age, the urbanization is still going to continue because you're still going to have, rural to urban migration that's going to continue as rural areas continue to hollow out. And that's kind of just seems to be a, that's sort of the future, at least for the time being for, rural areas worldwide. Is an exodus to cities.
And even, probably among secondary cities, and sort of peri urban areas as well, right? You're still gonna have this migration, to the biggest job centers to the most important cities economically. So, even as, you know, certain demographic challenges, maybe slow down or change, the urbanization specifically. Is, going to continue. We thank Victorian Planning Reports, our very first supporter.
If you want the A to Z of planning decisions in Victoria and excellent editorials, please get yourself a subscription to the VPRs. Details on our website. We would like to thank Elison Properties, a terrific sponsor of the podcast, great people, great properties. Details on our website. Jeff, I'm intrigued, you've explained the push pull of cities and rural really well, but you were talking about the, the per capita wealth of the new residents isn't high in the, these new sprawling cities.
And you talked a bit about low cost housing, you know, development, that must be a fascinating area of research, sort of matching the housing and the services to the ability to pay or to fund. Can you talk a little bit about that, please? Sure. So a lot of the city projects out there, like I said before, they're targeting this emergent middle class. Because it is genuinely hard to build housing in a formal way. Housing that is fully serviced and completed.
It has the kind of amenities that residents want. It's really hard to get that Type of thing. Even if we're talking about just say a one bedroom flat. Um, but it's really hard to get that down to a to a price point. Or so the average person off the street in one of these cities can can afford that. Although just because it's not just because it's hard, though, it doesn't mean it's impossible.
And some of the partners that we've worked with, in Malawi and elsewhere have been working, you know, really diligently on providing housing, that, that folks on the ground, can actually afford. It's basic, right? But it is sort of, it is, it is private, right? There are no mortgage markets in most of these places.
But it is at a level where people can, actually afford to pay for it, and, and operating these sort of parallel structures and in the place of mortgages, and actually afford that when you're earning, a family's earning 100 a month or something like that. So it can be done. The question is, how many developers can sort of figure out how to do that. So like I said, we, we have a partner in Malawi with a group called small farm cities.
Who's who sort of figured that out, and they're doing sort of agro industrial, and white industry clusters there. And they're at that kind of price point for housing. Most city projects are not even ones that are technically affordable. Very few are getting down to that level, but that's something that we're trying to engage more projects with and make the point that when we're talking about urban expansion planning, you don't necessarily need to do everything in advance.
Okay, here's here's the here's a grid, with demarcated plots. Here's arterial roads where they're going to go. Even just simple things like that to bring some order, to sort of urban expansion, even when it's still is technically informal, can can do a lot to make providing the housing and then also the infrastructure, more cost effective, because it's incredibly expensive to have to retrofit, it. Infrastructure and utilities in an already settled informal area.
It's multiple times the cost, Jeff, what's the alternative? I mean, what's actually happening now in 95 percent of the cases. With the new dwellers in this in these mega cities, it's for the for the most part. It's just the sort of unplanned outward sprawl. The sort of periphery, continues to grow in some cases, the sum of that is being captured in slightly more proactive, urban expansion planning.
But the vast majority is just unplanned, So basically Hutz, sort of Hutz apartment, I mean, what sort of, can you just describe? Yeah, mostly self built, self built over time. Yeah, in formal. So yeah, uh, you know, 10. Tent shacks would depending on what's available where you are. But yeah, that kind of thing is the vast majority of this. This organization looks like, although slums do tend to differ from country to country. So in some cases, that's more of the model.
Um, of course, famously in,, some places like, like India, right? They, they have these massive slums that are, they are more vertical, um, you know, multi story type things. Um, but like in most of Africa, it's, largely, small structures that are self built. Jeff, we've spoken about the challenges for institutional reform in some of these cities, particularly when coming in to try and retrofit cities. Have there been any past attempts at planned cities or charter cities that have failed?
And if so, could you talk to some of those examples? Sure. So, a lot of people will be familiar with the sort of quote unquote ghost cities, in, China. I think personally it's a little bit of an overblown narrative and sometimes what you'll see described as a ghost city has filled in over time. There's a famous quote unquote subway to nowhere in Chongqing that was famous and then a couple of years later. The thriving area had built up around it.
