In today’s world, charter cities could look very much like they looked when William Penn created Pennsylvania.

For example, the government of Honduras has amended its constitution to say that different pieces of land in Honduras can be exempted from all of the existing rules, regulations and institutions – something completely different can be built up there.

They’re planning to then designate a site that’s about 1,000 square kilometers – bigger than Hong Kong or Singapore – and say, “In this geographical area where no one lives right now and where the government owns the land, we’ll create a very different set of rules and then Hondurans and people from throughout Central America can opt in and participate in those new rules.”

This lets the people of Honduras do something that they want to do. They want to change their society and change their rules to get beyond things like high levels of crime and high levels of youth unemployment.

This is a mechanism that lets them do it quicker. It also lets them avoid delays associated with coercion. Any change you make throughout Honduras would force everyone to accept the change. Those element of coercion mean that it takes much longer to get consensus and there’s always resistance to any proposed change.

The idea here is to take an area where you just put in place a certain set of rules like Penn did and then say, “Who wants to come in?” And if some people don’t want those rules, they certainly don’t have to go there. But if others are attracted to those rules then they’re free to go in.

In the Honduran case, the place is large enough to host a city of 10 million people. You can tell from that figure that it’s also designed to be very open in terms of immigration…

Excerpt from CNN – Continue CNN News article here.