Ten New US Cities: 1. Guantanamo City

I’m trying a new type of articles: Short Series. These are series of 3-7 articles. The articles will be sent every day or two, so that the series is done within a week or so. The first article covered how to think of great sites for new cities, starting from first principles. This series follows from the first two articles on US climate and cities:

• Deserts, Tornadoes, Hurricanes, Snow, Paradises, Swamps: Why Do People Live Where They Live in the US?

• The Top 50 US Cities: Why Are They Where They Are?

In the next few articles, we’re going to cover my 10 actual proposals for new cities in the US. Don’t worry if you don’t keep up with them as they come out. They can be read in any order.

Enjoy!

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A new wind is blowing.

We used to fear ourselves. We witnessed the pain our technology can cause in our world wars and in accidents like Chernobyl. We saw how we can pollute the Earth with indiscriminate emissions. As a result, we became afraid. We withdrew. We became wary of touching anything, lest we make it worse.

But as we’ve learned to control our technology, we’ve learned how we can use it to make the world a better place. We must be cautious, but when we are, we can take reality and recraft it to make it more beautiful, more harmonious, better for humans and for the world.

Now is a good time to create new cities, so that we leave behind the ugliness of 20th century fears and drab urbanism, to prove that we can build human environments that inspire us.

So I asked myself: Where could we build ten new cities? The US became the obvious place because it has both space and the will to do expand.¹ And for me, the most inspiring city in the US would be to turn Guantanamo Bay into Singapore.

Here’s Guantanamo Bay:

Today, Guantanamo Bay is a military base.

Source

It represents everything that’s ugly about the 20th and early 21st centuries: the Cold War, violence, political fights, the senseless invasion of Iraq, Communism, the division of peoples…

But it’s also in the middle of busy sea trade routes.

The bay has an ideal deep water port and two landing strips for planes:

If you squint, you can see the borders with Cuba

Couldn’t it become the Singapore of the Caribbean? Two factors could help make this happen.

First, many of the most successful cities I’ve studied started as military outposts: Military outposts have customers (the soldiers), security, and infrastructure to make them easily reachable. As a military base, Guantanamo Bay has this initial demand for services that could enable a city to appear.

Guantanamo Bay could also become a trading hub thanks to its deep water port in the middle of shipping lanes, but there’s intense competition: Panama already has two big ports on each side—Pacific and Atlantic—and the US ports of New Orleans, Houston, Corpus Christi, and Miami are quite big. But none of these ports is centrally located in the Caribbean. And all the US ports have a big problem: the Jones Act.

The Jones Act requires ships that carry passengers or goods between US ports to be made in the US, flagged by the US, and crewed by US citizens.

This is useful to make sure the US would have a navy in times of war, as it would have kept its shipbuilding facilities. But it’s quite expensive! A ship going from Panama to New Orleans to drop some cargo can’t then go to Miami and drop some more cargo, or pick up new cargo in New Orleans for Puerto Rico. But if Guantanamo was set up as a special economic zone (SEZ), select federal laws could be locally suspended. In such a case, Guantanamo Bay would become THE US port in the Caribbean, serving as a base for all other ports, without dramatically impacting the American shipbuilding business.

Making Guantanamo into a SEZ would be pretty similar to what happened to Dubai, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Singapore: They were all empty lands that became formidably rich because they had amazing portuary potential and all regulatory obstacles were canceled when they were declared SEZs.

Like Shenzhen and Hong Kong, another benefit would be to show the Communist party controlling the neighboring region that capitalism works better. China is not a Communist country anymore, and I suspect the success of Shenzhen and Hong Kong played a big role.

Another benefit of Guantanamo is that it would have plenty of very cheap labor available, as the only thing the average Cuban wants is to get out of the country and have access to economic opportunities. It’s easier to cross a road than to sail 100 miles.

As the port became successful, Cuba could choose to develop more portuary infrastructure on the Cuban side of the bay, making money for itself, too.

Guantanamo Bay is small: With 117 km², it’s one-seventh the size of Singapore. But it’s big enough for a big port, an airport, and to house hundreds of thousands of people. Creating a SEZ there would also benefit the US by making shipping cheaper—and would be a dramatic boon for Puerto Rico, who can only source its goods from US ships coming from the US, which makes everything very expensive.

We should do it.

I learned about the idea for Guantanamo City from Mark Lutter.

Every city in my list of proposals is ambitious, and tries to recast humans not as a force for evil, but as a force for good, when that’s what we try to do.

That’s why the next idea for a city is also a port, but one of a different kind—in fact, a type of port that has never been seen on the face of the Earth.

1. President Trump mentioned two years ago that he’d be open to create ten new cities.