So there are some of those cases where there is genuine sort of overbuilding, especially in a place like China, where the sort of state is intertwined so much with business, so your typical market discipline maybe doesn't necessarily apply. I think failed is, is kind of a sliding scale. So there are a lot of projects where something gets done, something gets built, and they don't finish it, or it attracts some residents, but doesn't quite hit its target.
Or maybe starts then stops for a while, and then maybe eventually picks back up. And there's a number of these, so like Forest City in Malaysia. Just north of Singapore is one that's kind of famous, for sort of low occupancy. Despite being built out pretty extensively, echo Atlantic in Nigeria is another famous one, that was going to be sort of wildly expensive, for the Nigerian market, right on Victoria Island, right across from the core of Lagos.
I think it's still ongoing, but progress has been slow setting aside the kind of mismatch between the sort of population and the price point in which is being built. So you can find lots of these, throughout the world. It can often be hard actually just to find. Accurate and up to date information, on these. So, for example, in South Korea, they built a new city called Songdo on reclaimed land off the coast of Incheon, and this is built up over the past 20 years.
And it hasn't hit all of its original targets. But if you go back 56 years, you'll find these stories where, like, This place is empty and lonely, like, what's going on here? And of course now it's filled in more, but that's not like an interesting story. So, a lot of these projects, it's just, they have ambitious targets, they don't hit them, but they do fill in over time. So, yeah, failure is kind of a sliding scale, I would say.
For a lot of these, at least, usually something gets built, somebody lives there. They just don't always hit their, for one reason or another, they don't always hit their, original objectives, which are often quite ambitious. Jeff, there's always knockers out there, and, the press loves a bad story. you mentioned China, that that's had enormous success with some of its policy experimentation and lifting say 800 million people out of poverty since 1980, incredible.
And so what can others learn from China, both good and bad? And I love this saying by Deng Xiaoping, famously said, it doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice. How does this pragmatic approach apply to your role in city making? And Do you like the quote? I do. he also, there's also another, den quote that says, we, we have to cross the river by feeling the stones, which kind of gets at a similar ethos. China is interesting, is, is an interesting example.
because right starting starting in the eighties, you have this, this opening up this liberalization. and a big part of that is this sort of release of all of this pent up, demand for rural to urban migration. So, this kind of migration was sort of under Mao, had, had been sort of heavily restricted. but in 1980, starting in Shenzhen and, three other. cities in southern coastal China. they established special economic zones. over 300 something square kilometers, comprises the shenzhen.
So we're talking about city size zones. Where policy was dictated, not from Beijing, but by local officials, and they were given broad leeway to experiment to figure things out. Of course, when your sort of starting point, is, you know, in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, right, there's a lot of low hanging fruit, to pick, you know, liberalizing in a communist society like 1980s China.
but it's interesting, and I think the lessons are broadly applicable to new contexts. where they were able to sort of pioneer new policies. If something worked, scale it up, and keep going with it. If something doesn't work, okay, stop. Let's try something else, and use those laboratories to then. Okay. they did this in Shenzhen. it worked well. So they had their 1st, land markets, 1st, labor markets, like, very basic things.
started out there and then we're scaling up throughout the rest of China based on those experiments. So I think that there's sort of 2 parallels to sort of rapidly urbanizing and developing countries today that you could draw from that example. So, 1 is on urbanization. you know, it's not exactly analogous in that, right? the urbanization in China was kind of. at least partially responding to, easing of the sort of restrictions.
And I think Shenzhen in particular benefited from being next to Hong Kong. So that's another part of the story. but I think the sort of scale of urbanization that happened and the sort of transformative power. Of large scale urbanization when it's employed productively. but shows I think what is what is possible. And then the 2nd bit is on the experimentation and figuring out what works from a governance point of view. There's a lot of power in saying, okay.
