The Governance Gauge: Private Cities

Given the recent publishing of our reading list, we’ve decided to provide weekly book reviews of some interesting picks that anybody in the competitive governance space would do good to read.

We’ve decided to call this weekly book review the “Governance Gauge” — which will measure exactly how applicable the text being reviewed is to those creating new governance models, those studying them, and those regulating them.

Without further ado, we begin with Georg Glasze and Chris Webster’s “Private Cities — Global and local perspectives”.

The primary subject of the book is a governance model which is not quite an SEZ, nor completely under domestic law: Homeowners’ associations, gated communities, and other societies governed by bylaws.

The book discusses homeowners’ associations in the US, the rise of gated communities in Portugal and Spain, the advent of private governance in general, China’s recent stumbling onto HOAs, Latin America’s attempts at such arrangements, South Africa’s problematic relationship between land and race, and the enterprising private societies in the war zones of Lebanon.

It is quite interesting that the experiments in governance that go on in a war-torn region have more than just regulatory and competitive pressures to worry about. These organisations discriminate heavily, use various kinds of technology to automate governance, and leave security to a combination of trained experts and autonomous solutions.

Creators of zones and societies will find chapters 2 through 7 invaluable, as they highlight relevant tools and best practices, as well as pitfalls that should be avoided.

Policymakers and analysts will mostly appreciate chapters 1 and 3, as they go into the legal and economic repercussions of such zones, with a heavy focus on the American state-federal discrepancy.

Scholars and experts can find no end of intriguing references to similar literature, some of which we’ll be reviewing in the future.

A full version can be read here.