Technology in New Cities

The administration is the product

A new jurisdiction cannot afford a civil service. What it can afford is a stack. Estonia is the working proof: its X-Road data exchange lets agencies query one another instead of making citizens carry paper between them, and the once-only principle means a fact is given to the state a single time. Companies are founded online in minutes, and the e-Residency programme has issued digital identities to well over a hundred thousand people who have never lived there, tens of thousands of whom went on to register businesses. Próspera has built a smaller version of the same idea: online incorporation, an e-residency open from anywhere, and a rule that lets a business adopt the regulatory code of an approved foreign country rather than wait for a local one to be written.

Land registry is the quieter half of it. Hernando de Soto’s argument that insecure title locks up capital drove Georgia’s experiment in anchoring digital land records to a public blockchain. Honduras announced a comparable project in 2015 and it went nowhere. That is the lesson worth keeping: registry software does not create the will to honour titles, it presupposes it.

Building on a blank slate

The physical side has moved further than the debate suggests. Modular and volumetric construction cuts build times sharply against conventional methods, and the first hundred-home neighbourhood of 3D-printed houses has been completed in Texas. Reverse-osmosis desalination now delivers drinking water for a few kilowatt hours per cubic metre. Battery costs have fallen far enough that a solar microgrid is a serious alternative to a grid connection that does not exist, and satellite internet has removed the last practical reason a remote coastline had to sit near a telecoms network. Together these lower the cost of starting a settlement somewhere an incumbent state never bothered to build.

Not everything on the wishlist has arrived. Small modular reactors are routinely promised as the answer to a new city’s power and are not yet a product anyone can buy: the flagship American project was cancelled in 2023 after its projected costs nearly doubled.

Who holds the controls

The same stack that makes a small jurisdiction administratively cheap also decides who holds power inside it. One identity, one register, one interface is convenient for a resident and equally convenient for whoever runs the system. The design question is therefore not how much data a city gathers but who may query it, and whether the subject can see the query.

Estonia’s answer is architectural rather than promissory. There is no central pool of records: every agency keeps its own, access is granted case by case, each exchange is signed and logged, and any citizen can open the log and see who has looked at their file. The country also keeps a backup of its core registers on Luxembourg soil under Estonian jurisdiction, so the state survives the loss of its own servers.

For a Free City the equivalent commitments are portability and legibility. A resident should be able to leave with their title, their records and their money, and should be able to see what the operator knows about them. Both are choices made when the system is built, and both are very hard to retrofit afterwards.