Here I am reading along only to be shocked by casual racism. I’d love to know why you didn’t provide pictures of other ethnic groups native to the various lands mentioned in this article? Or is it that you don’t consider Sierra Leonians people? How dare you caption the picture “Yup, that’s definitely an ethnic group. I have honestly never seen a group this ethnic before. A+ at being ethnic”. Throwing in pictures of people in traditional garb with pictures of maps and mountains and such is incredibly disrespectful, racist, totally unnecessary and completely repugnant. I couldn’t unsubscribe fast enough.
The relevance of the Sherbro people is that there is an island. It is being planned for a charter city. It got described as a "greenfield site", ie one with no people. However, there is an entire ethnic group called the "Sherbro people" located on the island. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherbro_people . To me, this is surprising and relevant in the way that, say, the fact that there are ten ranchers living in a part of Solana County that nobody ever denied had some ranchers in it is not.
As for the picture, I looked into them and thought it was a pretty exotic looking picture that accurately conveyed the idea of "ethnic group living on a far-off little-known African island" and I found it interesting.
I think you are coming from a place where noticing that an ethnic group is interesting, or different-looking, is automatically belittling of that ethnic group. I don't have that instinct, and I think it is fine and good to be delighted by how different and unusual different groups can be.
The caption raised eyebrows for me (I did wonder if it was a reference to something I didn't understand). I didn't know the term 'greenfield', so I didn't realise the comment about the town and the ethnic group was supposed to be a counterpoint to the greenfield claim. So it did seem like a bit of a non sequitur to me (but also, you're just listing off a variety of facts about each one).
I am glad to read this comprehensive reply to that comment, because it makes connections I didn't make on my own.
What I think he meant is that the Sherbro people picture ticks every box in the criteria for a portrait of an exotic ethnic group, to the point where it might as well be AI or a header for a dictionary article on Ethnicity. It's got topless, darkskinned women in colourful skirts and bodypaint, standing a in a line in a jungle. I've seen dozens of similar pictures from Borneo to Tierra del Fuego.
Fine post, fine answer; wonderful caption, A+, made my day; would pay-subscribe just for this, only trouble: I am already a paid-subscriber. And will remain so as long as Scott will remain Scott. Hypoclites are hardly the target group of ACX. God bless them and I wish them a wonderful day. Scott: give Kai a hug and feel loved. Because you are.
Personally I was delighted to learn that that particular clothes-and-makeup situation had been invented on this Earth, A+ cool picture that taught me a thing I didn't already know. Also yeah, calling the whole island a greenfield site when there's already a town there is misleading and I'm glad you pointed it out.
I’m not sure if “greenfield” means “no inconvenient people already living there”. History doesn’t seem to support it. I think the term was created to contrast “brownfield”.
Though, calling something with inconvenient people living it “greenfield” could be construed as kinda racist. Seems obvious to me that the picture (and the caption) was included to point out the kinda-racist use of “greenfield”.
I was under the impression of the opposite of davep - the term greenfield came first (probably coined in mid-century suburban expansion if I had to guess) to refer to development in open spaces, which are typically marked as green on maps.
Then with deindustrialization as a lot of cities started to have these abandoned or under-utilized industrial/warehouse districts in the middle of the city, "brownfield" was coined as a contrast to greenfield, for urban revitalization of industrial areas. I think this coinage may have not come until the late '70s or the '80s, as it's sort of a progressive urban planning concept—redeveloping uninhabited warehouse districts was seen as a lower-harm alternative to doing things Robert Moses style.
Dogpatch or Mission Bay are easy examples of brownfield development in SF.
Are there any examples of "greenfield" being used outside of a development context? I don't think anybody referred to places that colonized or expanded into as "greenfields".
"Brownfield" refers to land that has extra development costs (like waste cleanup) , "Greenfield" refers to land/property that doesn't have this cost. The etymology might be that "greenfield" was created to indicate things that weren't "brownfields". Both are "developer" terms.
Also, I don't see a picture of a load of women who've laboriously painted their entire bodies, put on their brightest coloured skirts and posed, beaming, before a photographer who is presumably of a different ethnicity, and think "these women would be upset if I joked about our cultural differences, I'd better treat this image with solemn, sober respect."
Because in real life when you meet someone with their traditional glad rags on and that look on their face, in my very limited experience, generally they're as excited to show off their culture as you are interested in it, and usually it's a mutual interest too and you're all in for a cracking evening talking about who's culinary traditions make the least sense or what have you.
Priggish aversion to pointing out the cultural differences of a group of people who've lined up conspicuously to show off their cultural differences is in its own way offensive.
Here I thought people were going to complain about seeing titties at work. But without constructing various racisms, I agree the vibe is off. Point-and-laugh always runs the risk of falling flat, whatever your intentions.
Was there an anti-Prospera campaign promise in Honduras, or is it just score settling among the elites? Wondering if there’s a populist anti rich gringo movement.
I was sure the campaign slogans "Let's Join the Gringos!" and "Daddy at your service!" had to be memes edited onto the image afterward, but I am very pleased to report they are not.
According to that video (use yt autotranslate) “ Unámonos a los gringos” means to cede national defense to the US and getting easier US visa, similar like the Marshal Islands. Of course the US was interested in doing that in the Pacific so they have military stations for the navy countering Russia/China. But Honduras has no strategic value I know of?
For what it's worth, I don't think that beach is on Grand Bahama, it appears to be Nassau or vicinity, you can tell by the enormous Atlantis resort in the background. From a bit of triangulation I think it's Cabbage Beach on Paradise Island (formerly Hog Island).
