What is a Free City?
Free Cities
Free Cities is an umbrella term for self-governing territories that uphold individual rights and freedoms. They usually hold a special legal status within a host state that grants them autonomy over local affairs: their own laws, regulations, public funds and services. What sets them apart from other special jurisdictions, such as Free Trade Zones, is their focus on a better life for a full residential community rather than advantages for businesses alone.
Nine models fall under the banner today, from Free Private Cities to Intentional Communities. They differ in who runs the place and how it is founded. What they share is the claim that a community can choose the rules it lives by, and that better rules make better places.
Video byBaixuArchitectHeirs to the city-states and the Hanseatic League
Self-governing cities are not a modern invention. For most of European history the city, not the state, was where law was made: the Greek polis, the communes of northern Italy, the free imperial cities of the Holy Roman Empire, the Hanseatic towns of the Baltic and the North Sea. A person who made it inside the walls of one of them and stayed for a year and a day was free, whatever they had been outside.
The record shows two things this movement builds on. Self-government paid: the free towns grew rich enough that the princes around them stopped resisting the idea and started granting charters of their own to attract settlers. And rules could be chosen: towns adopted the law of Lübeck or Magdeburg by choice, not because anyone made them.
The record also shows how it ended. The territorial state absorbed nearly all of them between 1803 and 1871, and only Hamburg and Bremen still carry the title. What the state had that the cities lacked is the question worth asking, and the one this movement inherits.
The models under the banner
From Free Private Cities to Seasteads, these are the self-governing models that fall under the Free Cities umbrella. Follow any model to the content gathered on its hub.
- Free Private Cities Cities whose administration, security and rule of law are run by a private company (the City Operator) under a Citizen Contract, with disputes settled by independent arbitration.
- Special Economic Zones Business zones with lower taxes and lighter regulation but no real autonomy: a precursor to, but not themselves, Free Cities.
- Charter Cities Zones granted their own legislative powers through a charter. Popularised by Paul Romer, they are Free Cities when that charter is freedom-oriented.
- Network States Online-first communities, popularised by Balaji Srinivasan, that aim to acquire territory and become self-governing in the physical world.
- Seasteads Permanent settlements on the high seas, beyond existing states: a new frontier for voluntary models of governance.
- Micronations Self-proclaimed states that claim their own territory and full sovereignty without international recognition, from Sealand’s sea fort to Liberland on the Danube.
- Intentional Communities Groups living together around shared values: grassroots self-determination within existing states.
- Honduran ZEDEs Honduras’s Zones for Employment and Economic Development: a far-reaching autonomy framework, and home to Próspera and Ciudad Morazán.
- Modern City-States The places already governing themselves at city scale, from a principality owned by one family to a Special Administrative Region of 7 million people.