 Hello, so my name is Mark Lutter. I'm the founder and chairman of the Charter Cities Institute. Little bit about my background. I come from a distinguished line of bureaucrats. My dad worked for the FDA, which I know is a fan favorite here. My mom worked for the Pan-American and branch of the World Health Organization and in my kind of teenage rebellion and now middle-aged kind of adult rebellion, I decided to build better institutions. So I did my PhD at George Mason in economics and that's kind of informed my world view, thinking about what are the economic levers of governance, what leads to economic growth over the long term, and why that matters. And the kind of conclusion was Charter Cities, right? Governance matters. If a country is well-governed, it will tend to do relatively well. If a country is poorly governed, it will tend to do relatively poorly. The challenge often is how do you change government on a national level because you have a lot of special interest groups. Governments tend to be slow to reform. And so instead, we focus on how do you change it on a city level, right? So what is a Charter City? A Charter City is a new city with better laws. The city part is important because you need a sufficient number of people to have agglomeration, to have the benefits of living together, right? We heard some presentations earlier about building communities. And these communities tend to be much easier to build when you're already enmeshed in a large urban environment with amenities, with a number of people who might share those interests. Second is kind of the better laws, right? So think about a Charter City as kind of a supercharged special economic zone, right? Authority is delegated from the government to the zone that allows them to have easier building processes, a better business environment, perhaps better immigration rules that allow you to be more competitive on the city level. And this is multi-use, not just a single industry. So why are Charter Cities important? There are a rule for changing rules, right? Humanity has developed some good rules for governing ourselves, but there are probably better rules out there. And oftentimes, you don't want to implement these rules at a national level because you're not quite sure how they'll work. But if you implement them at a local level, for example, China, right? Their economic growth was driven by special economic zones and urbanization. The special economic zone started in Shenzhen. They pioneered labor markets, land markets, financial markets, and those spread throughout the rest of China. Once they could test those reforms within the Chinese system, they knew they would work. They'd spread that to other coastal cities, eventually throughout China. And that led to 10% annual growth for almost 40 years, leading China to be a global superpower today. So like generally framing that's gonna help accelerate growth in emerging markets, as well as kind of accelerate technological innovation in advanced economies. So how do we think about a history of the space? Right? We have Paul Romer, who's a Nobel laureate in economics currently at NYU. He gave a TED Talk in 2009 on Charter Cities. And his version of Charter Cities is a little bit different from the one that I advocate. But what he advocated was a high income country, for example, Canada, administer a city in a low income country, for example, Belize, right? Where the high income country has good institutions, they can sign a treaty with the lower income country and minister the city. This got a lot of pushback because a lot of low income countries thought, hey, this smells a bit like colonialism. He tried in Madagascar and then in Honduras. And actually the current legislation in a Honduras that Prospera and others are operating in is in part a descendant from Paul Romer's involvement in that country. At the same time, you had the seasteading movement, right? I think that seasteading institute launched in 2008, where Paul Romer focused primarily on how do you make poor countries thus poor? Seasteading focused on how do we accelerate technological innovation? How do we get the smartest people together? How do we kind of improve cutting edge institutions? And then what's happened recently is that kind of network states have emerged as an idea, as a concept. And one of the most interesting examples of this is this event, as well as Zuzalu, which Vitalik Buterin spoke at a few hours ago. And so I hope to organize the new cities and network states track at Zuzalu, but it demonstrated that's possible to bring together a few hundred people for several months that can seed new communities and eventually turn into new cities, right? It's demonstrated a function of demand aggregation to bring these communities together to help instantiate kind of the physical infrastructure that allows them to grow over time. So how do we think about charter cities today, right? There's several historic examples and a lot of this depends on how strictly or loosely you define charter cities. With a somewhat loose definition, you can include Singapore, Dubai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong. All of these are cities that have varying degrees of autonomy, right? Singapore is a separate country. Hong Kong was British. Then even under Chinese, there was one country, two system. Though in the last few years, that's kind of been collapsed a little bit with the passage of