> American street grid, Spanish/Japanese superblocks, and Dutch woonerfs
Every time I hear this sort of thing I think yeah, that kinda makes sense. And then I think about the Garden City Movement, and which said that instead of living in crowded European style cities everyone should live in big, spacious and thoughtfully laid-out low density cities, and which also seemed to make sense at the time. But then they tried it out, and people found they didn't really like it -- people love green space but they hate the fact that everything is too far from everything else. Now all the urban design experts want to go straight in the other direction, back to a high-density mode of living which presumably has its own failure modes that we haven't figured out yet, instead of working to find some kind of happy medium.
The main "failure mode" of high-density living is that it partly conflicts with hundreds of years of American cultural values. I think that other than that, we don't worry too much about uncovering new failure modes.
Why do you feel that the Garden City didn't work out? There are lots of successful garden towns like Wewelyn, Hampstead Garden Suburb and Canberra. Like every late 19th century movement thought they were going to complete transform the world and bring in utopia and that didn't happen, but that doesn't like the right bar for success or failure.
We have tried high-density and it works fine. Like, obviously we don't want to live in Kowloon Walled City, but even if you look at the highest-density city in Europe (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population_density), the commune of Levallois-Perret in Paris at 27,713/km², it can fit inside it parks and plazas and trees lining the streets just fine. Density above all comes from uniformly mid-rise housing and ready access to transport (such that the space isn't used by cars and parking lots), it's perfectly compatible with areas zoned for greenery as well.
Heck, in a sense high density is enabler of greenery: if you look at the Nordic capitals for instance, besides smaller-scale very local pieces of greenery like parks, there's sizeable wedges of nature wedged right next to city centers. Were there substantially more sprawl on account of lower density, well, there certainly would have been more temptation to roll over the nature preserves and zone nearby islands for residential rather than recreation.
We have all kinds of happy mediums in terms of urban intensity. It's all relative and subjective.
Manhattan's population density is something like 60,000 people/sq. mile. Lots of people think Manhattan is way too intense and would never want to live there.
Well San Francisco, Chicago, DC, Philly, and Boston all have pretty similar population densities to each other - somewhere around 16-18,000 people/sq. mile. That seems to be a pretty happy medium. Those are all quite successful cities, and desirable places to live. Lots of people even think those cities are too sleepy and quiet! They might prefer the happy medium of Brooklyn (~39,000)
Portland's a pretty happy medium - walkable, bikeable, decent public transit, tons of street trees and green space. Only 5,000 people/sq. mile. To my taste, Portland makes a much more pleasant environment out of that density than other cities with comparable density, like Vegas. Plenty of people in the suburbs or rural areas of Oregon still think of Portland as unbearably crowded and urban! Well, they still have plenty of options for their own idea of "happy medium."
If you want a happy medium between Portland and the cities I listed above, Seattle and LA are both around 8,000 - but they're totally different from each other in terms of walkability, bikeability, tree coverage, traffic - even at any given population density, different planning decisions can take you in all kinds of directions.
And Manhattan's 60,000 is not a ceiling! There are denser cities around the world, and there are parts of Manhattan that could be built up a lot taller. For someone from Hong Kong, Manhattan might be their happy medium!
For a lot of people, Seattle, Boston, or Brooklyn is their happy medium. And the important point that planning nerds in the US converge on, is that places of that degree of urban intensity are really quite rare in this country, even though tons of people want to live in places like that, as indicated by the high housing prices in those cities! It would be great if we could fill out a lot more of the spectrum of "happy mediums" in between ~16,000 (that whole cluster of cities) and NYC.
One reads references to Free Cities in European history but I never read up what precisely they were and how they functioned. I recently read in AJP Taylor's book on German history that Napoleon did away with about 300 Free Cities and ecclesiastical states.
Certainly a pity that such a unique political formation does not exist any longer.
Sounds like the Cities of the Hanse (not only Germany) - Germania consisted of nearly 1800 territories - lots of them free cities until Napoleon conquered her (well, the Kaiser was officially their (only) superior, but he was always far, far away, very busy and easily distracted). @ ClanceJ: The ecclesiastical states were as feudalistic hellholes as the other feudalistic hellholes were. And I would prefer an Indian slum in 2025 to a German free city in 1780.
To this date Hamburg and Bremen are city-states within the German federal state. Never visited Bremen but Hamburg is very much a by-the-numbers big German city so it does not seem to have that much impact on the ground.
I think those were basically the same as any other self-governing city? Think Venice, Athens etc., but usually on a smaller scale. With huge variation in how they were actually governed, anything from an elected council, unelected representatives of different social groups (masons etc.), to basically a king.
The cities you are thinking of I think are the Free Cities of the Holy Roman Empire. Napoleon ended them in part by conquest, incorporating them into the Confederation of the Rhine, or them falling into other German states which allied with France, and in part because he forced Austria and the Electors to disband the Holy Roman Empire as terms in one war, I forget which exactly.
These cities were free in that they had the right of Imperial Immediacy, meaning their only overlord was the Emperor, they did not have a feudal relationship with any Duke or Count or some such between them and the Emperor. And since the HRE was a very loose thing by this point and had been for a long time, not really a state, this made the cities little sovereignties of themselves like Venice or Genoa or the other Italian city states.
Though a similar process happened in Italy (outside the HRE), not just via Napoleon as Emperor, before he was Emperor he was a general fighting in north Italy, where France was creating and propping up an Italian Republic.
Similar deal with the ecclesiastical states, these will have been things like the Bishopric of Cologne. Cologne was an ecclesiastical state, the Bishop was it's sovereign, it was also an Elector in the HRE, the Bishop got to vote on the Imperial succession.
