Businessman Ivan Ko of the Victoria Harbour Group wants to build a new city in Ireland. Ko’s idea, first reported by Ben Haugh of The Times, is to bring the people of Hong Kong – and their capital – to plan, build, and control this new city. 

The increasing dominance of mainland China in Hong Kong’s affairs provides a supply of willing and wealthy emigrants, who wish to leave what they see as a draconian regime. Those migrants would benefit greatly from the stable democracy Ireland enjoys. The benefit for Ireland would be the infusion of ideas they bring with them, the jobs constructing and running any large capital project brings with it, and of course the tax revenue the new city’s enterprises and activities would generate. 

The land for the city would not be part of some autonomous region – it would remain Irish, the overarching legal system would be Irish – but the local rule sets of the new city, including its master planning, would be up to the local authorities. This responsiveness of the local authorities to the needs of the new city’s owner/operators is key and I’ll return to it in a moment. 

In terms of scale, Ko envisages the city as being about 50km², with approximately 100,000 people there after a decade or so. The new city, then, would roughly be the size and population of Limerick city, which has about 100,000 residents and is 59km². Around 50 per cent of the new city’s residents would be from Hong Kong, which like Ireland is one of the world’s most open economies, with complimentary strengths in financial services and education, not to mention sheer enterprise. 

The initial reaction online to Ko’s idea can be summed up by a combination of eye-rolling and scoffing. It seems ludicrous, to a population experiencing the deep disruption of a global pandemic, to discuss fanciful, Walter Mitty-esque visions of new cities in underpopulated areas of the country. 

I think that while understandable, this initial impression is wrong – that Ko’s idea needs both serious consideration and modification. 

Charter cities: the good and the bad

Ko’s idea is a version of the charter city concept, which in one form or another has been around for a long time, but which was widely popularised by Nobel Laureate Paul Romer about ten years ago. A charter city is predicated on the idea that good rules help societies develop, while bad rules hamper improvements in living standards. In an odd reversal, Romer used Hong Kong as a good example of a charter city. 

Romer’s Nobel-worthy contribution was to focus on the positive spillovers that come from good ideas. The concept of a charter city is that the importation of different rule sets – which are just ideas in a blueprint form – into a host country helps the host country in learning new rules from its more experimental charter. So there is a long term strategic advantage in being part of something like this. 

The evidence is that the experience of charter cities started from scratch is mixed. Those city-scale projects in Madagascar and Honduras associated directly with Romer failed for a variety of reasons, but the common problem was clashes with the local elites whose power would be weakened by the introduction of so many new players, and unstable political systems. Thankfully, we don’t have the problem of political instability, though like everywhere else we do have elites who will react to protect their vested interests.  

Context matters, as always, and history is a good guide. Ireland created the world’s first economic development zone – in Shannon – in 1959. For 60 years, we have used our industrial policy to create special economic development zones of one type or another to encourage the flow of capital and ideas into the country. While it has not all been plain sailing, that approach has underpinned our growth and development. 

If you compute the ratio of imports and exports to economic output, you typically find Hong Kong and Ireland at or near the top of the table. There are a lot of similarities, not least our colonial histories. 

Hong Kong, like Ireland, began life as a poor outcropping of the British Empire. Both survived an imperial presence, and then thrived by focusing on trade and openness. Both are now rich countries that lifted themselves out of poverty using an outward view, as the chart below shows. A crucial difference between the examples of charter cities Romer and his team encountered and the Irish example is the wealth differential: there isn’t much of one. We do not have an example of poor migrants leaving their home to find a better life. The two countries are roughly at the same level of development economically, though the world happiness report ranks Ireland 16th in the world, and Hong Kong 78th. 

Critics of the idea will focus on two main issues. First, charter cities can feel like creepy 21st century colonialism, which amounts to little more than rich people rocking up to an empty field to make the rules under which they will then thrive. 

Charter cities have also been rather lazily critiqued as “neoliberal urbanism”, which lack any democratic legitimacy because they are ultimately instruments of the rich. This lack of legitimacy ultimately compromises the sovereignty of the host nation, because once bought, you stay bought. Imagine a private police force, for example, or a private surveillance system, or a new language adopted as the default. It is an even more dystopian version of John B Keane’s The Field, but with skyscrapers.  

