Patrick Lamson-Hall & Nuria Forques: Designing a Free City from Scratch
“We’re not inventing anything here. These are all things that we walked around the world, here and there, and observed, and they are very doable, and they work in many places. We’re just trying to reintroduce them in a packaged way to new places because that’s very different from what the current norm is.”
Today’s podcast is a discussion with two city planners who designed a Free City from scratch.
Patrick Lamson-Hall and Nuria Forques are a husband-and-wife team whose firm, Fitted Projects was commissioned to design the Honduran ZEDE community of Ciudad Morazán, the second ZEDE established in Honduras after Próspera. While Próspera primarily focused on technological innovation and connecting Honduras with international business, Morazán was designed as more of a ‘blue-collar ZEDE,’ targeting working-class and middle-class residents primarily from Honduras.
Patrick and Nuria have much to share about the design, implementation, and future of free city projects. It was phenomenal to sit down with two individuals who possess such in-depth, hands-on experience in manifesting these innovative ideas in real life.
This conversation was recorded during the ‘New Cities & Network States’ weekend at Zuzalu, the so-called pop-up city gathering in Montenegro. With many of the talks and presentations fresh in our minds, we ended up dissecting various projects within the Free Cities ecosystem and discussed how the movement as a whole might best progress in the coming years.