Interested in your definition of the throwaway term NIMBY, often used but rarely with a rational definition behind it. I collect these definitions, and given the rest of the piece, this one should be good! I always hope for something new.
…as it is where I live and work, just asking for clarity re priorities. Does anything qualify as a bar to this year’s project X? If so what, if not why? Happy to take the rap.
I don't think it's much of a mystery what NIMBY means - it's someone who is opposed to building things near them, because they think those things might cause traffic, disrupt views, change neighborhood character, etc. Were you looking for something more philosophical? If so, can you be more specific?
Usually it seems to be used as shorthand for those who think that their own (environmental) interests are more important than (say) the aggregate interests of a wider community; but of course the NIMBY agent might be arguing for a still wider aggregated interest - say the preservation of a local ecology unique to the region or nation. I was looking for some sort of statement about the balance of interests and their weight. Generally it’s just used as a synonym for ‘selfish’.
Nevis: part of the independent "Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis". Legally, a smart choice as the smaller Nevis has the constitutional right to secede when 2/3 of its 12k people demand so.
"Nevis has considerable autonomy in its legislative branch. The constitution actually empowers the Nevis Island Legislature to make laws that cannot be abrogated by the National Assembly" - much smarter choice than Honduras.
Hi sorry to message on the post but can't see how to message Scott off post. I just found out that my subscription auto renewed, much as I enjoy the posts I did not actually want to pay for another year's subscription as I like to vary my substacks, and would like to request a refund from Scott please. Sorry
To find out how to email Scott, go to this blog’s homepage and scroll down a bit, or alternatively scroll down to the end of the comments section of this post.
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There’s also Bhutan’s Gelephu Mindfulness City which is a charter city for quality of life rather than economic development. Or something. It’s not exactly clear.
I'm pretty disturbed by the Honduras international treaty thing, I don't see how this defensible. Essentially this is a means for a democratically elected government to pass an unrepealable law, binding future governments no matter how much popular support they have. This is pretty blatantly undemocratic. Hell, the original government that signed the treaty might have been actively breaking an election promise not to!
And although in this case the treaty is being used to restrict government power, there's absolutely no reason it couldn't be used for the opposite. (There've already been ideas about mandating minimum tax levels. Also, see the UN regularly condemning the US for violating human rights by...*not* making certain political opinions crimes.)
I think this might be a necessary principle of economics. The Obama administration can take out a loan, but then the Trump administration has to pay it back (or declare bankruptcy, or be in default, or otherwise offend the global economic elite).
In the same way, if the Obama administration asks Japanese investors to go 50-50 with American investors on a factory located in American territory, then the Trump administration can't steal the Japanese's share in the factory and give it to Americans without offending global economic norms etc.
I think the Prospera case is just part of the more general version of this.
I admit there are ways to make this extremely bad (eg Obama takes out a $10 trillion loan and gives it to himself, is Trump obligated to respect this), but it seems like a matter of degree and hard to do anything about consistently.
I think that you are overestimating the power of the "international treaty thing": This binds future governments to respect the agreement... or pay a fine.
If the People in the future democratically believe that breaking the agreement is worth the fine, they will pay it. If they don't, they won't.
This is pretty standard for Free Trade Agreements, and there's a reason for that: What investors need to invest is *certainty*. This binding mechanism creates certainty that they will see a ROI, whether through investment or by paying the fines.
And don't be alarmed by the disproportionate fine that Prospera is asking for: It's pretty common in these arbitration to start with a big number, only to make it come down later on the negotiations. And as Scott mentioned, Prospera doesn't want the fine anyways.
In practice, future governments have all the power to break these treaties, although they likely pay a metaphorical fine through lesser investment due to the juridical uncertainty that their actions create. Look at the Brexit (the UK tearing up an agreement), the renegotiation of NAFTA into USMCA (the US tearing up an agreement), etc...
And this isn't counting the idea that the arbitration might just side with the new government anyways. Ten years ago, in El Salvador (neighboring Honduras), a Canadian gold mining company sued the government for something like $1 Billion USD (20% of annual government budget), for not getting permissions to mine gold. El Salvador argued that the company never had the environmental protections that the law demanded at the time. The nation won, and the company had to pay the arbitration fees.
There, a guy noticed that this West Texas county has about $60m in oil revenue but fewer than 100 registered voters ( many of whom don't even live there). So he's encouraging his social media followers to move to Texas and take up residence on some cheap land so that they can all democratically take over the county government and do what they want with the $60m.
Definitely an innovative solution to the sustainability problem plaguing other model cities. Also a better place name.
With regard to Sherbro Island City, I'm going to do some brainstorming because I'm excited by the anti-poverty potential of this project. Have they thought about applying for development dollars at all? A lot of Gates philanthropy goes to Africa, yes? Imagine if Gates agreed to match investments in Sherbro Island City dollar-for-dollar, for example.
In terms of bootstrapping Sherbro, my understanding is that the regulatory environment in Africa is extremely unfavorable to entrepreneurs. Magatte Wade has written many notes and blogposts on Substack about this issue; here is a recent one: https://substack.com/@magattew/note/c-169164344
I understand that a lot of African businesses operate under the table to escape the notice of regulators, or struggle to get consistent access to electricity. So one path would be to scour the continent for successful small business owners who are sick of blackouts and bad regulation, and entice them to move to Sherbro. Of course, these same issues would also be expected to apply to non-African multinationals who are looking to expand their footprint in Africa. Presumably some fraction of these businesses don't require as much critical mass in terms of civilization, so are more interested as early adopters. The best seed might even be a sort of "company town" for some multinational.