the national security law. You have Shenzhen, which is frequently called a special economic zone. However, when it was implemented, if you read some of the early legislation, they basically had a full set of rights, except for things like rail systems and post office. But beyond that, they could experiment with labor law, with land law, with all of these things that otherwise in China were effectively illegal to do. And then Dubai, right? It's part of the United Arab Emirates. And then they have a series of special economic zones of which the Dubai International Financial Center is one of the best known where they brought in common law judges to create a financial center that could compete with global financial centers, right? And if you think about current projects in Honduras, you have Prospero, which was presented earlier. You have Sulaimorazan, you have Praxis, which also presented earlier. Bravo Cities is my company. I'll talk about it a little bit at the end, still a little bit in stealth. You have Niyam, which is a very large Saudi New City project that the Saudi government has committed a half billion dollars to. They're focusing on, one, breathtaking infrastructure, and then two, on an improved legal environment to help attract businesses and residents to relocate there. So I founded the Charter Cities Institute about six years ago, and we're a nonprofit for building the ecosystem for Charter Cities. And so how do we think about this? One is building a city requires a population. And so thinking about where that population comes from, we see as critical to understanding what the dynamics of the city look like. Broadly defined, there are kind of two global migration patterns that can be tapped into for cities defined as hundreds of thousands to millions of residents. One is a global south to global north migration. Right, a lot of people wanna be in the US, wanna be in Europe. And two is a rural to urban migration in the global south. And so I started as a nonprofit because building a city has very long time horizons. There's a number of stakeholders involved. I attended a conference in Kazakhstan that was helping to plan a new city that had several distinguished urban planners from MIT. And they, for example, were unaware that zoning and land use increased housing prices. And so I realized that, one, there are new cities being built. And two, the advisors they are hiring for these new cities oftentimes had prestige but did not actually have a functional understanding of how the city's operated, how to sequence things, how to scale them into kind of a functional urban agglomeration, urban environment. Right, and so what do we do? The Charter Cities Institute, we do events. We're hosting an event in Rwanda in Kigali in about three weeks, bringing together a lot of the stakeholders in the Africa ecosystem where we focus. We do research thinking about, all right, what are the key ingredients that go into a new city? How do you partner with these different stakeholders? And then we lay out those partnerships, right? Who are the funders? How do you talk to governments? We don't see these as antagonistic to governments but a way for governments to really help achieve their aims. So let me run through this quickly. I'm running out of time here. One of the key challenges is right, where is land? If you wanna do a city, you need tens of thousands of acres of land. How do you amalgamate that land close enough to existing infrastructure that you can piggyback off the existing infrastructure? How do you work with governments? Most governments will have five or 10 year plans, right, where they will say we wanna create X number of housing units, Y number of jobs, Z number of schools, and then you frame your project as a solution to the challenges the governments are already concerned about. How do you finance the development, right? Different areas have different financial mechanisms for large infrastructure projects, but charters are effectively large infrastructure projects and you need to do that, all right? Spaces are validated when they get large exits, when they are able to achieve that. We heard from some of these early projects and we can see a lot of momentum in this room but I think catalyzing that momentum really kind of building it up requires projects that launch with tens of thousands of residents and hopefully in the next five years we can get there. So Bravo Cities, we're partnering with the Zanzibar government and a local developer. This is a render of the development in Zanzibar and we're basically taking a low friction strategy, right, the existing development has 600 units. It's 30 minutes south of Stone Town, the main city, 20 minutes south of the airport. We wanna build a knowledge center of East Africa, suck all the brains out of East Africa, put them in Fumba Peninsula, Fumba City, which is what we're building and the government has a special economic zone. We're partnering with them to improve the operations of that zone so we can expedite investment, attract more businesses, attract more companies, make sure the developers have the appropriate infrastructure to scale. And so lastly, if you wanna learn more, right, the website is CharterCitiesInstitute.org. Twitter, cci.city. My Twitter is at Mark Lutter, my email. We have the Charter Cities podcast, Africa's New Cities Summit. Feel free to find me later. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you.