You know, in this limited geographic area, under these rules under these conditions, within this policy area, right? you can try things out and figure out ways to do something better. and then you can take that and scale that up. So those are sort of the 2 core lessons. I think for charter cities. is that urbanization, if implemented, well, can be an incredibly productive force. for lifting people out of poverty.
and the second is that, allowing for policy experimentation for novel, novel governance mechanisms, can do the same. And, you know, it bears acknowledging, right? late 20th century China is a unique setting, in its own time and place. that's different from say, Nigeria or India today. Right. that goes without saying, but I think those sort of lessons are broadly applicable to new context, even if the situations aren't completely identical. Jeff, what about infrastructure provision?
How do they keep pace with such rapid urban growth? And what are the challenges in terms of infrastructure provision? they don't. so this is part of the story of the sprawl. the roads, water systems, power systems especially electricity. just isn't being deployed, at the scale necessary to provide formal options, for people who are moving to cities. so you have this informality, that just dominates, and so these communities typically are not serviced, or if they are, it's in a very limited way.
and then it costs a lot of money to be able to go back into an area. once people have settled and, maybe you can do the main arterials easily enough. in an unplanned settlement, right? It's going to be really difficult to sort of pave any other roads. it's gonna be very difficult to bring in pipe water. It's gonna be very difficult, to deploy power transmission and distribution.
and that goes all the way down from sort of the big pieces of critical infrastructure, down to, individual household hookups. And then that doesn't even get into the questions of. how do you charge for usage? So in a lot of places, you can see, kind of comical, pictures of, power wires and these kind of things, we're just, you know, everybody's tapping in, Tapping into the existing network. It's totally unmetered and unmonitored. and it's like, horribly inefficient.
but at the same time, if you try to introduce, you know, user charges and pricing mechanisms, it often gets met, with a lot of resistance. But you need revenue generation to be able to provide the services in the first place. So you're, you're stuck in this horrible feedback loop.
or even when you try to deploy these services, at a wider scale and into new areas, just from, from top to bottom, there are all of these challenges that make it, really difficult, despite all of the growing interest from, from all, you know, the development finance institutions, from, from, from commercial banks, et cetera, who want to finance infrastructure projects. Thanks. I want to ask you about the expected need for new energy for these cities.
What's the scale, but before I, before you answer that, it must be, if you're in, I'm putting myself as a slum dweller in an African city, I haven't got tenure of where I live, have I, I mean, and so therefore my commitment to my local area, if I know I, you know, The government could turn up with a bulldozer next weekend. All my stuff has to go, then there's not the stability. There's not the buying or ownership. Can you talk about that?
And then just give us a very brief, you know, like how we need reliable, affordable, abundant energy in these places. What's the scale? So two different questions. Sorry, we'd Twitter, Twitter type answers. No, no, no. so, so on, on informality. there's been a big effort in the past, I don't know, 20, 30 plus years, to, to do land titling, and to get more people with, with proper, proper title for, for the land that they're on. you know, this was an especially big fad.
around the turn of the century, there's a, this is, this is Hernando de Soto's argument, as like the, like the, the one neat trick to, to solve poverty. And it didn't quite work out that way, but there's still a lot of these types of, titling and sort of land right projects ongoing. and it's important work because you can borrow against it. it allows you to operate in the formal economy a little bit more. but yeah, that insecurity is a big problem.
and there's, yeah, for those types of communities, there's nothing stopping. well, sometimes there ends up being, you know, community pushback and resistance and those kind of things. But in a lot of places where the government can and does. Come in and clear up those communities. right. That's often very unfortunate because, even if they have their problems, they are often still sort of functional communities.
with sort of in the absence of the state, other mechanisms can come in and they're not perfect, but they do work. the flip side, of course, of that is, unfortunately, sometimes there is infrastructure that you really need for a city to function, and it has to go somewhere. So, that's one of the things for renew city projects, that is like one of the absolute, worst things you could try to do is just acquire land.
you know, through through through through evident domain where people are living, or without without compensation in some way that sets off a city project or any big infrastructure project off on, you know, really negative footing when you could have been done, could have been done with allies, these land tenure issues vary from country to country.
it's like famously nightmarish in India, to try to assemble land, for, a factory project or an infrastructure project or something like that, because the way the land, sort of climate system, through families and all that works there. Some places are more difficult than others. but yeah, it's a difficult problem when there's nothing really stopping the next person just from coming along. and setting up their little house, just, you know, keep adding one, keep pushing things further out.