In principle I think existing Sherbro inhabitants can be a significant benefit for the project, if the project means bringing good jobs to the area. It's definitely an important relationship to manage. I would start by doing ordinary development stuff focused on delivering benefits for island inhabitants (fresh water, school, library, whatever they want/need), then once some trust has been built, get them to sign a document which unlocks further development aid, and a chunk of equity so they will share in the benefits if the city is successful.
Another way to think about it is that manufacturing exists on a spectrum. Something really bulky, like concrete, will generally be manufactured locally. Something tiny and complex, like a microchip, will be imported into Africa from elsewhere for the time being. The sweet spot is something medium-heavy, maybe something you can make with a 3d printer, maybe refining of raw materials which Africa exports, where it's medium-punishing to transport it from place to place. If it was heavier, doing it on an island would be too much trouble. If it was lighter, importing it from abroad would be too easy.
Sierra Leone import/export data could be a good place to start, either take a raw material they're exporting and refine it first, or identify something they're importing and see if it could be made locally: https://oec.world/en/profile/country/sle It looks like the country actually imports a fair amount of cement and is doing a tariff to try to build indigenous cement manufacturing capacity, so that could even be a good place to start perhaps?
An AI tells me: "Despite having favorable conditions for rice cultivation, the country’s domestic production is low due to poor investment in agriculture over many years, partly linked to historical policies in the 1980s that encouraged imports rather than supporting local farming. Rapid population growth has also outpaced local production capacity. Additionally, many consumers, especially in urban areas like Freetown, prefer imported rice because it is perceived as cleaner and free from impurities like stones, which can be present in locally grown rice."
How about a business which buys locally grown rice and uses robotics techniques to purify it? How about an academy for farmers from the mainland which teaches them farming techniques and sells them farming supplies?
(1) For Solano, good luck with the shipbuilding. There's good reasons that the former big shipbuilding industries have mostly gone away and the East has taken over.
(2) Re: Prospera, I would cynically suggest the problem with the unconstitutionality could be solved by changing the constitution (that's what the Repeal movement for abortion did in my country). I have little sympathy for Prospera itself and thought this would be the exact outcome: the government changes and the new government revokes all agreements made by the previous one
(3) Re: Sierra Leone, again - best wishes and good luck, but it's Sierra Leone.
"Finally, something nobody else will care about but which is close to my heart - Jan is pursuing a partnership with Monumental Labs, a group working on 'AI-enabled robotic stone carving factories'."
Why the need for AI, or is this just a case of "AI all the things"?
Not sure why a CNC machine with the right cutting tool could not be used to mass produce stone ornamentation.
I suspect that at least part of the problem might involve the fact that stone is not a perfectly homogeneous medium, and stonecutters need to learn how to adapt their design to the grain structure they find as they start cutting parts away. I think this is the meaning of Michelangelo’s quote about “removing everything that doesn’t look like David”.
I should add that I consider Prospera's whole regulatory regime to protect consumers basically a lie. They chartered a bank, Seshat Bank, in which I deposited a decent amount of money in 2022, to be returned on a very short (3 month!) timeline. The bank refused to return my money for over 2 years, and I was trying to be in contact with both the bank and Prospera's regulators for that whole time, but they were all very unresponsive. Eventually Prospera issued a statement of liquidation of the bank in early 2024. Now it's been another year and there has been no movement. As far as I can tell, the money is gone. I thought the bank was a real bank and thought Prospera had a reasonably competent regulator, but neither seems to have been the case; I thin it was basically a scam.
Here I am reading along only to be shocked by casual racism. I’d love to know why you didn’t provide pictures of other ethnic groups native to the various lands mentioned in this article? Or is it that you don’t consider Sierra Leonians people? How dare you caption the picture “Yup, that’s definitely an ethnic group. I have honestly never seen a group this ethnic before. A+ at being ethnic”. Throwing in pictures of people in traditional garb with pictures of maps and mountains and such is incredibly disrespectful, racist, totally unnecessary and completely repugnant. I couldn’t unsubscribe fast enough.
Banned for this comment.
I’d love to here what he has to say but I don’t think he meant it in that way
Wow, that was unexpected.
The relevance of the Sherbro people is that there is an island. It is being planned for a charter city. It got described as a "greenfield site", ie one with no people. However, there is an entire ethnic group called the "Sherbro people" located on the island. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherbro_people . To me, this is surprising and relevant in the way that, say, the fact that there are ten ranchers living in a part of Solana County that nobody ever denied had some ranchers in it is not.
As for the picture, I looked into them and thought it was a pretty exotic looking picture that accurately conveyed the idea of "ethnic group living on a far-off little-known African island" and I found it interesting.
I think you are coming from a place where noticing that an ethnic group is interesting, or different-looking, is automatically belittling of that ethnic group. I don't have that instinct, and I think it is fine and good to be delighted by how different and unusual different groups can be.
The caption raised eyebrows for me (I did wonder if it was a reference to something I didn't understand). I didn't know the term 'greenfield', so I didn't realise the comment about the town and the ethnic group was supposed to be a counterpoint to the greenfield claim. So it did seem like a bit of a non sequitur to me (but also, you're just listing off a variety of facts about each one).
I am glad to read this comprehensive reply to that comment, because it makes connections I didn't make on my own.
I thought the cheeky caption was fine.
