Filip Buys, chairman of a major Afrikaner trade union, delivered a speech last year at the Orania City Conference promoting the free city as a model for building successful independent communities, noting how self-governed private towns are growing popular in all of South Africa due to greater security and reliability of basic services, in the light of a deteriorating centralized polity.
Drawing inspiration from the work of American economist Paul Romer and the economic success of free cities such as Singapore and Hong Kong, Buys also envisions how emerging communities like Orania might propel a revitalization of culture and identity, rather approaching the Hoppean idea of private, closed covenant communities asserting not only their economical autonomy but also their right to pursue their own preferred trajectory of culture, local policy and style of government.
The proprietary governance thinker Spencer Heath is worth mentioning in this context, outlining his philosophy looking at the social fabric of pre-Norman England for the foundation of an ideal society that combines freedom and justice in his 1957 book Citadel, Market and Altar, available online at the Startup Cities Institute (https://startupcities.squarespace.com/publications/). A reader familiar with Georges Dumézil will immediately recognize the Indo-European tripartite theme in the title of Heath's book.
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