Gabriel Scheare

Gabriel Scheare is the founder of Frenly Park, a liberty-minded community project in Saskatchewan, Canada.

He grew up on the Saskatchewan prairie in a district that largely looked after itself, where fire cover, road work and most disputes were handled locally rather than by a distant authority, and he traces his interest in self-governing communities to that experience.

In 2013 he moved to Chile, drawn there by the Galt’s Gulch Chile land project, which collapsed soon afterwards. Rather than go home he founded Fort Galt, an entrepreneurial start-up village on a hundred-acre site outside Valdivia, and spent several years building it out for the people who had bought in. The project closed at the end of the decade, after Chile’s political turn made its position untenable.

Back in Saskatchewan he bought land and started Frenly Park, run first as a private residential country club so that membership and rules rest on contract rather than on municipal politics, with the stated aim of growing it into an incorporated village of around three hundred residents. It is the small-scale end of the Free Cities idea: not a new country, but a settlement whose residents agree in advance on how it is run.