What I think he meant is that the Sherbro people picture ticks every box in the criteria for a portrait of an exotic ethnic group, to the point where it might as well be AI or a header for a dictionary article on Ethnicity. It's got topless, darkskinned women in colourful skirts and bodypaint, standing a in a line in a jungle. I've seen dozens of similar pictures from Borneo to Tierra del Fuego.
Knowing what “greenfield” means is key.
I knew the term and got the intention, and if I didn't I would have looked it up before accusing the author of racialism
Fine post, fine answer; wonderful caption, A+, made my day; would pay-subscribe just for this, only trouble: I am already a paid-subscriber. And will remain so as long as Scott will remain Scott. Hypoclites are hardly the target group of ACX. God bless them and I wish them a wonderful day. Scott: give Kai a hug and feel loved. Because you are.
Personally I was delighted to learn that that particular clothes-and-makeup situation had been invented on this Earth, A+ cool picture that taught me a thing I didn't already know. Also yeah, calling the whole island a greenfield site when there's already a town there is misleading and I'm glad you pointed it out.
I’m not sure if “greenfield” means “no inconvenient people already living there”. History doesn’t seem to support it. I think the term was created to contrast “brownfield”.
Though, calling something with inconvenient people living it “greenfield” could be construed as kinda racist. Seems obvious to me that the picture (and the caption) was included to point out the kinda-racist use of “greenfield”.
(But I knew what greenfield/brownfield meant.)
Tell me more about how you interpret greenfield vs. brownfield?
I was under the impression of the opposite of davep - the term greenfield came first (probably coined in mid-century suburban expansion if I had to guess) to refer to development in open spaces, which are typically marked as green on maps.
Then with deindustrialization as a lot of cities started to have these abandoned or under-utilized industrial/warehouse districts in the middle of the city, "brownfield" was coined as a contrast to greenfield, for urban revitalization of industrial areas. I think this coinage may have not come until the late '70s or the '80s, as it's sort of a progressive urban planning concept—redeveloping uninhabited warehouse districts was seen as a lower-harm alternative to doing things Robert Moses style.
Dogpatch or Mission Bay are easy examples of brownfield development in SF.
Are there any examples of "greenfield" being used outside of a development context? I don't think anybody referred to places that colonized or expanded into as "greenfields".
"Brownfield" refers to land that has extra development costs (like waste cleanup) , "Greenfield" refers to land/property that doesn't have this cost. The etymology might be that "greenfield" was created to indicate things that weren't "brownfields". Both are "developer" terms.
https://www.aeroqual.com/blog/brownfield-vs-greenfield-sites
Hm, I wonder if that's how they're using it here. Surely nobody expects there to be a lot of toxic waste on an island in Sierra Leone.
I thought the caption was fine, and funny.
Also, I don't see a picture of a load of women who've laboriously painted their entire bodies, put on their brightest coloured skirts and posed, beaming, before a photographer who is presumably of a different ethnicity, and think "these women would be upset if I joked about our cultural differences, I'd better treat this image with solemn, sober respect."
Because in real life when you meet someone with their traditional glad rags on and that look on their face, in my very limited experience, generally they're as excited to show off their culture as you are interested in it, and usually it's a mutual interest too and you're all in for a cracking evening talking about who's culinary traditions make the least sense or what have you.
Priggish aversion to pointing out the cultural differences of a group of people who've lined up conspicuously to show off their cultural differences is in its own way offensive.
Here I thought people were going to complain about seeing titties at work. But without constructing various racisms, I agree the vibe is off. Point-and-laugh always runs the risk of falling flat, whatever your intentions.
I'm genuinely not sure if this is a troll comment or not.
Probably not a troll, bluesky gonna bluesky.
Banned for a month for this comment.
"I couldn’t unsubscribe fast enough."
Oh dear how sad never mind
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4uivPpzCGo
Was there an anti-Prospera campaign promise in Honduras, or is it just score settling among the elites? Wondering if there’s a populist anti rich gringo movement.
Yes, there was a lot of populist/nationalist concern about "selling off the nation to foreigners".
I was sure the campaign slogans "Let's Join the Gringos!" and "Daddy at your service!" had to be memes edited onto the image afterward, but I am very pleased to report they are not.
I couldn't find good information on the Christian Democrats and wonder if they really want to become the 51st state or are only joining us in spirit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfrm7VNtwk4
According to that video (use yt autotranslate) “ Unámonos a los gringos” means to cede national defense to the US and getting easier US visa, similar like the Marshal Islands. Of course the US was interested in doing that in the Pacific so they have military stations for the navy countering Russia/China. But Honduras has no strategic value I know of?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_of_Free_Association
For what it's worth, I don't think that beach is on Grand Bahama, it appears to be Nassau or vicinity, you can tell by the enormous Atlantis resort in the background. From a bit of triangulation I think it's Cabbage Beach on Paradise Island (formerly Hog Island).
> American street grid, Spanish/Japanese superblocks, and Dutch woonerfs
Every time I hear this sort of thing I think yeah, that kinda makes sense. And then I think about the Garden City Movement, and which said that instead of living in crowded European style cities everyone should live in big, spacious and thoughtfully laid-out low density cities, and which also seemed to make sense at the time. But then they tried it out, and people found they didn't really like it -- people love green space but they hate the fact that everything is too far from everything else. Now all the urban design experts want to go straight in the other direction, back to a high-density mode of living which presumably has its own failure modes that we haven't figured out yet, instead of working to find some kind of happy medium.
The main "failure mode" of high-density living is that it partly conflicts with hundreds of years of American cultural values. I think that other than that, we don't worry too much about uncovering new failure modes.
When I visited Barcelona I remember a fair amount of trees and green space in the superblocks.
