“Chartered Territory” in Next American City

For the last few years, the economist Paul Romer has been traveling the world making the case for building “charter cities,” i.e. cities built from scratch across the developing world in an effort to create jobs and wealth while replacing aid with trade. In theory, the idea is powerful and intriguing – as Jane Jacobs once said, “cities don’t attract the middle class, they create it,” and so creating high-functioning cities might be one way to solve poverty when the world’s urban population is expected to double. But for various reasons (including charges of neo-colonialism), only one nation has taken him up on it – Honduras.

In February, I flew to Honduras to learn what I could about its implementation of Romer’s concept (known colloquially as REDs), and about his new partners in a government that came to power after a coup removed the country’s democratically-elected president in 2009. My story is now live at Next American City, although be warned: it’s behind a paywall.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I am a visiting scholar at NYU’s Rudin Center of Transportation Policy and Management; Romer’s Urbanization Project sits within NYU Stern and Solly Angel teaches at NYU Wagner. Also, Paul blurbed my book.)

To whet your appetite, here’s an excerpt from the piece describing Romer’s faith that rules and institutions create successful cities, not architecture or urban planning (and he may be right):

Imagining the future is one thing; designing cities for as many as 10 million inhabitants (in a country of only 7.5 million) is an altogether different exercise – especially if you doubt that urban form and planning make any difference in their success.

“Do you know of the South Pacific cargo cults?” Romer asked me last October. He was referring to the tribes who had ritually restored World War II landing strips in hopes the U.S. Army would return, bringing C rations with them. For 70 years, they’d mistaken circumstance for causality. “I think architects may be running their own cargo cult,” he said. Their obsession with form had blinded them to the true importance of rules. Look at the Army: “It went from one of the most segregated institutions to the most integrated” gradually in the decades following the Vietnam War. “The buildings didn’t change.”

“It’s important that buildings don’t catch fire or fall down when there’s an earthquake,” he added, affirming the necessity of building codes. “Otherwise, I don’t think it matters all that much.”

Romer had made a similar point a few years earlier in a debate with Yale University economist Chris Blattman, who had compared charter cities to the infamous high-rise public housing projects of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green. Romer replied that high-rises had worked “remarkably well” in sheltering the poor of Hong Kong and Singapore. “The key difference between these cases lay not in the hardware or architecture but rather in the supporting rules, particularly those related to crime,” he wrote. Architectural historian Katharine G. Bristol made a similar case in her 1991 essay ““The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” arguing modern architecture hadn’t failed the residents of infamous St. Louis projects –institutions had.

Still, plans must be made, not just for Honduras but for the potentially dozens of charter cities Romer hopes to inspire around the world. His guru in these matters is Shlomo “Solly” Angel, who teaches planning at NYU and Princeton and was his first recruit for the Urbanization Project. Angel saw the developing world’s urban explosion first-hand during a 30-year career as an advisor to the United Nations and the World Bank in Bangkok, Nairobi and across Latin America, including Honduras. Most recently, he’s turned to geographic information systems and satellite photography to document the astounding pace of urban expansion.

Angel’s working theory of instant urbanism can be reduced to two principles, each of which is controversial. The first is that outward expansion is inevitable and must be accommodated, and the second is that the mistake most planners make is to plan too much, not too little. “What I try to do is the opposite of what these other guys are trying to do,” he told me recently in his SoHo loft. “They’re trying to specify more and more and more. I’m saying: ‘What is the minimum amount that I could specify?’ And after that, I say I don’t care.”