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Kitchen Table Kibitzing Friday: freedom cities are like freedom fries [1]

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Date: 2025-03-07

Is California ready for a Freedom City? Is the Presidio in San Francisco a Freedom City or a tempting Billionaire Ghetto.

Mark Lutter, founder of the Charter Cities Institute, which promotes "deregulated new cities," co-wrote an article published last month in Palladium magazine in which he advocated turning the Presidio into a "Freedom City" modeled after Shenzhen in China.

It’s like something out of the most feverish nightmare of a Steve Bannon-style MAGA nationalist. Pooling the funds of billionaires to create special zones across the world that are unfettered by nation-states is the very definition of “globalism.” To put an even finer point on it, Lutter has pointed to China’s Belt and Road Initiative as one successful model of establishing charter cities all over the planet.

Some potential locations for a Freedom City might include Presidio National Park, Lowry Range in Colorado, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

On Tuesday, the Rio Vista City Council voted unanimously to explore annexing some of the land owned by a subsidiary of California Forever, making it the second neighbor to consider expanding its boundaries in the wake of the company’s proposal to build a city from scratch on nearby farmland. In January, Suisun City’s council took a similar action to consider annexing land surrounding its borders. Although the directive didn’t specifically mention California Forever, a large portion of unincorporated land to the east of the city is owned by the company’s subsidiary, Flannery Associates. “This decision is about just getting to the table,” Rio Vista Mayor Edwin Okamura said shortly before Tuesday’s vote. “Many of us were content waiting for further studies on the original impacts of the California Forever project before weighing in. Suisun’s bold move requires Rio Vista to take steps to protect our interests.” The council directed staff to start the lengthy process of determining how much land the city could annex, the process for annexation, and how such a move might impact its budget. Included in that process is a request to explore expansion while still maintaining Rio Vista’s character as “a quaint river town.” At just 6.6 square miles and 4 square miles, respectively, Rio Vista and neighboring Suisun City are the county’s two smallest cities. Lisa Duke, who was recently appointed to the city council, said she wants to protect the 700-acre open space buffer between Rio Vista and the proposed city. www.kqed.org/...

Spatialized Trumpism

In an essay exploring the Trumpian movement and its continuities with American political and social development, Markley and Allums (Citation2020) argue that a vital aspect of Trump’s appeal is rooted in the specific relation between White racial anxiety and suburban property ownership. They submit that the intensity of White anxiety in the post-2008 conjuncture, when unemployment and housing precarity impacted large swaths of the White population, ignited latent fascistic impulses that overrode laissez-faire myths and legitimized forceful state action in defense of sectional privileges. Across his first campaign and his administration, Trump embraced these anxieties by identifying migrants and various internal Others as the source of the generalized crisis, not neoliberal capitalism itself. Drawing on Neil Smith’s (Citation1996) account of the “revanchist” urbanism of 1990s New York, Markley and Alums find a common thread between then and now, when middle-class and ruling-class elite groups, enraged by the rise of locality-based progressive political power in cities, assembled a reactionary coalition to violently dismantle these bases of power in retribution for having allegedly stolen the city from its rightful leaders. Smith recounts how a cast of Others – women, minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ communities, environmentalists, homeless people – were singled out as the culprits of the city’s fall from grace, and how their expulsion was sought as a foremost task of the state. As a fixture of the New York property developer scene since the 1970s, Trump’s reactionary politics were forged in the post-1970s anti-progressive backlash nurtured within that milieu.

Trump’s Freedom Cities should be seen as an important addition to this brand of politics, one that turns to space as a vehicle for realizing his movement’s objectives. In context, the proposal arrives at a moment when the ambition to retake cities foundered amid the massive opposition to police-inflicted violence in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in spring 2020. Trimming its sails, Trump’s new agenda is instead to abandon cities in favor of starting afresh. Freedom Cities are not subtle in this respect. As the reading of the proposal above indicates, Freedom Cities represent a desire to build exclusive new cities that materially and symbolically manifest the reactionary and fascist thrusts of the Trumpian movement. Clues to the social regime envisioned for such spaces emerge in Trump’s ominous comments on the role of the police. “Very importantly, I will make sure that all of these new places are safe. We love and cherish our police. They will do the job the way they have to,” he says (Trump, 3:20).

www.tandfonline.com/...

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