Why do you feel that the Garden City didn't work out? There are lots of successful garden towns like Wewelyn, Hampstead Garden Suburb and Canberra. Like every late 19th century movement thought they were going to complete transform the world and bring in utopia and that didn't happen, but that doesn't like the right bar for success or failure.
We have tried high-density and it works fine. Like, obviously we don't want to live in Kowloon Walled City, but even if you look at the highest-density city in Europe (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population_density), the commune of Levallois-Perret in Paris at 27,713/km², it can fit inside it parks and plazas and trees lining the streets just fine. Density above all comes from uniformly mid-rise housing and ready access to transport (such that the space isn't used by cars and parking lots), it's perfectly compatible with areas zoned for greenery as well.
Heck, in a sense high density is enabler of greenery: if you look at the Nordic capitals for instance, besides smaller-scale very local pieces of greenery like parks, there's sizeable wedges of nature wedged right next to city centers. Were there substantially more sprawl on account of lower density, well, there certainly would have been more temptation to roll over the nature preserves and zone nearby islands for residential rather than recreation.
Thanks, sorry, fixed.
I completely agree. I think the thing to make the difference is public spaces.
You need enough gardens and playgrounds to support all the high density.
But you don't need so much that you have low density.
Also the parks have to be connected, good and nice enough to walk through, with maybe some shops?
I was pretty impressed with Mexico City, around Roma and the big parks.
really nice to walk, trees, lots of businesses and street vendors and a lot of parks.
We have all kinds of happy mediums in terms of urban intensity. It's all relative and subjective.
Manhattan's population density is something like 60,000 people/sq. mile. Lots of people think Manhattan is way too intense and would never want to live there.
Well San Francisco, Chicago, DC, Philly, and Boston all have pretty similar population densities to each other - somewhere around 16-18,000 people/sq. mile. That seems to be a pretty happy medium. Those are all quite successful cities, and desirable places to live. Lots of people even think those cities are too sleepy and quiet! They might prefer the happy medium of Brooklyn (~39,000)
Portland's a pretty happy medium - walkable, bikeable, decent public transit, tons of street trees and green space. Only 5,000 people/sq. mile. To my taste, Portland makes a much more pleasant environment out of that density than other cities with comparable density, like Vegas. Plenty of people in the suburbs or rural areas of Oregon still think of Portland as unbearably crowded and urban! Well, they still have plenty of options for their own idea of "happy medium."
If you want a happy medium between Portland and the cities I listed above, Seattle and LA are both around 8,000 - but they're totally different from each other in terms of walkability, bikeability, tree coverage, traffic - even at any given population density, different planning decisions can take you in all kinds of directions.
And Manhattan's 60,000 is not a ceiling! There are denser cities around the world, and there are parts of Manhattan that could be built up a lot taller. For someone from Hong Kong, Manhattan might be their happy medium!
For a lot of people, Seattle, Boston, or Brooklyn is their happy medium. And the important point that planning nerds in the US converge on, is that places of that degree of urban intensity are really quite rare in this country, even though tons of people want to live in places like that, as indicated by the high housing prices in those cities! It would be great if we could fill out a lot more of the spectrum of "happy mediums" in between ~16,000 (that whole cluster of cities) and NYC.
One reads references to Free Cities in European history but I never read up what precisely they were and how they functioned. I recently read in AJP Taylor's book on German history that Napoleon did away with about 300 Free Cities and ecclesiastical states.
Certainly a pity that such a unique political formation does not exist any longer.
It seems a very peculiar European institution.
The ecclesiastical states were such feudalistic hellholes, though. Good riddance.
Very Napoleonic of you.
One of France's best monarchs.
Sounds like the Cities of the Hanse (not only Germany) - Germania consisted of nearly 1800 territories - lots of them free cities until Napoleon conquered her (well, the Kaiser was officially their (only) superior, but he was always far, far away, very busy and easily distracted). @ ClanceJ: The ecclesiastical states were as feudalistic hellholes as the other feudalistic hellholes were. And I would prefer an Indian slum in 2025 to a German free city in 1780.
To this date Hamburg and Bremen are city-states within the German federal state. Never visited Bremen but Hamburg is very much a by-the-numbers big German city so it does not seem to have that much impact on the ground.
I think those were basically the same as any other self-governing city? Think Venice, Athens etc., but usually on a smaller scale. With huge variation in how they were actually governed, anything from an elected council, unelected representatives of different social groups (masons etc.), to basically a king.
The cities you are thinking of I think are the Free Cities of the Holy Roman Empire. Napoleon ended them in part by conquest, incorporating them into the Confederation of the Rhine, or them falling into other German states which allied with France, and in part because he forced Austria and the Electors to disband the Holy Roman Empire as terms in one war, I forget which exactly.
These cities were free in that they had the right of Imperial Immediacy, meaning their only overlord was the Emperor, they did not have a feudal relationship with any Duke or Count or some such between them and the Emperor. And since the HRE was a very loose thing by this point and had been for a long time, not really a state, this made the cities little sovereignties of themselves like Venice or Genoa or the other Italian city states.
Though a similar process happened in Italy (outside the HRE), not just via Napoleon as Emperor, before he was Emperor he was a general fighting in north Italy, where France was creating and propping up an Italian Republic.
Similar deal with the ecclesiastical states, these will have been things like the Bishopric of Cologne. Cologne was an ecclesiastical state, the Bishop was it's sovereign, it was also an Elector in the HRE, the Bishop got to vote on the Imperial succession.
There were free cities after Napoleon. Danzig and Dubrovnik come to mind.
