Charter cities make sense in Europe

Charter cities are a great idea. You take a poor country, create a special zone in it where the country won’t exert its usual harmful influence, and allow that special zone to grow to a self-managed city. The idea is that if you just change governance, you can create real economic growth with mostly the same resources that the host country already has.The Charter Cities Institute lists several examples of this on their website: Shenzhen, which was a village and is now a futuristic city; Singapore, which was a swamp and is now a futuristic city; Dubai, which was a desert, and is now a futuristic city; Hong Kong, which was a less than futuristic city, and is now – a futuristic city.The main issue with new charter cities, at least according to the very sparse Wikipedia article and what little info I could scrape from Claude, is not the idea or even the execution of charter cities themselves, but the country where they are founded.Próspera, one of Honduras’s ZEDEs, is apparently facing problems with the Honduran government. One government decides it’s constitutional and good for Honduras; the second one overturns the decision. It seems that the founders of Próspera were ready for this because they managed to set up international agreements and penalties, so that it isn’t trivial for an unfriendly government to just hit the undo button.But the story of charter cities having trouble getting off the ground is not exclusive to Honduras, and in fact Próspera seems to be closer to success than to failure.The main problem is, and will likely continue to be the host country. Charter cities can self-govern in many areas: immigration, economic policy, building and zoning code, civil courts, even policing. But they are not countries, and they (usually) don’t have authority in criminal law, nor a standing army. And if they happen to be situated in unstably governed countries, then all this autonomy is exactly as stable as the weakest chain in the link – the host country’s governmen