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IPFS News Link • Housing

How to Grow A City in Honduras, Part I: Governance as Technology

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Honduras is one of the poorest countries in Central and South America. It has the highest murder rate in the world, almost double the next closest contender. It's a place ravaged by the drug trade and political instability, where as recently as 2009 the military ousted a president pushing to modify the constitution in order to extend his own term. It may seem like the last place on earth where businesses would want to invest, and people would want to move.

But there's a new idea about to be tried in Honduras.

Some call it a Startup City or Free City, others a LEAP Zone, and in Honduran law it's known as a ZEDE. They are politically autonomous, privately run zones that supporters believe could transform not only Honduras, but the entire developing world.

In "Governance as Technology," the first episode in a four-part series, a couple of the key players behind the ideas animating this project explain the specifics of the Honduran plan and the broader philosophy behind the "startup city" movement. There's Zachary Caceres, a young man who moved from the U.S. to Guatemala to run the Startup Cities Institute and who says that bringing the same "entrepreneurial process of trial-and-error to social tech that we already know works in physical tech" is essential to lifting the developing world out of poverty. And there's seasoned reformer and ex-Reagan speechwriter Mark Klugmann, who sits on the board responsible for greenlighting the zones in Honduras and who believes that this project could "demonstrate inside of Honduras and to the world that the capacity for solving problems and for creating jobs in particular could go forward with a velocity that few have been expecting."
 

1 Comments in Response to

Comment by PureTrust
Entered on:

There are two basic things that reduce poverty:

1. Faith in the God of the Bible;

2. knowledge... of whatever it may be that is needed.