When cities become owners

Before the summer, I wrote Design Infection (in French) to describe mechanisms through which apparently rational arrangements (repair, resilience, investment, autonomy, innovation) can settle into everyday life and silently reconfigure power. In particular, I was working on the question of who decides what can be repaired, what must be moved, and what is judged too costly to maintain.

I have just read Courrier international’s translation* of the article devoted to the Destiny project, led on Nevis by the Belgian investor Olivier Janssens. What jumped out at me was not only the ambition of a “Dubai of the Caribbean”. It was the political form of the project: a city no longer seeks only to attract residents or businesses; it seeks to become the owner of the very conditions of collective existence.
*Techno-libertarians are flocking to the Caribbean in The Economist

The Destiny project plans a libertarian community on about 2,400 acres on Nevis. Its developer has offered $100 a month to every resident of the island, children included, provided the final agreement with the government is approved; the offer amounts to $4,800 a year for a family of four. This proposal is presented as an advance share of future value, but it also turns an institutional decision about territory, rights and sovereignty into an immediate economic choice for residents.

A city that owns

The heart of the problem is not that an investor finances a city. Cities have always been shaped by capital, infrastructure and owners.

What is new, or at least made more explicit, is the bundling of several powers in a single entity: land ownership, legal rules, taxation, access to housing, services, employment, territorial reputation and the promise of income. The city no longer merely sets the rules of the game: it can become the actor that owns the land, writes the contracts and organises the conditions of entry.

In the logic of Design Infection, this is the move from an administered city to an owner-city. The question is no longer just: “who lives here?” It becomes: “on what terms does existence here become an asset?”

Classic public city —> Owner-city

The territory is governed by multiple institutions —> The territory is organised around one dominant operator

Citizens in principle hold political rights —> Residents also become customers, beneficiaries, investors or users

Services fall under contestable public policies —> Services become part of the value proposition |

Tax organises solidarity, however imperfect —> Direct payment or private benefit can replace solidarity

Conflict is about collective rules —> Conflict is about access, the contract and the conditions of belonging |

This shift is not abstract: when an individual payment depends on a project being approved, income becomes a political interface. It can genuinely help people facing limited resources; it can also make it much harder to separate democratic consent, material need and private influence.

The infectious mechanisms

Several mechanisms from the seven chapters of Design Infection appear here almost in plain sight.

Conditional repair

Take the case of a refugee in chapter 1: the person struck by a climate disaster is not asking for “a better future”. She wants her life and her world to have counted: a house, neighbours, habits, the dead, places.

Destiny is not a climate disaster, but it activates a similar logic: a population receives a promise of repair or improvement (income, hospital, jobs, infrastructure) in exchange for territorial acceptance. Repair then stops being an unconditional right; it becomes the benefit of a deal.

This is exactly where the RRL (Reality Rating Level), the relationship to reality, must be rated high: the $100 offer is not an ideological abstraction. For a family, it can mean $4,800 a year and have an immediate effect on living conditions. But the PRL (Propagation Rating Level), the mechanism’s potential to propagate, is just as high: if the city can pay directly to win acceptance of its own institutional framework, it becomes a replicable model of government by incentive.

Sovereignty as a service

The Próspera project in Honduras makes this shift even more readable. It was built under the ZEDE framework, with the ambition of its own regulatory regime; when that framework was repealed, the developers launched international arbitration proceedings, initially valued at up to $11 billion.

So a city that claims autonomy can, paradoxically, get around the sovereignty of the territory that hosts it. The project presents itself as an escape from bureaucracy; when a local democratic decision goes against it, it can turn international investment law against the state.

In Design Infection, this is an essential mechanism: power does not disappear with the promise of freedom. It moves from public debate to the contract, arbitration, investment and legal jurisdiction.

The composite resident

The owner-city does not only produce housing and roads. It produces a new figure: the resident with several statuses.

They can be, all at once:

an inhabitant;
a consumer of services;
the holder of an access right;
the beneficiary of an allowance;
the holder of a residence permit;
an employee of private infrastructure;
a data source;
a talking point;
a variable in a financial model.

This multiplication of statuses creates a political difficulty: how do you oppose what pays you an income, employs your relatives or funds the facilities you depend on? The individual autonomy promised can turn into dependence on the operator that owns the city’s gateways.

What goes beyond Design Infection

The Nevis project is not simply another case of urban privatisation. It brings in elements that spill over the initial frame of Design Infection.

The city as a geopolitical asset

These enclaves do not only sell a quality of life. They sell a position in the world: taxation, regulation, asset security, the right to experiment, access to crypto networks and sometimes the chance to slip free of the constraints of one’s home country.

Próspera is backed by American investors and remains locked in a major dispute with Honduras, showing that the city also becomes a vehicle of transnational power. It no longer sits entirely “inside” a state: it connects foreign capital, international commercial law and local territory.

This is an important difference from the apparatuses described in Design Infection. The initial scenarios dealt mainly with the gradual contamination of institutions by management tools. Here, the tool arrives already armed with a jurisdiction, investors, a financial infrastructure and a language of sovereignty.

Incentive instead of mandate

The $100 monthly payment is politically more interesting than the libertarian imaginary alone. It does not ask head-on: “do you want to give up part of your sovereignty?”

Rather, it suggests: “do you want to be paid to welcome a possibility?”

This is a softer, more ambiguous form of government, and often more effective than an order. The promise of income can be framed as solidarity, profit-sharing or local prosperity; it can also become a way of pre-financing support for a future regime.[4][1]

The city as an exit product

The old libertarian dream often imagined micro-states, artificial islands or offshore utopias. Recent projects are less fanciful because they do not necessarily try to leave the world: they build selective conditions for staying in it differently.

The city becomes an exit product:

exit from ordinary taxation;
exit from certain regulations;
exit from local political accountability;
exit from health, land or environmental constraints;
without exiting the infrastructure, workers, ports, networks and protections provided by the host territory.

Perhaps this is what is newest: not the utopia of a city without a state, but a city that chooses which fragments of the state it wants to keep.

Rereading the seven chapters

The seven chapters of Design Infection can serve as a reading grid, not to say that Nevis is already an accomplished dystopia, but to identify the operations to follow.

The lost world: residents risk losing not so much land as a collective capacity to decide its future
Repair: material benefits become conditional on support for a territorial project
The cosmetic movement: jobs, renewable energy, health or philanthropy can be real while legitimising a concentration of power |
The knowledge that carries on: | you can know the risks of inequality or to sovereignty and carry on regardless in the name of development |
The seeds: local forms of organisation can emerge: land cooperatives, rights of oversight, public funds, resident governance
The narratives of influence | opponents can be portrayed as nostalgic, hostile to progress or unable to grasp “innovation”
Europe against the world | the case reveals a global circulation of capital, regulatory standards and exit narratives

The danger is not necessarily that every private city becomes a sovereign enclave. The danger is more diffuse: that the promise of an efficient city gradually makes us accept that a territory can be governed like a portfolio.

The question to ask

So the right question is not: “should we be for or against charter cities?”

It is more precise: “At what point does a city stop being a common space and become the main asset of whoever owns its land, writes its rules and finances its residents’ support?”

The Nevis case deserves to be looked at without easy irony. Residents are not irrational if they consider a promise of income, facilities or jobs. Developers are not necessarily insincere when they talk about infrastructure or development.

But that is exactly where reading through Design Infection helps: it does not only look for a hidden intent or an identifiable villain. It follows the mechanisms. It asks what an offer produces, however generous, when it fuses territory, law, capital and daily survival.

And it forces us to add a question these projects often sidestep: when the city belongs to someone, who still holds the right to say no?