Free Cities Awards 2024: Winners of the Liberty in Our Lifetime Awards Announced in Prague

Prague, 1 November 2024. The Free Cities Foundation presented three awards on the opening evening of the Liberty in Our Lifetime conference, recognising a storyteller, a community and a project that moved the Free Cities idea forward over the past year.

The 2024 winners, from left: Alex Ugorji (Storyteller Award), Tatiana Butanka of Montelibero (Intentional Community Award) and Gabriel Delgado-Ayau of Próspera (Free City Pioneer Award).

Every year we ask our community a simple question: who has actually moved things forward? Not who has the biggest following or the loudest launch announcement, but who has written, built or argued the movement a little further along. Nominations come from members, the jury narrows each category to three, and the winners are announced on stage in front of the people who nominated them.

In 2024 we presented three awards in Prague. The full list of categories and past winners lives on our awards page.

Storyteller Award: Alex Ugorji, reporting from Ciudad Morazán

The Storyteller Award goes to the people who make this movement legible to everyone else. Alex Ugorji won it for his ongoing commentary on ZEDEs, the political situation in Honduras and daily life in Ciudad Morazán, the aspiring Free City where he lives. Most of it appears in his Morazán Monday series, but much of it also goes into the questions he patiently answers in the Free Cities Community Telegram group, week after week, for people who have never set foot in Central America.

His work is valuable because it is reported from the inside. When the coverage of Honduras swings between boosterism and hit pieces, Alex has offered something rarer: a resident’s account, with the awkward parts left in.

Also shortlisted: Mikkel Thorup, for the Free Cities episodes and interviews on the Expat Money Podcast and Expat Money Online Summit; and Carl Peterson, for his long-form essay “Ciudad Morazán: A Libertarian City without Libertarians”.

Intentional Community Award: Montelibero, Montenegro

Tatiana Butanka accepted the Intentional Community Award on behalf of Montelibero, the freedom-oriented community in Montenegro that has become a landing place for people leaving Russia and Eastern Europe in search of somewhere they are left alone.

In 2024, Montelibero stopped being mainly a plan. The first apartment block was completed. Montelibero City counted 21 permanent residents, 32 temporary residents and around 15 daily visitors. The community also launched its own court service, which had resolved four cases by the time of the conference. That is a small number, and a significant one, because a community that can settle its own disputes is a community that can grow.

Also shortlisted: the Free Commune of Penadexo, represented by Marnix van Suylekom, which moved its first residents into an abandoned village in rural Spain and hosted its first festival in July 2024; and Liberstad, represented by Sondre Bjellås, the intentional community in Norway running on voluntary cooperation and digital governance.

Free City Pioneer Award: Próspera, Honduras

The Pioneer Award is our most prestigious, and in 2024 it went to Próspera, accepted by Gabriel Delgado-Ayau. The special economic zone (ZEDE) on the island of Roatán has done the unglamorous work of building legal and regulatory machinery that other projects can now point to and copy, and it has attracted more than 200 businesses to test it, in fields from gene therapy to smart manufacturing and drone technology.

Over the year, Próspera completed its Duna Residences and welcomed the first residents into the building, while events such as Vitalia brought to Roatán an international audience, many of whom had never heard the phrase “special jurisdiction” before they arrived.

Also shortlisted: Ciudad Morazán, represented by Massimo Mazzone, the first legally autonomous community run as an Entrecom and the first built for blue-collar workers; and Liberland, represented by Vít Jedlička, whose team spent the year holding their ground against Croatian authorities.

Our thanks to everyone who nominated someone this year. The Free Cities Foundation is a small organisation, and the awards only work because our community does the noticing for us.