The second criticism is the deeply technocratic nature of the idea. How can a city concept championed by property developers and economists be anything other than awful? Large-scale city visions, from Brasilia to Salt Lake City, Singapore and Chandigarh have been technocratic, the vision of planners and politicians, but few have been driven by economists. Some of these cities are widely seen as having ‘worked’, while others have fared less well. 

These criticisms are valid. Both stem from the erosion of the commons of our sovereignty by big business and the lack of democratic input into decisions taken, ultimately, by people not our own. 

Both criticisms tend to ignore the work of another Nobel Laureate, Elinor Ostrom. Ostrom won the prize in 2009 for her work on the governance of the commons – how people decide to work with each other and share those aspects of life which must be shared, like rivers, forests, and the streets of cities. Ostrom’s work moves beyond markets and states, and is truly exceptional. She is one of my intellectual heroes. 

Ostrom’s key insight is that the rules people use to control something like a city need to fit their ecological and social context. That statement might sound trite, but it is not. Imagine locating the new city in the middle of a special area of conservation, or within a contested border region due to Brexit, or within a community which had not previously agreed to play host to the new city. Sovereignty is a common-pool resource. You choose to share it. You can nest a series of rules in different contexts to work out the best rules. Ostrom’s 8 principles for designing those rules might really help stop the first critique from getting out of hand. 

The second critique requires people from a community deciding to look carefully at becoming hosts. Ko’s idea is to reach out to the government of Ireland, and that makes sense, but in doing so he makes the mistake of ignoring the complex and nested community structures that exist on the ground. Ostrom’s work shows communities can self-organise common solutions to the kind of public/private problem a charter city presents, but they can only do that if they are at the table. 

But how does Ko and his team find these people? Is there a process that might make sense? Amazon ran a competition to locate its latest hubs, but that process was fraught with difficulties. However it is run, a community has to put its hand up to discuss being a host. 

Kiltyclogher’s appeal and community consent

In 2017, the people of Kiltyclogher in Leitrim issued a request for people to come and live in their lovely area, hit by successive waves of depopulation and facing closure of some of its essential services like schools and shops. The solution to their problem might or might not be Hong Kong in Kiltyclogher, but it is certainly worth them considering it as a community. 

The evidence is that real, structural change does not come from the Irish government. It responds to the sustained and spoken will of the people, particularly on social issues, and make no mistake, building a new city is far more social than it is economic. Despite our low population density, having looked at it, I think there is no part of Ireland less than two hours from an airport with absolutely no one in it. Wherever you look, a community, however small, lives there. 

An individual community would want to design a process to talk about agreeing to host the city long before the various government departments, or even local authorities, could be brought in. Only then, with the consent of the to-be governed, and from the ground up, does it make sense to proceed. These people’s lives are going to be changed by the introduction of a new city. It is only right they are on board with the process. 

The charter city idea is not without risk. Things could go very wrong. They could also go very right. But consider the development of the country since the 18th century. There have been no new substantial urban formations, and certainly no new cities. Project 2040 doesn’t envisage any new ones, either. 

The story of our country in population terms has been a decrease post-famine that was only partially arrested in the 1960s, with persistent emigration a feature of each generation over that 200-year period. Our history since the 1960s is actually one of openness of large parts of the economy to the rest of the world, but not all parts of our island have benefited equally. A new city in the midlands or the north-west could be a catalyst for real long-term change in that area, real balanced economic development. 

The city is the engine of much of the progress we have seen over the last 200 years. A new city might be the next step in the evolution of the country. It might not. But scoffing at a potentially transformative idea is the wrong approach for sure. 

A few recommendations to take this idea forward

First, Ko and colleagues need to design a process to find communities they can work with, not councils or even national governments. 

Second, the rules for the charter city need to be discussed openly, perhaps using a citizen’s assembly format or following Ostrom’s design principles. Yes, bring the world’s experts to advise this local assembly on crucial aspects of design, development, and so forth, but ultimately the decision and the subsequent legitimacy for the city must come from the local communities. If they say no, it’s a dead duck.

Third, the public/private partnership aspect of the city needs to be understood. Two of the key benefits will be access to wealth and high quality social housing infrastructure, as exists in Singapore and other cities, but there is a buy-in required in the terms of usage of the land. A new policy hashing out this partnership is vital, because without it, someone is getting ripped off. 

Fourth (and finally), there will be a strong tendency to locate the city on the eastern side of the country. This should be resisted if possible, as it will only compound the problems of regional imbalance.