Abundance Cities are new urban forms built on the premise that governance, zoning, and construction are design variables, not inherited constraints. They span a spectrum: charter cities (Próspera in Honduras, NEOM in Saudi Arabia), special economic zones at the city scale, privately-run innovation districts, and fully dematerialized network states that claim jurisdiction over diaspora communities before they acquire territory. Each experiment tests a different hypothesis about whether cheaper housing, mobility, and energy can be unlocked by rewriting the rules stack.
Three flavors of experiment
Charter cities negotiate with a host nation for a distinct regulatory regime inside a physical footprint. Special economic zones lower trade and tax barriers without touching urban form. Network states, in Balaji Srinivasan's formulation, begin as online communities, acquire capital and territory, and seek recognition only after achieving scale. The three flavors compete as hypotheses about the minimum viable jurisdiction.
Post-zoning urbanism
More prosaically, the abundance city thesis also applies to existing cities that repeal or radically simplify zoning. Japanese land-use law, Auckland's 2016 upzoning, and Minneapolis' 2019 elimination of single-family-only zoning have produced measurable rent and construction effects. This strand of the thesis is less glamorous than charter cities but has a larger near-term impact. It connects directly to Autonomous Mobility, since the highest-leverage zoning reforms become possible only when parking minimums stop mattering.
Risks and open questions
The legitimacy problem is acute. A city whose rules are written by its founders rather than its residents can replicate the company town rather than escape it. Human-rights protections, democratic accountability, and exit rights are the load-bearing constraints that distinguish abundance cities from extractive enclaves. The wiki tracks each experiment on those criteria, not on GDP alone.