Also in Italy before the Risorgimento or however it's spelled.
Alternative first heading: "It's one Bahamas, Michael, how much could it cost?"
Interested in your definition of the throwaway term NIMBY, often used but rarely with a rational definition behind it. I collect these definitions, and given the rest of the piece, this one should be good! I always hope for something new.
Oh goodness, you've stirred the hornets nest. This is YIMBY country.
…as it is where I live and work, just asking for clarity re priorities. Does anything qualify as a bar to this year’s project X? If so what, if not why? Happy to take the rap.
I don't think it's much of a mystery what NIMBY means - it's someone who is opposed to building things near them, because they think those things might cause traffic, disrupt views, change neighborhood character, etc. Were you looking for something more philosophical? If so, can you be more specific?
Usually it seems to be used as shorthand for those who think that their own (environmental) interests are more important than (say) the aggregate interests of a wider community; but of course the NIMBY agent might be arguing for a still wider aggregated interest - say the preservation of a local ecology unique to the region or nation. I was looking for some sort of statement about the balance of interests and their weight. Generally it’s just used as a synonym for ‘selfish’.
> Vintage Freeport. I think this casino is now closed, but I can’t figure out what exactly happened to it, or whether the building still stands.
The building still stands, but it doesn't look to be in very good condition.
Street View: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bahamas+Princess+Resort+%26+Casino+Freeport+Resort+Club/@26.5172238,-78.6979664,3a,75y,300.36h,84.95t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sCIABIhAGbwPTiS06CWfEriAADP11!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh3.googleusercontent.com%2Fgpms-cs-s%2FAPRy3c_ilxCp8CSpWmxLWxju1gXEG5TdFmp8M5jjP3lUlXUdOmUv2aq1Cr4ZCAyhwOx81SpeS97GeEY_teeT1u4b_8tp5nOorOjqPqrfTVuObwci-Tyugg904-sLW1HY-qfBYfSjG5Hfate03Icd%3Dw900-h600-k-no-pi5.051328427433859-ya154.243360378333-ro0-fo100!7i10560!8i5280!4m6!3m5!1s0x892727cc7edb48ed:0x5db9988cf23c9250!8m2!3d26.5177136!4d-78.6981036!16s%2Fg%2F1tc_9jrs?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MTAyMi4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
Nevis: part of the independent "Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis". Legally, a smart choice as the smaller Nevis has the constitutional right to secede when 2/3 of its 12k people demand so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevis#Politics
"Nevis has considerable autonomy in its legislative branch. The constitution actually empowers the Nevis Island Legislature to make laws that cannot be abrogated by the National Assembly" - much smarter choice than Honduras.
Amazing how all polls agree that Salvador Nasralla will get exactly 27% of the votes.
Hi sorry to message on the post but can't see how to message Scott off post. I just found out that my subscription auto renewed, much as I enjoy the posts I did not actually want to pay for another year's subscription as I like to vary my substacks, and would like to request a refund from Scott please. Sorry
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This comment doesn’t seem to advance the conversation but I’m surprised it earned an indefinite suspension with no comment explaining why.
It clearly is a no-value-added LLM summary. It's a good idea to discourage such things.
There’s also Bhutan’s Gelephu Mindfulness City which is a charter city for quality of life rather than economic development. Or something. It’s not exactly clear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelephu_Special_Administrative_Region#:~:text=Gelephu%20Special%20Administrative%20Region%20(stylized,from%20the%20country's%20existing%20laws.
I wrote about this one at https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/156163841/you-had-me-at-dragon-king
I'm pretty disturbed by the Honduras international treaty thing, I don't see how this defensible. Essentially this is a means for a democratically elected government to pass an unrepealable law, binding future governments no matter how much popular support they have. This is pretty blatantly undemocratic. Hell, the original government that signed the treaty might have been actively breaking an election promise not to!
And although in this case the treaty is being used to restrict government power, there's absolutely no reason it couldn't be used for the opposite. (There've already been ideas about mandating minimum tax levels. Also, see the UN regularly condemning the US for violating human rights by...*not* making certain political opinions crimes.)
This sort of thing absolutely shouldn't exist.
I think this might be a necessary principle of economics. The Obama administration can take out a loan, but then the Trump administration has to pay it back (or declare bankruptcy, or be in default, or otherwise offend the global economic elite).
In the same way, if the Obama administration asks Japanese investors to go 50-50 with American investors on a factory located in American territory, then the Trump administration can't steal the Japanese's share in the factory and give it to Americans without offending global economic norms etc.
I think the Prospera case is just part of the more general version of this.
I admit there are ways to make this extremely bad (eg Obama takes out a $10 trillion loan and gives it to himself, is Trump obligated to respect this), but it seems like a matter of degree and hard to do anything about consistently.
There are very few formal restrictions on the power of the UK Parliament, but one thing it cannot do is bind any future Parliament.
I think that you are overestimating the power of the "international treaty thing": This binds future governments to respect the agreement... or pay a fine.
If the People in the future democratically believe that breaking the agreement is worth the fine, they will pay it. If they don't, they won't.
This is pretty standard for Free Trade Agreements, and there's a reason for that: What investors need to invest is *certainty*. This binding mechanism creates certainty that they will see a ROI, whether through investment or by paying the fines.
And don't be alarmed by the disproportionate fine that Prospera is asking for: It's pretty common in these arbitration to start with a big number, only to make it come down later on the negotiations. And as Scott mentioned, Prospera doesn't want the fine anyways.