it's really difficult to manage. yeah, one, the energy, yep. On energy. So this is probably one of the single most important things, that's holding back a lot of these economies. there's a stat, that I think like the average person in, Sub Saharan Africa consumes less electricity in a year than my refrigerator upstairs does, which is insane. the sort of gulf between, power consumed in, high income productive economies and low income unproductive economies is absolutely massive.
and there's obviously a lot of interest from the DFIs, from others. They want to do power projects. and there has been this sort of, emerging, view from some corners of, the policy sphere or the global development sphere that, we shouldn't do, gas projects or other things that aren't, renewables or solar and that kind of thing. and I think that this is a really wrong head of view that's.
causing a lot of people to be poor for a lot longer than they would need to be, these countries, the electricity is so limited, so unreliable, there really needs to be just much more generation, just a much higher baseline level of power, you know, maybe not coal, right. That has a lot of. pretty bad health effects that make the trade offs pretty bad. But basically any other form of power generation, these places need it.
And if they have the resources locally to be able to do oil fired plants, gas powered plants, if they have the right conditions to do solar, to do wind, I think they really need all of the above strategy, to be able to build out their networks. and then there's also potential for some decentralized solutions as well, like small local solar grids and rooftop and that kind of stuff.
I think that that becomes difficult to scale There are advantages to building out a proper functional national electric grid. but I think really the golf and energy usage and the pervasiveness of energy poverty in these places is just so great that I think you really do need and all of the above strategy and you need it quickly. Jeff, new cities, new rules. What does this phrase mean in practice? And how do the governance models of new cities challenge traditional city making?
Sure, so when we say new cities, new rules, this gets at the idea, that I spoke at before about applying some form of new and or more innovative governance over a limited geographic area. and so you can think about this kind of again, on, a sliding scale. you could have a sort of maximally. Autonomous charter city that basically handles. Everything, right? You could go all the way up to the doorstep of being its own, almost sovereign entity or something like that.
and you could go all the way the other direction and you have the most basic industrial park where okay, maybe you've got a tax exemption or 2 and most projects are going to fall somewhere in the middle of that where they've got some degree of autonomy. better regulations for that apply to the formal economy. these are the productive, industries that are doing exporting. This is professional services, right?
All of the activities that characterize, the, economic activity that is linked into the formal economy. global and regional trade. these, generate large scale employment, and ultimately lift people out of poverty. So there's that macro level view, if you will, but then there's also on the more micro level, where it shouldn't cost. The average person off the street to if they wanted to operate a business, formally, right?
It shouldn't have to cost them a huge share of their annual income just to register that business. it shouldn't take, you know, knowing the right guy and some bribes or months on end. just to get approved to operate that business or to get the permit you need or pay your taxes or whatever it is, just the the barriers to operating in the formal economy for most businesses that are really large scale or or or foreign, in these places. It's just really high. And so informality persists.
So if you can create some new structures that really streamline that, and make it very easy to do business, very easy to interface with government, very easy for government or a private operator to provide services, for residents and make all of that sort of as light touch, you know, with the appropriate oversight, as possible. You can create the conditions where. business formation and investment both domestic and foreign, is more feasible.
You can concentrate it within a specific geographic area. So you get the benefits of agglomeration, of having, particular industry and or business, and then its suppliers they wanna locate in or near that jurisdiction, and you create these kind of knock on effects. so, there's location arguments as well of why you would want to concentrate some of this activity. rather than having it be, widely dispersed. and just public sector reform isn't just a developing country thing.
public sector reform, is hard to do anywhere. right. There's lots of. In trans interests, that, have a reason to enjoy the public policy status quo. there are just sort of incentive arguments for folks in government, often just to keep things the way they are. there's just the. Stasis. that sets in from there being just a volume of things to deal with. maybe, doge here in the US is showing one approach to maybe a sledgehammer approach, but I don't think you have to do that.
these types of settings, you can sort of target these high leverage areas, get permission to try out and do some new things and experiment. created an environment and operating environment. That's better for everyone. ideally government will see that and scale it up over time, elsewhere throughout the country. I, you know, the, the sort of longterm vision is that, you know, I'd say after a few decades, ideally you wouldn't need a charter city, anymore if successful, right.
