Mark Lutter (@MarkLutter), founder and executive director of the Centre For Innovative Governance Research, joins Erik on this special two-hour episode to talk about charter cities.

They start off by discussing how Mark became interested in the idea of charter cities. Mark explains the two main schools of thought when it comes to new forms of governance and talks about his philosophy for figuring out the best way to govern and how that involves charter cities.

He talks about the recent interest from Silicon Valley in charter cities and some of the projects that have been going on in the space. Mark talks about seasteading and why the promise of that project wasn’t realized. He points out that there are over 200 masterplanned cities being built around the world.

Mark explains the differences between charter cities and special economic zones and the main models for charter cities and special economic zones. Erik asks what forms of government Mark would advocate for if he was building a brand new charter city from scratch.

Mark talks about the reasons for avoiding centralized planning and reasoning from first principles and instead running experiments to see what kinds of phenomena emerge. They also have a lightning round where Erik names an individual and Mark explains where he agrees and disagrees with that individual’s thinking.

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Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global, is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg and is produced by Brett Bolkowy.