In practice, future governments have all the power to break these treaties, although they likely pay a metaphorical fine through lesser investment due to the juridical uncertainty that their actions create. Look at the Brexit (the UK tearing up an agreement), the renegotiation of NAFTA into USMCA (the US tearing up an agreement), etc...
And this isn't counting the idea that the arbitration might just side with the new government anyways. Ten years ago, in El Salvador (neighboring Honduras), a Canadian gold mining company sued the government for something like $1 Billion USD (20% of annual government budget), for not getting permissions to mine gold. El Salvador argued that the company never had the environmental protections that the law demanded at the time. The nation won, and the company had to pay the arbitration fees.
Does Loving County, Texas, count as a Model City?
https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/loving-county-texas-takeover-malcolm-tanner/
There, a guy noticed that this West Texas county has about $60m in oil revenue but fewer than 100 registered voters ( many of whom don't even live there). So he's encouraging his social media followers to move to Texas and take up residence on some cheap land so that they can all democratically take over the county government and do what they want with the $60m.
Definitely an innovative solution to the sustainability problem plaguing other model cities. Also a better place name.
With regard to Sherbro Island City, I'm going to do some brainstorming because I'm excited by the anti-poverty potential of this project. Have they thought about applying for development dollars at all? A lot of Gates philanthropy goes to Africa, yes? Imagine if Gates agreed to match investments in Sherbro Island City dollar-for-dollar, for example.
In terms of bootstrapping Sherbro, my understanding is that the regulatory environment in Africa is extremely unfavorable to entrepreneurs. Magatte Wade has written many notes and blogposts on Substack about this issue; here is a recent one: https://substack.com/@magattew/note/c-169164344
I understand that a lot of African businesses operate under the table to escape the notice of regulators, or struggle to get consistent access to electricity. So one path would be to scour the continent for successful small business owners who are sick of blackouts and bad regulation, and entice them to move to Sherbro. Of course, these same issues would also be expected to apply to non-African multinationals who are looking to expand their footprint in Africa. Presumably some fraction of these businesses don't require as much critical mass in terms of civilization, so are more interested as early adopters. The best seed might even be a sort of "company town" for some multinational.
In principle I think existing Sherbro inhabitants can be a significant benefit for the project, if the project means bringing good jobs to the area. It's definitely an important relationship to manage. I would start by doing ordinary development stuff focused on delivering benefits for island inhabitants (fresh water, school, library, whatever they want/need), then once some trust has been built, get them to sign a document which unlocks further development aid, and a chunk of equity so they will share in the benefits if the city is successful.
Another way to think about it is that manufacturing exists on a spectrum. Something really bulky, like concrete, will generally be manufactured locally. Something tiny and complex, like a microchip, will be imported into Africa from elsewhere for the time being. The sweet spot is something medium-heavy, maybe something you can make with a 3d printer, maybe refining of raw materials which Africa exports, where it's medium-punishing to transport it from place to place. If it was heavier, doing it on an island would be too much trouble. If it was lighter, importing it from abroad would be too easy.
Sierra Leone import/export data could be a good place to start, either take a raw material they're exporting and refine it first, or identify something they're importing and see if it could be made locally: https://oec.world/en/profile/country/sle It looks like the country actually imports a fair amount of cement and is doing a tariff to try to build indigenous cement manufacturing capacity, so that could even be a good place to start perhaps?
An AI tells me: "Despite having favorable conditions for rice cultivation, the country’s domestic production is low due to poor investment in agriculture over many years, partly linked to historical policies in the 1980s that encouraged imports rather than supporting local farming. Rapid population growth has also outpaced local production capacity. Additionally, many consumers, especially in urban areas like Freetown, prefer imported rice because it is perceived as cleaner and free from impurities like stones, which can be present in locally grown rice."
How about a business which buys locally grown rice and uses robotics techniques to purify it? How about an academy for farmers from the mainland which teaches them farming techniques and sells them farming supplies?
(1) For Solano, good luck with the shipbuilding. There's good reasons that the former big shipbuilding industries have mostly gone away and the East has taken over.
(2) Re: Prospera, I would cynically suggest the problem with the unconstitutionality could be solved by changing the constitution (that's what the Repeal movement for abortion did in my country). I have little sympathy for Prospera itself and thought this would be the exact outcome: the government changes and the new government revokes all agreements made by the previous one
(3) Re: Sierra Leone, again - best wishes and good luck, but it's Sierra Leone.
One of the Bahama beach photos is broken.
"Finally, something nobody else will care about but which is close to my heart - Jan is pursuing a partnership with Monumental Labs, a group working on 'AI-enabled robotic stone carving factories'."
Why the need for AI, or is this just a case of "AI all the things"?
Not sure why a CNC machine with the right cutting tool could not be used to mass produce stone ornamentation.
I suspect that at least part of the problem might involve the fact that stone is not a perfectly homogeneous medium, and stonecutters need to learn how to adapt their design to the grain structure they find as they start cutting parts away. I think this is the meaning of Michelangelo’s quote about “removing everything that doesn’t look like David”.
I should add that I consider Prospera's whole regulatory regime to protect consumers basically a lie. They chartered a bank, Seshat Bank, in which I deposited a decent amount of money in 2022, to be returned on a very short (3 month!) timeline. The bank refused to return my money for over 2 years, and I was trying to be in contact with both the bank and Prospera's regulators for that whole time, but they were all very unresponsive. Eventually Prospera issued a statement of liquidation of the bank in early 2024. Now it's been another year and there has been no movement. As far as I can tell, the money is gone. I thought the bank was a real bank and thought Prospera had a reasonably competent regulator, but neither seems to have been the case; I thin it was basically a scam.