Those reforms could be scaled up. the whole country environment, operates like that. Geoff, I keep thinking Singapore, Singapore, Singapore, when you mention its growth from being a very poor place. Now we're coming towards the end of the podcast, but before we get to your podcast, can you tell us very briefly a bit about the freedom cities in the States that are sort of, Come up sure.
So in, 2023 in a campaign speech, Donald Trump, one of the ideas that was thrown out there, was the idea of using federal land, to build new cities in the United States. both to expand housing options and affordability. and also to, pursue the development of advanced technologies. there's lots of federal land in the United States, especially out west. in some states like Nevada, it's often a majority.
of the land when we talk about federal land, this often conjures up the image of national parks and that kind of stuff.
but there's actually lots of land that is not being used for anything at all, or is on the periphery of existing built up areas you could build 10 sizable new cities, using U. S. federal land without disturbing any of the national parks or any of that, C. C. I. Is working with, various other partners to engage both the administration and Congress, to pursue, legislation and implementation that would allow.
for the government to establish, freedom cities using federal land or, also looking at allowing state land or private land, to be opted in, which would obviously expand the set of possibilities, of where you could build something like this by, by a lot. But so there, and there's sort of two approaches, that that folks are looking at, with freedom cities. one, is housing affordability. and housing production.
so there's some people who are looking at this idea of freedom cities really just as a way to unlock federal land for new housing development. and you can look on maps and then we have some partners that are doing this and basically mapping out, various cities out west. here's their current footprint.
Here's where that footprint abuts, parcels of federal land, and how you could, in a phased way, unlock some of that land, to continue building housing in those places, especially in, California, this could be something that could be really impactful, because housing is so expensive, and then a second approach is closer to like a special economic zone or special jurisdiction approach.
Where the housing and the sort of urban urban development part is important, but also includes includes some regulatory targeted regulatory relief, especially surrounding emerging technologies. So, you could use these areas to within this area. We're going to allow certain expedited approvals.
Or, or say more limited, time duration for trials for in,, say, biotech and biomedicine, autonomous vehicles, energy projects, all these kind of things you can create sort of a targeted regulatory environment. where it's easy to research, develop and deploy these new technologies and infrastructure, in a way that would be much less costly, and much more quick, than you could just operating, generally in the United States.
and so there's a lot of possibilities, with what you could do, using federal land or incorporating, private land into this type of regime. Obviously, the United States doesn't face quite the same, urbanization, rapid urbanization pressures. We're as urbanized as we're going to get any rural urban shifts or urban shifts. it's in the global sense. It's all marginal.
but obviously, new housing development is sort of highly restricted, especially in the most important job markets, the centers of innovation. So, New York, San Francisco, and if you could just use federal land to unlock, say, in the San Francisco Bay Area, new land for housing, right there. there's potential huge gains from doing that. And there's also interesting sites. that could be used like abandoned military bases that are no longer in use.
sites like that in particular, I think are particularly attractive. we're talking about land that has already been developed in some form, but it's now just sitting there uselessly. it usually is in relative proximity to some kind of existing area built up area.
so there's a lot of advantages why you would want to build, in a place like That, that would be silly, but there's, like, for example, there's a, out of function military base just outside of, Denver, Colorado, that's a pretty large portion of parcel of land. You could very easily redevelop that, and build lots of housing and target a specific industry or industries. to shut up, set up shop in that jurisdiction. So we'll see what happens over the next, I don't know, 18 months.
We're going to try to make this a reality. And, you know, we'll see if this is something that Congress and the administration wants to, wants to pursue. And we're optimistic. You run a podcast on these topics. Can you tell us a little bit about it? And what sort of insights have you gained? Sure. so in addition to our, research blogs, all the other things we do, we have the Charter Cities podcast.
we bring on a range of experts in, from, cities, both kind of from an academic sense, but also sort of practical, on the ground sense. so with urban planners, city developers themselves. and try to capture sort of all facets of this ecosystem. what folks are working on, why they're building what they're building, what some of their challenges have been.
What their successes have been, and I think it's really useful to sort of collect this information, collect these stories, from the people who are both studying these topics, but also actually doing the thing, and that can inform not only what we're doing when we engage with our research, but are engaged with a partner in government or developer, but also the folks in that ecosystem who are listening, and really just trying to build up that base of knowledge.
for the benefit of the broader ecosystem. We'll have all that on our episode notes, Jeff, your podcast and the YouTube channel and the newsletter will have all the things. So we're moving to podcast extra or culture corner. Have you got something you can recommend to our listeners that you've read, watched, experienced lately that might be of interest? Sure. so we have an in house, staff book club that meets, every month or every other month at CCI.
And, one of our most recent, books was really a really interesting study of a unique, experiment in governance. It was called Outsourcing Empire by Andrew Phillips and J. C. Sharman. So this is a deep dive on the British East India Company, Dutch East India Company.
and some of the other European colonial corporations that were established, in the, 16th, 17th, 18th century why they were established, why they were so successful at, going as sort of conquest, how they did it, why they did it, but then also why they failed. what they did, in these places, why they ultimately failed. so it's a really interesting look from both the rise and the fall, and the effects on the ground and the places.
the places where, where these, these, these sort of imperial corporations worked. and it's a really sort of fascinating perspective into what, you know, the sort of 18th century world and 19th century world, looked like and was governed, in a way that we, I think we often don't think about, but it's had profound effects, obviously for the countries in which these entities operated.
places like India, obviously huge, lasting effects from this sort of form of colonization, that I think informs a lot of, our understanding of how these places operate today and sort of what some of their legacies that they have to contend with are. So a really fascinating dive We'll have that on our episode notes and Jess, your podcast extra. I'm about five years behind the times here, Paige and Jeff, but I've just started watching Ted Lasso, which I'm thoroughly enjoying.
I haven't watched it, Jess. It's won a lot of awards and, um, I remember hearing about it years ago and I think someone told me briefly what it was about. And I was like, nah, it's not really my thing. It's great. I'm loving it. Have you seen it? My wife and I also just watched it for the first time. Did you enjoy it? Yes. it was fun. How about you Pete? Well, I've got one question for you, Jess.
How's your tennis going, I have done a couple of lessons recently, which has been really good for my, I was going to say my form, but I'd say my lack of form. So I think my form is beginning. in my first lesson, you'll enjoy this, Pete, I, I went in quite cocky, you know, I can, I can hit a ball, I'm okay at this. And he, the, the instructor was giving me some tips on my, on my backhand and I did a double backhand and I hit him square in the neck with a tennis ball. It's all about power Jess.
And he did that, you know, that noise that people do and they get sort of winded and, I was mortified. Yeah. I didn't kill him, but I don't know if I can go back now. Jeff underneath this, de, you know, veneer, there's a beast in chest so I'm not surprised by that. But, my podcast extra is, a beautiful book called Fred Williams, Diaries, 1963 to 1970. Fred Williams was one of Australia's great landscape painters, and he kept a meticulous.
And, I actually know his daughter, not very well, but she's mentioned in the book. the diary, starts off writing about his technique, how he can improve it. And he talks about paintings, which this beautiful book, it weighs about five kilos, but it's got the paintings reproduced. he talks about the art world. He talks about. how his technique is either working or not working. But at the end of each year in these diaries, he reviews his year and he sets out what he wants to do.
But, Jeff, do you keep a diary? I do not. Okay. Jeff, uh, Jeff, do you keep a diary? Not since I was about 14. I'd love to read that one. Anyway, it's, it's probably people won't be able to get it, but because it's sort of an Australian production and just reading someone's diaries and there's such dedication to their craft or. art and just this sense of reflection about what's working and what's not working.
So maybe we need to start taking diaries and making diaries about the podcast, Pete, so we can do reflections each year on what we need to improve on. Well, the Netflix series is going to be fantastic. It is going to be fantastic. Jeff, thanks so much for being part of, planning exchange and we'll have a full episode notes. And thank you for, for being such a great guest. Thank you for having me. I'm going to have to pass on diaries of, Fred Williams.
I found it on Amazon and, it's about 140 Australian dollars. Oh, wow. So I might, I might pass, I might be passing on that one. How much of that is shipping? And, That's without shipping. It was five kilos. Yeah. Jeff, your life will be enriched if you do, and read it. Anyway, thanks again for your, for everything. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening.
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